Hi Dana,

Thank you for taking time to hear some of my work. Some of what you listened to would have been professional demos and some would have been BIAB. These days what I do is to assemble a backing track in BIAB and then get a vocalist (Jason Wyatt, Nashville) to overdub the backing. He sends me his vocals and I add them to the mix. He sounds much better than I do!

Anyway... enough of that This is how I set about creating a song.

USING BIAB
1. Find a style I like.

2. Layout a chord progression.

Sometimes I load in the demo song for the style and use the chords as a starting point for developing my accompaniment. If I do choose to load in a demo song, the a number of the chords will usually change. Since a chord progression is not copyrighted, though, it's possible to use the PG Music created progressions if you wish.

3. Listen to the chord progression over and over (much like your 40 choruses!) until phrases of words start to come to mind.

4. When I get a phrase that I like, I start developing lyrics.

5. Once lyrics are mostly done, I start working on a melody against the chord progression. At this point, I often try a number of different keys to see which one gives me the best feel. (I love BIAB's transposing ease!)

6. Once the melody is well on the way and the lyrics are starting to cement, I use Notation Editor to notate the melody and to add note-based lyrics to the music.

7. Now I play around with shots and holds and see if I can polish up the overall sound of the arrangement.

By the way, every few changes of the song, I create a newer version of the song. For example, my song will start out as SongTitle 1.SGU. By the time I reach #7 above, I'm usually up to around SongTitle 15.MGU

8. When I get something happening that I like, I move the BIAB file into Realband.

USING REALBAND
9. In RB, I play around with adding different Realtracks and look for RTs that I might be able to use as fillers in the arrangement.

10. I also do a couple of different tracks of generations of some of the RTs so that I can cut and paste sections to get an overall single, compiled track that works just the way I'd like it to.

11. When I'm happy with all the raw building material that I have in RB, I move my song as WAV files to Reaper (by Cockos). I always set reverb to off and center all tracks before the move.

USING REPEAR
I have found Reaper a terrific DAW. It had a bit of a learning curve associated with it but there is terrific documentation out there on this DAW that really helps understand it. I particularly like the auto-crossfade that happens simply by cutting and pasting. I've also found the tuning plugin excellent.

12. In Reaper I work on the mix (panning, reverb, compression, etc.), record vocals and apply mastering.

Hope this gives you some ideas BIAB, RB and Reaper and all vital parts of my songwriting workflow.

All the best,
Noel

MY SONGS...
Audiophile BIAB 2026