PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums RealBand Should PG Music Combine RB and BIAB to avoid conflicts?

Still a newbie to both BIAB and RB and enjoying them both but notice the differences, conflicts and features generate a lot of questions (and confusion) in these Forums.

My question is should PG Music consolidate the two programs into one to eliminate some of the Drop and Drag problems some are dealing with and to just simplify the whole process?

Since they both ship together price shouldn't be a factor.

Is it even technically feasible (not being a programer)?

Seems like Realband should be all you need.

What do you think?

Carkins

Realband is a DAW program with some of the autogenration features of BiaB mixed in. It is really Powertracks with a blending of BiaB.

Band in a Box is a full autogenration and accompaniment program that is aimed at fast generation of basic song bed, and useable live backing tracks. While Rb does this it does it differently

The combining of programs has already taken place., and Rb is the result.

There are still many users that never touch either PTPA or RB, and to take away BiaB would be to deprive them of their chosen work flow.

About once a month someone new comes in and declares that we need a hybred of RB and BiaB. get familiar with both and see what fits your needs.

While Rb does a great job generating automatic tracks, BiaB does it faster and better, in some instances. RB allows you to carry on and add much more to the system.

If you understand the system well you can go seamlessly from BiaB to RB. I open BiaB files routinely in RB.

Good point Robh.

I love both programs, and am learning to bounce from one to the other as needed.
Just thought if BIAB had all the extra tracks etc of RB "under one roof" it would be nice.

Definitely would not want to lose the speed of BIAB though.

I look at BIAB as a bicycle with training wheels for people just learning about how to put a sing together. For someone who struggles with chord progressions, structuring a verse, bridge, chorus, half verse, etc... BIAB is great from the music side.

BUT....

When you are ready to move into the production side of things, Real Band is it. The way you can copy and paste chunks of songs is nothing short of an answer to a prayer.

Example. In my song Crying Private Tears, the chord progression is what it is, but the feel of the song calls for the bass line to ride a D when the rest of the music goes to an A. No matter how I set that chord sheet up as A/D, the bass line kept moving to A there. Enter Real Band. I copied measure 1, which was how it should be, and pasted it over the top of the wrong bass line for the 8 or so iterations of that progression. 2 minutes. On a 5 minutes song, that is 3 minutes less time than I would have spent playing it in with a bass guitar. With the ability to do gain changes, fades...... Created a solo in one song, For some reason one measure of the solo was way too hot. Highlight, right click, gain change, set up a -2 db change, apply... smoothed it right out. And at the end, the last sustained note ended too abruptly. Select the last measure, fade out, 100 to 0, apply... done. Just that easy.

Real Band probably won't make you Phil Spector or Mutt Lange, but it is cheaper than hiring either one of them. And it doesn't carry a gun like Spector....

No real reason to "combine". You have your choice. Most of us like Real Band better, but either one works just fine. Real Band is just more fully featured and far more flexible.

Dan i will test that out for you as soon as i can. Hopefully someone in the know will enlighten us on it.

I am trying to use RB but for now I prefer BIAB.
It's good to have choices.

Mike

Hmmmmm ... I don't see BB as having training wheels. It's a type of DAW in its own right. You can put a song together quickly and make a mP3 out of it. Both programs serve to compliment one another for creative purposes, both for arranging and for finalizing.

I create my tunes in BB then open them in RB. In there I do all kinds of voodoo to the tracks and add guitar and bass then vocals and harmony. It's the best of both worlds. It would take too long to arrange a song in RB, even with the BB GUI interface. However, to each his own. That's why Pgmusic has all this at our finger tips. No?

Actually Russ i can build a song in Rb just as fast as BiaB. Now BiaB is faster on the actual generation of Realtracks and drums, but that is because BiaB allow itself to start before the generation is complete.

But to build a song bed it is very similar. just type in the chords, pick a style, and hit play.

It is definitely a work flow thing, and to each it is different.

