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#236692 01/23/14 01:48 PM
Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I have a question about why are you limited to just 7 instruments when making a song. How do you add more and not lose the previous ones that are already established in the style? You have Bass, Piano, Drums, Guitar, Strings, Melody and soloist. SO actually you only have 5 to chose from as the Melodist or soloist are for that purpose only. Plus some styles do not let you use the other tracks to add a different instrument. Am I missing something or what is the trick to accomplish this. If I want 5 guitars do I have to generate 5 times the guitar track for the 5 guitars and are they not just going to be the same notes or chords any way? How do I individualize each track then? Again sorry for the ignorance.

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someone with more experience than me will help but as far as I know you'd need to use RealBand (included with BIAB) for that. In BIAB 2013 I was able to use the solo and melo tracks as additional tracks for RealTracks but that does not seem to be working the same in 2014. Or I did something wrong! smile

Because I do not use RealBand I have actually saved the same song as an A and B version in BIAB and then opened B and replaced all of the RealTracks with additional guitars, etc. Then when I export all tracks individually from BIAB I end up with 10 tracks, all synched nicely to bring into my DAW.

BUT, if you do it that way be sure and put the guitars (or other duplicated RealTracks) in the same song because BIAB will try and give each one a different sound when you do that.

Last edited by JohnJohnJohn; 01/23/14 02:01 PM.
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MIDI supports 16 channels at a time, but BIAB uses more channels than may be apparent at first. The harmony you can apply to the melody or soloist takes up several additional channels, for example.

You can always take the song into RealBand, which has (I think) 48 tracks.


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You are right in that you can only use 5 tracks at a time. This is one of my pet peeves about BiaB. There are 16 different MIDI tracks so why not let the user decide what to put in each after your initial style selection? I did put in a suggestion for this some time back.

Anyway what you have to do is to generate your 5 tracks and save the file. Then select what instrument you want in each track, regenerate the track(s) and save that file under a different name. Then in your DAW bring in both files and cut and paste or move things to where you want them.

At least that is how I do it and if anyone has a better solution I’m all ears!


OK, a random thought;
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Move the project over to RealBand where you can generate BB tracks and then move them to one of the lower "black" tracks and generate some more on the freed up BB track(s).

You can have up to 48 tracks in RealBand.

Trouble is that it is very easy to add TOO MUCH. More is not necessarily better. Especially so with autoaccompaniment.


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Or if you are fairly sure you won't need to change things around, you can render the song to audio and set it to play when you open a song of the same name (it should have installed defaulted to that) and then put in 5 more instruments. The problem comes when you try to change a chord or tempo or something. Real Band is the better option most of the time.

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Remember also that if you import a Band In A Box file into RealBand and make changes, you should save it as a RealBand 'SEQ' file type. E.g. if you imported 'my_song.MGU' created by BiaB into RealBand, do some work on it, and just save it again, that MGU file may not work how you expect back in Band In A Box.

Instead, save it as a RealBand 'my_song.SEQ' format file and it will also open again quickly (especially if it has Real Tracks). Hope this helps.

Cheers
Trevor


BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
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