>> And is it possible to add half/double time to RealDrums?
Yes, possible and planned.
btw, we get the reverse request in bluegrass. We do the bluegrass styles as cut-time (Ev16, tempo 140), but the players want to see it in Ev8 (tempo 280). So we made half-time version of some bluegrass styles (there's no drums, so no issue there)
I listened to LaPopJazzSambaEv16. It definitely works at a tempo of 100, using the piano and bass samba 190 tracks at double-time.
I could not find another such drum track with the filter. My next suggestion would be to get Danny Gottlieb to record a jazz samba track at tempo quarter=100 that does not have as heavy shots on beat two and three-and as the LAPopJazzSamba drums. More like straight eighths. ps I've worked with Danny, and his cymbal playing is the best I ever heard.
Yes, I remember those reverse bluegrass requests. After studying the problem from the other side, I understand them better now. Thank you for all your efforts to accommodate us.
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.
Yes. To be clear, that's notated in 4/4 (not 2/2) and it is the same notation that you would get from Band-in-a-Box, which calls cut-time Ev16. I only mention that because the original poster said this...
"I have a ton of songs I would like to create but because they are in 2/2, I can't write them"
Anyway, the solution for the original poster is to pick from any of the 1,300 cut time ev16 styles, and write the music in 4/4 as is the convention.
>> Yes, you could say this song is notated in 4/4 as long as you count it at a tempo of 200 bpm. Just don't try to tap your foot in 4 at that speed.
Yes, you're right. I would enter that song in at tempo=200, and choose the existing Samba ev8 190 style. The notation and playback would work, and as you mentioned, musicians would be tapping foot at 100. I expect the same issue happens when playing fast jazz swing Sw8 (Donna lee, tempo 300, tap foot at 150)
I have often used BIAB to double or halve the length of the song, as appropriate, before exporting the MIDI into a notation program. It's a great feature when an adjustment like this is needed.
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>> Here is an example of a soca tune wirtten in cut time. Please pay close attention to how the melody plays and notice when the notes come in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF4enbTqPPU
So I am playing close attention, and please educate me on what about these styles is not meeting your defintion of cut-time. The sound I'm hearing from these styles is very similar to youtube demo
It's not about the style, it's about the feel, and the tempo. I may not always want have fast 4/4 to make it fell like a 2/2 groove, I may want to habe half note equal 85BPM or 100BPM.
Last edited by Islansoul; 11/17/1602:30 AM.
Computer: Macbook Pro, 16 inch 2021 DAWs: Pro Tools, Logic, and Maschine plays drums, percussion, bass, steel pan, keyboard, music producer/engineer
Double meter and triple meter is how I break them down.
A 2/2 song can really be a fast 4/4 song. A waltz can be written in 3/4 or even 6/8 or rarely 12/8.
Listening to a song that has a repeating pattern of 7, can you tell without looking at the music if it is in 7/4 or alternating measures of 3/4 and 4/4 or something else?
Listening to a song can you tell if it's in cut time or common time?
Some say bass line, if the bass plays on 1 and 3 it must be cut. But what about those mm=220-330 bop songs with walking bass throughout that are written in cut?
So it must be speed. But then I've played lots of standards with walking bass at moderate tempos written in cut time.
I've played songs that have definite swing feel that could have been written in 12/4 time but were written in 4/4 with even eighth notes that should be played as if they were dotted eighth + eight note triplets.
So I tend to think of each numbered area in the BiaB matrix as a cell.
That cell could be a 4/4 measure, two 2/4 or 2/2 measures, one 2/2 measure depending on the style or even half a 2/4 measure, again depending on the style.
Same goes if you F5 3 beats to the cell. It could be a 3/4 measure, half a 6/8 measure or one beat of a 12/8 measure, again depending on the style.
For 5/4 time I often make a cell of 3 beats for half the measure and the next cell of 2 beats for the rest (or 2 plus 3 depending on how the tune is subdivided).
Thinking of the cells as either a measure or a part of a measure with either 2, 3 or 4 beats in it (determined by F5) and as building blocks instead of complete measures unleashes the creativity to do wonderful things in Band-in-a-Box.
I have no problems with cut time in BiaB, I either find the right style so a cell is one 2/2 measure, or I can F5 it to 2 beats, or I can find a style where a cell is two 2/2 measures. There is an amazing amount of flexibility there.
