New to BIAB, anyway... LONG time musician....

I got this thing yesterday, not knowing what to expect. If BIAB was the perfect woman for me, teh words would be "Where have you been all my life?"

I am in the process of writing for a CD. Typically I use Sonar, MIDI interface, sequence all the parts, program drums either on a controller, or with drum loop software, or a standalone drum machine. Then I make demos of each track and send them off to the players who will do the CD with me and they take the demo and do what they want to do with it anyway.

Since firing up BIAB last night at 8pm, I have 2 songs done and out to the players.

Given that the guys don't play what I play on the demo anyway, it is a huge waste of time to sit at a MIDI controller and do take after take until I get through one with no clams. And playing with Sonar, THE most tempermental software I have ever seen, gets frustrating sometimes. With BIAB, this is what I have done.

I typed in the chord charting, at this point leaving everything in first option (since it is just a reference track). That was saved to a WAV file. I then feed that out to my mixer. I play those tracks back through the mixer which has 2 digital reverbs patched through it, feed that mix into my TASCAM 8 track direct to disc recorder. Once I have a reference copy on the TASCAM, I then start with dubs, adding vocals with or without the vocoder for harmonies depending on the song, guitar or sax solos (this CD is country so it's mostly guitar), any specific drum fills I want to hear.... From there, after saving to the hard drive after every dub, I feed that through RCA jacks into a computer so I can save that raw audio data into digital files. Then they are ready to go off via email to my bass guy, my keyboard guy, my guitar guy, my drummer and the pedal steel player I am using for this project.

And guys, this is day TWO of using this product. I have 99% of the product to learn yet.

So here come the newbie questions. Other than to just leave the first 3-4 measures empty to accommodate a piano or guitar pick up as the intro, is there a way to set BIAB to say "start playing on beat 2 of measure 4"? I think I read somewhere about inserting rests using periods, but when I want a whole measure rest, how do I do that?

I know there are going to be times that I HAVE to use the sequencer, but the time I spent with BIAB over this 2 days tells me that with carefully prodding it will turn out music I would use on stage or on CD. Solos over the generated tracks to be sure, but this is great stuff.

In one of the songs, I wanted to see how it would work if I entered a series of 2 beat chords with a note "walking" through them. C9 to C to Cmaj7 to C7, where through that base C chord I should hear a D to C to B to B flat walking through it, and I heard exactly what I asked it for. I love this thing.