PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows I don't think this can be done. Am I wrong?

Hi,

I got this idea to create an acid loop in the melody track with my guitar playing melody rather than with Midi playing melody. I am pretty sure I can get that to work except for one problem which may not have a solution. What if the melody starts during the count in? I don't think it is possible to create a loop there. I think the only work around solution would be to create some intro chords (maybe 4 bars) and create a separate style for the 4 bar intro with a separate loop to do the melody that leads into the main chorus. As part of this work around the melody loop which is in main chorus would be of a 2nd style which I saved (or maybe I do not even need to save these styles since the song contains them). Unfortunately creating a separate 4 bar intro is a bit of a problem and I would prefer not to do this. So based upon my knowledge I am thinking there is no point in even trying. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
John

John,

Realband would be the way to go for this.

In RB, it's possible to highlight the section you want to save and then save it with acidized information. It's very quick and straightforward.

While BIAB will render with acidized details, as far as I know, it's the entire backing track that gets rendered. I believe it would be possible to record a short audio file and then save this with the acidized details.

It's so very much easier in Realband though. Just create a whole track and then select the sections you want to make loops from.

Regards,
Noel

Don't forget you have the Audio track, you can import your loop/clip and set the Audio Master (Base) Tempo of it so to match the session tempo, and copy paste/import to the count-in or anywhere in the Audio track (enable snap). It would be good to have a drag n drop for the Audio track !

Hi Guys thanks for your responses.

I don't think Noel's idea works. To create the loop I found out a while ago you have to remove the count-in while in RealBand and save the remainder of that track as an acid loop and this will line up perfectly with the BIAB tracks. Of course the melody in the count in area is gone.

Its amazing what a good night's sleep does :-) I woke up with a variation on Pipeline's idea and just tried it. It does work (with two weakness). I recorded the melody with my guitar in BIAB (so that includes melody during the count in and during the chorus). So I have the full audio track at this point. I closed down BIAB, started RealBand and opened the file. In RealBand I made a copy of the whole audio track. I then went back to the audio track and cut from bar #1 to the end (in other words I left the count in portion intact). I then saved the file using (file save) which saved everything except the copy of the audio track. To do this there is a special popup that comes up and I have to indicate which track has the audio data and I selected the track that was used for audio when I first opened the file. This properly saved the Audio track with just the count in portion. I then went back to RealBand and deleted the 2 bars of the count-in from the whole song (all tracks) and created the acid loop from the copy of the audio-track (deleting the 2 bars of the count-in lines the loop up properly for the chorus). I closed down RealBand at this point and opened up BIAB then applied the full chorus loop. So this allows me to have melody during the count-in and any number of repeats I choose for a live jam. One might ask why would I want to use a BIAB melody during a live jam. Unfortunately what is likely to happen at one of our jams in the future is someone in our group will initiate one more more new songs I do not know and they do not show up while everyone else does. I will hopefully have learned the melody and recorded it after much struggle in BIAB and followed this procedure to get a good take but not actually be very comfortable performing it live so I will use the BIAB recording during the jam instead. So I Here are the weaknesses.

1/ The first one is that I thought doing it this way would make the volumes of the count-in-melody and the chorus-melody the same but it did not. I had to reduce the count-in melody a fair bit to get them to match. The good part is the BIAB song file remembers this setting.
2/ The second one is for some reason when I save the song in RealBand and then open it in BIAB it puts the red underline on every bar suggesting the bar settings are different. I looked at it quick and could not find any change so I just overlaid this temp copy of my BIAB file with the original and it still worked to give me the two parts of the melody on playback.

Here is the strange part. Before I tried the method above I tried cutting the chorus part of the melody from the Audio track and saving it as a .wav file all by itself without saving the whole song (without saving all the BIAB tracks that were read in). When I did this it said it was saving it but it never did. I was using my downloads directory as the working directory for this. I went to another directory and then back to make sure it would find it but that .wav was not there. I tried this 2 times and it still said it wrote it out but it never actually did. I tried highlighting the whole audio track and still could not get it to work. So rather than struggle any more with this approach I decided to try the method above which ended up working. In the end I think the method above which I got to work is better because ultimately I had to do those two steps regardless. There is something about reading in and saving the whole set of BIAB tracks using (file open and file save) that tells RealBand that there is an audio-track involved (it is stored in the SGU file somewhere).

Sorry did not read all that, too tied, will look more tomorrow.
But you can have another copy of Biab running and copy sections from one audio track and paste in the other.