I've done 36 fake disks from popular music books that have from 100 to over 800 songs in each book. That's a lot of songs. And I've never found a cut time song that cannot be represented in Band-in-a-Box.
It's a very flexible program if you simply treat it that way. And in a way, I know a lot of the reason the way it is today is because of the limited resources of DOS and Windows 3.1 and backwards compatibility, but I find that the flexibility of using cells instead of measures actually lets me do more than if the program supported time signatures instead.
I think the issue here is that the Notation only supports the display of a limited number of time signatures, and not 6/8, 12/8, 2/2 etc.
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I think two things mentioned will help greatly. Allowing RealDrums to be half or double-time, and allowing the screen display of 12/8. If we're fortunate that will carry over to notation.
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I think the issue here is that the Notation only supports the display of a limited number of time signatures, and not 6/8, 12/8, 2/2 etc.
I never considered BiaB as a full fledged notation editor, but simply as the world's best auto-accompaniment app with a notation window for convenience.
I feel that if you need good notation, use a dedicated notation app. I have an old copy of Encore that serves my minimal needs (head charts). It will do multiple repeats/endings, codas, and a number of notation symbols.
Reasonable points, but I don't see why Notation should have unnecessary musical limitations.
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Professional & Windows 11, Sonar Platinum, Cakewalk by Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M Monitors, Pioneer Active Monitors
Double meter and triple meter is how I break them down.
A 2/2 song can really be a fast 4/4 song. A waltz can be written in 3/4 or even 6/8 or rarely 12/8.
Listening to a song that has a repeating pattern of 7, can you tell without looking at the music if it is in 7/4 or alternating measures of 3/4 and 4/4 or something else?
Listening to a song can you tell if it's in cut time or common time?
Some say bass line, if the bass plays on 1 and 3 it must be cut. But what about those mm=220-330 bop songs with walking bass throughout that are written in cut?
So it must be speed. But then I've played lots of standards with walking bass at moderate tempos written in cut time.
I've played songs that have definite swing feel that could have been written in 12/4 time but were written in 4/4 with even eighth notes that should be played as if they were dotted eighth + eight note triplets.
So I tend to think of each numbered area in the BiaB matrix as a cell.
That cell could be a 4/4 measure, two 2/4 or 2/2 measures, one 2/2 measure depending on the style or even half a 2/4 measure, again depending on the style.
Same goes if you F5 3 beats to the cell. It could be a 3/4 measure, half a 6/8 measure or one beat of a 12/8 measure, again depending on the style.
For 5/4 time I often make a cell of 3 beats for half the measure and the next cell of 2 beats for the rest (or 2 plus 3 depending on how the tune is subdivided).
Thinking of the cells as either a measure or a part of a measure with either 2, 3 or 4 beats in it (determined by F5) and as building blocks instead of complete measures unleashes the creativity to do wonderful things in Band-in-a-Box.
I have no problems with cut time in BiaB, I either find the right style so a cell is one 2/2 measure, or I can F5 it to 2 beats, or I can find a style where a cell is two 2/2 measures. There is an amazing amount of flexibility there.
I've done 36 fake disks from popular music books that have from 100 to over 800 songs in each book. That's a lot of songs. And I've never found a cut time song that cannot be represented in Band-in-a-Box.
It's a very flexible program if you simply treat it that way. And in a way, I know a lot of the reason the way it is today is because of the limited resources of DOS and Windows 3.1 and backwards compatibility, but I find that the flexibility of using cells instead of measures actually lets me do more than if the program supported time signatures instead.
Insights and incites by Notes
Again, I have some songs written where I need cut time because the sheet music is written in cut time, not 4/4. I mainly get ny chords from leadsheets because I like knowing where the chord is placed in the song, and I play the melody,
Computer: Macbook Pro, 16 inch 2021 DAWs: Pro Tools, Logic, and Maschine plays drums, percussion, bass, steel pan, keyboard, music producer/engineer
)) Again, I have some songs written where I need cut time because the sheet music is written in cut time, not 4/4. I mainly get ny chords from leadsheets because I like knowing where the chord is placed in the song, and I play the melody,
Does yours look like that? Because if it does, what I see is something that is notated as fast 8th notes for melody and chords. Tempo=180 for quarter note. No different than if it was a fast bossa or a fast swing tune. So you would choose a Samba 180 tempo style and every thing would play and notate exactly as you want it. I get that you would be tapping your foot twice per bar, but since you want the music to be written like it was played like fast 4/4 I cannot see what the issue is. To me the style that would perfectly in BiaB is the Ev 180 samba style, because the notation matches.
