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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I am doing backings for several Mose Allison songs which require quite a few "shots" in the head of the song.
I am using Biab 2011 and have decided on the J140TB (Part B)real tracks style which I am very happy with.
However when I put shots into the song, they are mostly different to each other (some with loud snare, others with softer hi hat etc) In addition some (particularly the snare one) are much too loud in comparison to the rest of the song. I find the quieter hi hat shot quite good but it seems impossible to get it for every shot..
Is there any way to only get the hi hat shots, or alternatively even out the shots/holds so they are all the same type, and most importantly the volume is in balance with the rest of the drum parts?
Mal
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It is interesting to me that you have version 2011. There was quite an improvement in this area in the new version.
Can you specify only a hi hat? No.
Can you make all the shots/holds the same type? Probably not, unless you are willing to regenerate until they randomly sound the way you want, or you work in a sequencer to copy one you like to other places in the song.
Can you make the volume in balance with the rest of the drum parts? Probably yes; you can certainly make an improvement. Go to Opt., Preferences, Arrange. Enter a zero for the two boxes, "Boost Shots By" and "Boost Holds By".
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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You can use RealBand and copy/paste the shot
or
Edit the appropriate RealDrum .txt file. Shots and Holds are defined in those files. An excerpt from the JazzBrushes#1_100_Style.txt found in the JazzBrushes#1 folder is:
Shot{closed hi-hat},0,192,376,184,1,90 {A bracket is a comment and}
Shot{closed hi-hat},1,192,376,184,1,90 {anything inside is ignored}
Some files have very descriptive shots (such as above) and others just have lines like
;Shot,0,55,9,252,1,90 ;Anything following the semicolon
;Shot,1,55,9,252,1,90 ;is also ignored
Note the difference in the two lines is the first number following Shot. A 0 is a shot where a 1 is a push. In your case, you would want only the 0 entries.
So what to do is to first back up the desired .txt file(s). Then edit the file, find the section of shot descriptions, and comment out the ones you don't want. You can put ; at the beginning of the line to do this. What I did is comment out all but one at a time, save the file, and play the song. That way, you can hear what each shot is doing.
R
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Rachael is correct, if it is just the drums and not the other instruments, you can edit the TXT files. The style you are using has RD: JAZZTERRYCLARKE^02-BRUSHES loaded by default.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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I was doing the exact same thing yesterday except it's Blue Trane and have the same problem. The best way is to open that song in Real Band as a Biab song and copy/paste what you need and you can adjust the gain there too. The reason for that is the chord grid is already done. One useful trick is after you've generated the basic song go into the chord grid and make a shot every bar for as many bars as you have patience for then generate another RD track. All you need is the raw material to cut/paste what you want. You can keep the tune in RB if that works for you but if you simply have to keep it in Biab import the corrected drum track into Biab's audio track and mute the drum part. The problem with that of course is if later you want to make any change to the tune in Biab that drum audio part is fixed and you'll have to redo it in RB so make correcting the drum shots the last thing you do before finalizing it.
Bob
Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.
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I see I was writing my answer at the same time Rachael was. Her solution is interesting. It also requires some extra work but like you I usually would want either all hi-hats or all rimshots. Creating a separate TXT file could be the best long term solution because I would use it more than once. It's amazing how many different ways you can do things with this software.
Bob
Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I use a lot of endings where the canned 2-bar ending just didn't work for me. I actually edited all of the .txt files I use and have the shots exactly how I want them. Usually it is a sizzle cymbal. I hate to call them shots because they really are not. I tend to call them holds but BIAB treats a hold the same as a shot with RealDrums. I suggested a couple of years ago to add another option for the RDs to do exactly what this post is about. I don't know if anything is being done.
I found it interesting when I was editing my files, I found a couple of entries where there is a Shot,2 entry suggesting that there was some experimentation with a third type of Shot entry for some reason. I hope this is for the Hold.
R
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Thanks Rachael, Matt and Bob...appreciate your suggestions.
I'll probably use the cut paste method in Real Band (or Adobe Audition), and hope that in the next BIAB build, PG music have an option to choose only hi hat, or rimshots for shots/holds. Will open a thread in the wish list now..
Mal
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Greater control over Real Drums (and R/Ts) would certainly be a good thing.
But there are drum plug-in applications that allow one to do that.
I, however, have shied away from such apps because I fear the time required for getting to that level of detail.
There is something to be said for 'click play and ya have a drummer.'
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Rachael
please put this in TIPS & TRICKS so it doesn't get buried under new posts. This is an excellent bit of information that should stay easy to find for a long time.
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I'm finding the shots, hold and stops extremely frustrating too. I don't want to learn to edit code and text files. I just want this thing to do what it's supposed to do!
On some styles it's not bad, but on others, it misses out instruments, plays one part really loud, or there's no drums in the stops at all. I had a very early version of BB, before it had any of that, then when they added it, I thought it was ok, but not great. I switched to Mac after that and didn't have BB for a few years. I recently bought the Audiophile hard drive, with all it's bells and whistles, only to find that PG Music have STILL not fixed this issue.
It basically mean that I'm back to my original method of generating guitars and other instruments, and then programming the drums and bass in EZ Drummer and EZ Bass. It would be so nice if, after all this time and money wasted, PG Music would finally address this issue. BB is an incredible piece of work, but this simple issue renders it useless to me in terms of just writing a track I can use without loads of messing around.
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Perhaps you could suggest one or more styles and specific instruments that have this issue?
Then we could confirm your issue and possibly suggest workarounds, or other methods to help you to resolve.
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
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Hi Rick.
I've had the audiophile version for a few years now and I'm presently running BIAB 2025. I use shots and holds often and I haven't had a problem with them. As Audiotrack has suggested, if you could let us know what style you have loaded, we can all test it out.
Out of curiosity, do you add the shots and holds directly from the computer typing keyboard or do you use ALT + F5. (For those who are reading this post and don't know about entering directly from the typing keyboard, a shot is X.. and a hold is X... where X is the chord. If you want to exclude instruments from being affected by the command, these days I find it easiest to do that in the ALT + F5, Chord Options dialogue window.)
Also, after you have added the shots and holds, it's necessary to unfreeze any frozen tracks and then regenerate the song. If a track is frozen the shots and holds are ignore when the song is regenerated.
I hope this helps.
--Noel
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2026
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Reading this older thread again, I would also suggest upgrading to a recent version of BIAB and exploring the drum patterns that have stems. In those, you have much greater control over the volume of individual parts of the drum kit. There aren’t many available yet but perhaps one that is could work for you with no adjustment other than volume sliders.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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