In a few months, I will be the featured artist at the pops concert of our regional symphony orchestra. They called and asked me to orchestrate four of my original Brazilian jazz compositions and perform as soloist along with my guitarist and pianist. After I fell out of my chair, I got back up and started work on the project. BIAB has been invaluable in all parts of the preparation, and I thought it might be helpful to others if I made a few notes about how I have used it so far. Sorry in advance for the length.

Writing the songs

Not to overlook the most basic use of BIAB, I composed all four of the songs in BIAB. Three have been recorded and are available on iTunes, Pandora and Spotify. Two of those are played regularly on Music Choice TV on the jazz channel. One was among the twelve finalists for best jazz composition at the 2009 Los Angeles Music Awards. I play horns but not piano, guitar, bass or drums, so BIAB is invaluable to me in hearing those parts during the creative process.

Getting a starting pitch

This job required writing instrumental parts based on some of the playing that was improvised in the studio during the recording sessions, so I did a lot of transcribing from my own CD. Since I don’t have perfect pitch but do have great relative pitch, all I need to do transcriptions is a starting pitch once in awhile. I usually keep BIAB running, so instead of picking up a horn (no piano, remember), it’s quicker to just use my mouse and the built-in keyboard of BIAB.

Voicing chords

In BIAB, you can write a chord and then use Shift+ENTER to hear the chord. If you keep pressing Shift+ENTER, you hear alternate voicings of the chord (some more open, some more closed), and see them on the keyboard display. I did this frequently on some of the more complex chords to help me decide how to voice them for a full orchestra.

Reharmonizing soli sections

For some soli sections, I let BIAB make suggestions by taking the soli lead line I wrote back into BIAB. I placed that over the chords of the song, and used the Soloist Harmony to select the style I wanted (for example, an open-voicing trombone section). BIAB produced some great ideas for section harmony parts. BIAB should get a co-arranger credit!

Double-checking the song form

To make sure I had not missed any measures, I compared the measure numbers of major events in the BIAB song to my notation program. Sometimes, I played back the notation program and BIAB at the same time and listened to make sure all was well. Doing this with audio from different sources will occasionally result in one of the programs getting a bit out of sync, but I can make small adjustments of the BIAB tempo on the fly to keep it sounding good.

Changing a melody to cut time

Here’s a nifty trick that may be unique to BIAB. I wanted to redo one chart in 2/4 time that was originally notated in 4/4. I was surprised to find out that my notation program would not do this conversion. Instead of re-keying in the whole melody and written soli, I remembered that BIAB had the Edit Reduce and Edit Expand Duration commands. I saved the melody as MIDI, took it into BIAB, made the changes of duration and tempo, and then plugged the exported MIDI back into the notation program. This saved a lot of time.

Preparing a recording for the orchestra

The orchestra conductor requested a recording of each of my arrangements so she could focus on the string, horn, brass and woodwind parts she would have to cue. This recording was primarily made from the notation program. By itself, though, it sounded pretty sterile, so I used BIAB from my original tunes and muted some tracks to supply just background percussion and piano/guitar backing to put the parts into context.

BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.