BiaB is not a lighter version of RB, it is not really a true DAW. It has more auto accompaniment features than RB, but RB has a nice sequencer built in. So BiaB is aimed at a different path. And for what it does it does it better than another program.

RB is a sweet simple easy to use DAW/Sequencer, that happens to include a lot of the basic features of BiaB. Again it is aimed at full production of recording studio projects, and BiaB is aimed at quick, easy and powerful song generation, building 5 to 7 track backing tracks, and song bed files with simple chord entry. BiaB goes a step further and allows complex solos, generation of melodies, generation of harmonies, and also chord structure help.

Together these are a potent package.

Let me offer testimony here. For a while I was one of the users like Rob mentioned who only used BIAB. My process to that point went like this.

Write the song either on paper or in my head.

Open BIAB and enter the chord progression.

Experiment with the style over and over and watch it regenerate the song every time I changed styles.

Once I got that to where I wanted it, I then had to start playing with the solo generation features. That was another learning curve. Finally I would end up with an acceptable solo and move ahead.

From that point I would record my song off onto my Tascam 8 track digital recorder. I would then play that back a number of times as I added supporting keyboards, vocals, harmony vocals.... quite often running out of tracks.

No more. I have not powered the Tascam on in 6 weeks.

I had really taken that about as far as I could go with it and started following the threads about Real Band. I started into THAT learning curve with the same brash attitude I approach everything I do, that this should come easy to me and I will master it in an hour or so.

Reality check.

Real Band is SO full featured that there are nuances even the most experienced users may still be discovering after years of use. However, with the help of these great people on these forums, a few in particular but everybody in general, I was able to get enough of a grasp on Real Band that I could start using it.

Now, what did that do for me? Plenty. I have a 48 track sequencer with a full stable of experienced studio musicians there to play for me. Not one of them has talked back to me, told me my song was bad, that I couldn't play or sing.... I don't have to pay them, and they don't hit clams. I have cut and paste, volume boost and cut, fades, effects, and things I will be discovering for years. The point is that since one of the forum people was kind enough to invest some of his personal time to take remote control of my computer and show me on my own screen how to do several "this and thats", my whole world of writing and recording changed.

I still have to enter chords in and pick a style, but once that is done and the basic song is generated, then the true fun begins. Adding background instruments, setting levels so they appear to be coming in and out of the mix, generating multiple solos and then cutting and pasting them measure by measure on to a completely new track, using trial and error until I get the exact solo I would have asked the player to play if he was at my house. I can add those supporting keyboards, drum fills or accents, vocals, harmonies.... all right on my screen where I have MUCH more control. AND THEN fix the timing if it's off, control levels, fade in and out.... to be honest this is ruining me for actual playing to the point where I need to play in a band again so I have a reason to practice. Once I get everything recorded and mixed down, the consolidated track dump to .wav or .MP3 (I do both) is a breeze as well.

BIAB is fine for what I will call quick and dirty or scratchpad work, getting the basic framework done to take with you and play out and sing over. And it does a great job for that. But when you want to go further, Real Band is truly the better option.

The best example I can offer is one of my songs called Insignificant Other out on my Sound Cloud site. Other than the faux steel guitar part on the head, after the first chorus and on the outro (which was all from an Ensoniq SQ1 synthesizer), I didn't play a note on that song. If you go listen, pay particular attention to the guitar solo. What I got from Real Band fit the groove of the song so perfectly I wouldn't have asked Brent Mason to play anything different, and he couldn't have played anything better had he been in my house doing the session.

Also check out The One That Got Away, where I had to do a lot of fine adjusting on timing because of drum pickups that I played in manually on a Roland drum machine. One fill was a little early, another a little late. Select it, slide it to where it needs to be, and drop it. Timing fixed without another take.

And that pretty much explains what my original comment meant about BIAB being like RB with training wheels.

