PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Stem Splitter Proof of Concept for BIAB - Guitar Pro 8 Mashups!

My goal was to learn the bass lines for a real recording of a popular song and create a notation and TAB transcription that is synced with the real recording creating a great play-along and practice tool.

I realized BIAB has a great stem splitter and terrific measure alignment and tempo equalizer tools.
My Daw, Reaper has great quick custom rendering of audio files including some or all of the stems
Guitar Pro 8 has fantastic transciption tools and now syncs with imported audio files.

So!

My example is Imagine by John Lennon. I bring the real recorded song into BIAB and use the stem splitters. The advantage of this is that the BIAB features of aligning the first measure, then tapping in the measures on the "1" of each measure, then making fine adjustments to the measure marks, and THEN equalizing the tempo all which is super easy and intuitive. MUCH easier than in a DAW. Then you can drag the 4 files quickly into a DAW and they are all aligned perfectly. A DAW has much better render features than BIAB to choose an output file that has all the stems included or just some of them depending on your preferences. Super quick and easy and you don't even need to save a project. Then drop the custom rendered file into Guitar Pro 8. The measure alignment tools there are NOT good and tempo evening is NOT good, but you have already done all this work in BIAB, so easy-peasy. Just set the start point for the first measure and you are all aligned in Guitar Pro 8. Do your transcription now.

Now you have a wonderful full music notation and TAB transcription that plays along in perfect sync with the real recorded version of the song. I am easily now playing along with John Lennon! Guitar Pro 8 also allows you to replace the audio file after you have made the transcription so you can easily make a few versions for practice saving out each one. Say, one with all stems, one with all stems except the bass, one with just the bass etc...

This all sounds complicated because I am using three programs BUT I found that once I learned the sequence of steps, it was really fast. How cool it is going to be to slowly build up a repertoire library of bass transcriptions synced to the actual songs, with the huge benefit that I got to use my ear to create an exact transcription which is amazing practice.

This is a great mashup of BIAB and Guitar Pro 8

Here is a screen shot to show you a snippet of what that looks like in Guitar Pro 8. If Guitar Pro 9 builds in multiple track importation, HooEeee that will be astounding.

Thanks, very good.
I was not aware that I could drag in an audio file into GP8 and use it for manual transcription.

Yes, insanely useful. A wonderful mash up of BB splitting and manipulating features and the wonderful transcription writing tools of Guitar Pro. Hopefully Guitar Pro 9 will let us import multiple tracks. Imagine the possibilities!

Maybe it could be of use to others to also put this into into some of the other forum "tips" as "tracscription support software".
(maybe there are other useful tools for transcription as well that could be added)

I was not aware of the tracscription support in GP8.
I have minly used the software "Trancribe" before but it has no functionality for notation.

I find it very helpful to be able to drop an audio file into GP8 and align synk points on the audio and then to be able to notate manually or play from midi instrument the corresponding score for that part.