If I make a simple song or backing track and save it then reopen it and change the key several times...

Does the sound quality stay the same? (ie no degradation with multiple changes)

Does changing the key cause a re-rendering of the song and therefore a different BIAB performance of the song's style?

Thanks. I am strategizing my creation and use of simple practice tracks.

My understanding is Yes and Yes.

The experiment I haven’t tried (and would not try) is freezing the tracks then changing key. I think that the tracks would still play back in the original key so it wouldn’t change the key, but it wouldn’t do what you wanted anyway.

Song files regenerate when you make major changes such as the key signature or tempo. There shouldn't be any sound degradation since the audio will be freshly generated with each change.

Changing the key signature means the Band-in-a-Box song generator selects new material so the performance will be different. Many times a song will sound better in a different key signature than the one that you start with.

You can use tempo to add variety too. When the song tempo is near the upper or lower tempo limit of RealTracks you can alter the tempo just a few beats per minute to cross the tempo threshold. When the threshold is crossed Band-in-a-Box automatically substitutes RealTracks that better fit the new tempo.

Hmmmm, well all of this is very interesting. So how does one handle a song that you have created and you don't want it to change, but you want to change its key either for different practice or a full song that you don't want to change the performance, but just the key?

I think I am hearing you all say that if you change the key, you change the performance, period.

Matt advises not trying changing the key on a frozen song. I suppose one could try this with short song that one doesn't mind trashing just to see!

I wonder what PG peeps say??? Perhaps I will try chat, cuz Simon is usually there at this hour.

If tracks are frozen how are the frozen tracks going to follow the key change?

What Jim said.

Thanks Matt and Jim!

Simon at PG confirms tonight:

Change the key it will change the performance.

Freeze the track, you cannot change the key.

Hazah, more information to understand exactly what goes on.

I think the answer is that you can't do that in BIAB because that isn't generally something human musicians could do either.

Think especially of a rhythm guitarist. Changing a song from E to Eb isn't just playing notes at a different pitch, it's using completely different fingerings.

You might be better off doing some kind of pitch shifting of a finished audio file, to create recordings in different keys that are otherwise identical.

But not much of a shift. Go beyond two half-steps any you hear artifacts.

One thing you could try is to open the song with Realband.
Then use the 'make all BB tracks regular tracks' feature.
If you do this RB will only regenerate something if you explicitly tell it to.
And even then you can generate just whatever track/section you want and keep the good stuff.
Yet the tracks are not 'Frozen' as you can still use the pitch shift/key change (etc) on those tracks.

After making them regular tracks you can do Pitch/Key/Tempo shift to your hearts content and just see what happens.
As others have noted, you may get artifacts depending on the material and amount of key change or pitch shift.

But if it goes bad, as long as you don't intentionally save the song in RB as an SGU file and write over the original, you can always go back to the original, since RB saves in the SEQ file format as default.

A couple things about RB that make it better for this type of experimenting:

RB will natively save it as a SEQ file so it *shouldn't overwrite the original SGU, meaning you always have a safe staring point to go back to.

RB allows multiple 'undo' actions, so you can try things and undo easily.

RB makes a backup of the current version whenever you save a seq file. So if you get progress on something you like, then mess it up and inadvertently save it, you can open the backup file from before you saved the goof.

I have often wondered why BiaB doesn't use the same backup philosophy on Save as RB does, since the BiaB files are so much smaller..

Pretty interesting stuff; thanks guys!