I write styles, from scratch, and often I find BiaB putting notes in that I didn't want. Simplest example, put in a C5 chord, which is supposed to play only root an fifth, and you will see the major third playing along. Write a style without the third and it gives problems on all but 5 chords.

There are more complex examples but I thought the simplest one is easiest to explain.

I also find BiaB often ignoring the masks in the StyleMaker, and that's fodder for another post.

I've spent a lot of times on my styles tweaking and re-tweaking to find a balance between the occurrence of unwanted things I did not write into the style and keeping enough in to still keeping the style interesting. It's one of the challenges of the StyleMaker. So a style that should take a day to write, might take me a week. I might end up with a dozen different variations of a style before finalizing it and picking the one to put on my next disk. But in the long run, it's worth it.

My solution is to export what I create to a MIDI file and clean up the song there. I can use notation editor and/or piano roll editor to spot the clams and then erase them. Also time consuming.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm very happy with BiaB and believe it is the absolute best auto-accompaniment program out there. Band-in-a-Box does what it does well, but in my opinion it's output is very good, but not ready for prime time. This is where the DAW comes in handy. Real Band will do just fine in that department.

I find the two programs together allow you to take the very good output of Band-in-a-Box and turn it into something truly exceptional.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫


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