PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Buy BIAB 2013 now, or wait for BIAB 2014

Wally, you and I are almost the same age and I too traveled all over the place as a musician in a previous life.

I have a Korg Pa1XPro arranger keyboard and am very familiar with arrangers including your Roland BK-7. Your Roland is very nice although not as good as their flagship G70 keyboard. That thing is a beast but at around three G's it better be.

The big difference between Biab and an arranger is the arranger is instant. Turn it on and start playing and it will give you some nice backing tracks right now. The downside is no matter how good they are they're limited. For each style you have a couple of intro's maybe four variations and a couple of endings and I can get a drum fill by pushing a button. After some time though they sound the same over and over unless you're good at creating your own styles.

Biab is completely different. It's called intelligent because you have to enter the chords and set up your song structure first then hit play. Biab then analyzes all that and comes up with an arrangement. It doesn't depend on your playing for the exact chords it will decide what chord voicings to use based on the style. That can be good or bad depending on how picky you are. Some complain a lot that they can't input exact chord voicings. All I can say is that's not how Biab is designed to work and leave it at that. With my Korg I can play pretty much any voicing and I will still get the appropriate backing tracks. That's a big advantage sometimes. The other big advantage is live playing. I can do what I want with a tune on my Korg. The backing tracks are automatic and it will dumbly follow whatever I do. I can change keys, vamp a verse, extend a solo, segue into something else, whatever. Biab can't do that it has to be preprogrammed ahead of time.

Biab oth has the Real Tracks/Drums. All the arrangers and your Roland are using midi to trigger their internal synths. They sound pretty good but are not even on the same planet as the RT's. The RT's are like having a studio player right there with you. The bad news there is you can't tell him exactly what to play because his parts are prerecorded but still they sound so good that most of us don't care. You can still mix the RT's with a few midi tracks to get certain parts exactly how you want them.

I could write a book about this but at least this might help you a bit with the differences between using your Roland and Biab.

From what I'm reading you don't need the Audiophile tracks. Just get the regular ones and if you think they're lacking use the 30 day return policy and upgrade to the Audiophile.

Bob