A few things to add to that. Don't be fooled you can really finish a song in RB. While many here, myself included take songs and polish them in other software, like Sonar, and Reaper, you don't have to. I like to use automation envelopes to do fine adjustments to a lot of things, turning instruments on and off, having an instrument drop back into the mix and come forward for certain sections. You can automate here. It is not as easy, but possible.

You can use both the fader move recording, and or the draw automation in the piano roll. Not as easy but doable. My hope is that RB receives a node based automation feature on the next version, then it will be a playa'

A couple other reasons folks move to other platforms are 1. the like the effects plug ins there better. RB plugs are good and solid better than you think if you use them and get familiar. Plus if you want you can add 3rd party plugs easy. i have the Classic set, the "Fish" set, and a few more, like T-Sledge "Sweetie Boy", and a couple other mastering effects. I think i can do just about anything i need. Since i own Sonar, and Reaper i can use some of the plugs from there. 2. Comfort, the are just used to that platform.

RB now has some pretty good audio tools, and midi has always been solid. The features are growing.

I really like Insignificant Other. Nice writing there. A couple of comments, where's the bass? Is that intentional or is it something with Soundcloud? And I would mix your vocals and the guitar solo a bit hotter. If that waveform display is accurate there may not be the headroom to pull up the vocals, just lower the other tracks a touch or you could put some compression on the vocals. Other than that, I like that song and the way you got that old time honkytonk party feel with the handclaps.

It certainly shows what you can do with RB. Everything you said is right on the money. Biab is great, it does what it does very well but it's limited, you can't do a complete production with it like you can with RB.

Funny, when we first started corresponding on the forum you were talking about forming a 9 piece R&B funk horn band. This is quite a departure from that but it's cool, it shows your versatility. I play mostly jazz now but I was in a country band for several years and had a lot of fun with it.

Bob

That horn band is still on the burner Bob. It's just tough getting people able to find time for another project without abandoning something else to make room. Right now, just to use me as an example, in addition to a 40 hour job, I have a learn list for a bar band, rehearsals starting for the yearly reunion show with my old band, and writing my own stuff. A couple of the other pieces have even one more band above that. 2 of them are in the yearly reunion band.

This stuff IS indeed a departure for me. Several things aligned to do it. In late January/early February a girl and I went separate ways. That really stung and I started writing about it. If you listen to The One That Got Away and Do It All Again, those are the two main puzzle pieces. The lyrics and the emotion of the songs absolutely MADE them be country. I had barely listened to country music in my life, much less written or played it. So, adding in that a CD is more than 2 songs, out came Insignificant Other, I'm The One For You, What If It Was Love, Lie To Myself.... Now also add in that due to being a Facebook regular, I met the amazing piano player and singer I once posted a link to, and she grew up playing and singing country music to the point where her family owns a very popular spot called "The Barn" where every country and bluegrass player who is not working go on Friday nights and they go until they run out of energy. Through becoming very good friends with her and seeing her bands play, my eyes became wide open to this wonderful writing and energetic, emotional music called country.

The mix on Insignificant Other sounded great on my Wharfedale monitors, and that is part of the trouble I am having with this. Depending on what it is played back on, it sounds different. In my car, for example, Insignificant other has TOO MUCH bass. On my one computer that has a sub woofer, it sounds bass heavy but not overly so. In the studio through the monitors, it sounds fine. I don't remember if it was Spector or one of the other heavyweights but somebody used to mix through car radio speakers.

A couple of tricks I've picked up over the years. No, not those kinds of tricks...Mixing tricks. Find a commercial recording you like that's in the same style and similar instrumention to your song. Play that on your studio monitors and listen carefully then mix your tune to sound the same. That commercial recording will sound pretty good on most everything out there. The second one concerning vocals and/or a lead instrument is to have your mix playing fairly quietly in your studio room then leave the room but leave the door open so you can barely hear it. Now listen to what you hear. When you do that with commercial recordings all you hear are the vocals or lead, pretty much nothing else except maybe some drums, that's it. Again do your mix so it matches those levels when you leave the room.

Bob