[Edit, 5 Sept 2013: This started out a couple of days ago as me just asking for a general shortcut steer on how to get BIAB to work its various kinds of magic on a preexisting track; by 4 September it had meandered into me figuring out a way to add a pre-existing audio track and its underlying, pre-existing midi source file, to a BIAB song. As that is the main point and value of this thread now, I've renamed it accordingly -- lingyai]

All right, I am starting to get ancy here at the start of the BIAB learning curve -- I deserve a break and so want to have some fun for a little bit. So I'd like a suggestions for a shortcut or two, please.

Specifically: here is something I came up with

https://soundcloud.com/st-josephs-social-club/porquinho-triste-draft

using another product called EZKeys. In essence it is kind of like BIAB in that you lay down the chords, and can then choose from different playing styles, change the key, tempo and velocity. It plays everything back through a high-quality sampled piano. It all works off midi. Of course its feature set is vastly smaller than BIAB's (though it is also easy to have a lot of fun with after about 15-20 minutes of study -- yay!)

In this case, I exported the midi into my DAW and played it back, after some tweaking, through a sampled guitar library for Kontakt. (The library is from an outfit called Orange Tree Samples. The library is called Evolution Acoustic Guitar.)

Anyway, this is a fragile little thing. I like the chord progressions, but it needs something -- some kind of sparse lead, I reckon. Probably just another single instrument. Don't want to smother this or just add parts for the sake of it.

Except the deceleration at the very end, it is all at the same tempo. I could import a 100% constant tempo midi version of it into BIAB; or I could import a 100% constant tempo audio mix version of it into BIAB just for monitoring purposes, and then manually input the chords; ok, and then what? What is a quick and easy way to generate some fitting accompaniment? At this point I might prefer midi to a RealStyle, so that I could export the resultant suggestion from BIAB as midi for further mucking around in my DAW (trying out different sampled instruments etc.) (I *much* prefer Kontakt instruments to SampleTank or Coyote Forte; IMHO it's just night and day.)

This is as much a lazy request for a shortcut as I guess an invitation for some virtual collaboration if anyone's game. I'd even be willing to share the midi file if in return you could explain to me what you did with it.

So come on, play with the new kid!


Last edited by lingyai; 09/05/13 01:50 AM.