Perhaps I shouldn't have said "Can't be done" but I should have said "Can't be done well."

I've written styles for BiaB, Jammer, Korg i series, Yamaha PS series, and others.

Here is the difference, and why it can't be done well.

The auto accompaniment keyboards generally play from 2 to 8 measures of music (depending on the keyboard), over and over and over and over again, without any regard to what chord you are playing, how that chord fits in the progression, what chord came before, and what chord is coming next.

BiaB on the other hand can have hundreds of patterns ranging from 2 measures to 2 beats. That's a lot more variety than 8 measures ad infinitum.

Plus, since you enter your chord progression first, BiaB knows what chord you are playing, how it relates to the entire chord progression, and what chords are before and after. The 'genius' in the BiaB styles is that there are several masks in the StyleMaker that take advantage of that. You can program one pattern to appear only on a V7 chord before a drum roll and only in the next chord is a I chord. Then you can program a few others for the same situation and give probability numbers to them so the one with the most personality appears the least and the more generic ones appear more often.

And this is only one situation example. There are masks for the number of bars after the last part marker, the beat of the measure the pattern starts on, the Roman Numeral of the chord, the chord type (7th, minor, half diminished, etc.) and so on.

So for example, the 'stock' ZZJazz style has over 300 patterns. Which 8 would you choose to put into your Yamaha? And ZZJazz has only 3 instruments, drums, bass and piano. How about a more complex style?

I've also gone the other way around, and based BiaB patterns from ideas I have gotten from the Korg i3, Korg PA80, ad Technics KN7000. They of course are not exact copies, but simply inspired by these keyboards. Direct copies would be impossible for the reasons mentioned above. The styles based on these keyboards are clearly marked as such, to differentiate them from majority of styles which I have made "from scratch" using my experience as a multi-instrumentalist (sax, flute, wind synth, keyboard synth, guitar, bass, & drums).

So I took the root ideas of those styles, recorded plenty of variations on those themes into my sequencer, and then imported the snippets into BiaB. So where the original keyboard style had 8 patterns, my styles have hundreds. And where the keyboard style has 2 different rolls, mine usually have 8 or more.

There are of course other things the keyboard styles do IMO better. They often have more than the 5 instruments that BiaB is limited to. This is usually not a big deal, but sometimes it is. They often have more than one bass/drum/comp synchronization patterns that are not possible in BiaB. Plus they have longer and fancier intros and endings.

All in all, I have found that BiaB produces a song with much less repetition and with an output that is much more musically appropriate and 'intelligent'. This is why out of all the software and hardware products I have written styles for, I have built my business on Band-in-a-Box. I'm a musician, I've been a musician all my life, and as far as auto-accompaniment software and hardware products are concerned, BiaB stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫
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