If we started playing that song that Matt posted at successively slower tempos. And people were tapping their foot on half notes at first. And we kept slowing down, there would come a time where people start tapping their foot on quarter notes, when that happens, would someone say "stop, I can't read the music any more. Could you please give me a new leadsheet, written identically, but without the halfnote=80 marking at the top?"
Perhaps if you post a link to what you're referring to with these cut time songs that don't match either a ev16 tempo of 90 samba style, or a ev8 180 tempo samba style, I could understand this. Here's an sample of one of our tempo =180 samba styles, notated as desired in 8ths notes, like Matts example. http://64.40.109.32/audio/rt94/_BNGS190_Render.m4a
This really does seem to come down to the sound you get versus the notation you see. Certainly swing (tripletized) 4/4 can sound exactly like 12/8, but the notation can get messy (technically, in 4/4, you need to put a triplet bracket over every group of 3 8th notes, whereas in 12/8 you don't). That aids in readability. Similarly for 6/8.
And if you need to to 6/8 or 12/8 in fast 3/4 time (to allow changing chords at other than the beat divisions), then you have to be able to have drums that don't sound like a race car motor revving high.
So, as Matt pointed out, having the ability to reduce the drum speed would really help out here, it would be great if you could just specify what the notation should look like and display it accordingly. It shouldn't matter what's entered into the chord grid, but if I could hit a check box that says "display this as 6/8 or 9/8 or 12/8", then the rest is just simple math to translate the notation display.
That way, I could notate a 6/8 or 12/8 song that changes chords potentially every 8th note using a "waltz" style in 3/4 at a 180 speed, but have the drums play as if the entire 3/4 bar were a single beat (and would play much slower than 180). But the notation would display depending upon whichever checkbox I selected for the time signature.
Unless I'm missing something here and I hope that made sense.
John
Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 8TB SSD Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 11TB SATA
This really does seem to come down to the sound you get versus the notation you see. Certainly swing (tripletized) 4/4 can sound exactly like 12/8, but the notation can get messy (technically, in 4/4, you need to put a triplet bracket over every group of 3 8th notes, whereas in 12/8 you don't). That aids in readability. Similarly for 6/8<...>
+1
And exactly why old swing songs were written with straight eighth notes but played with a swing feel.
Which is also why I use a separate notation editor when I want to make a chart.
Of course that's me, and we all have different needs and desires.
)) Again, I have some songs written where I need cut time because the sheet music is written in cut time, not 4/4. I mainly get ny chords from leadsheets because I like knowing where the chord is placed in the song, and I play the melody,
Does yours look like that? Because if it does, what I see is something that is notated as fast 8th notes for melody and chords. Tempo=180 for quarter note. No different than if it was a fast bossa or a fast swing tune. So you would choose a Samba 180 tempo style and every thing would play and notate exactly as you want it. I get that you would be tapping your foot twice per bar, but since you want the music to be written like it was played like fast 4/4 I cannot see what the issue is. To me the style that would perfectly in BiaB is the Ev 180 samba style, because the notation matches.
If we started playing that song that Matt posted at successively slower tempos. And people were tapping their foot on half notes at first. And we kept slowing down, there would come a time where people start tapping their foot on quarter notes, when that happens, would someone say "stop, I can't read the music any more. Could you please give me a new leadsheet, written identically, but without the halfnote=80 marking at the top?"
Perhaps if you post a link to what you're referring to with these cut time songs that don't match either a ev16 tempo of 90 samba style, or a ev8 180 tempo samba style, I could understand this. Here's an sample of one of our tempo =180 samba styles, notated as desired in 8ths notes, like Matts example. http://64.40.109.32/audio/rt94/_BNGS190_Render.m4a
Here is a video of a famous steel pan tune that I play.
Last edited by Islansoul; 11/20/1601:41 AM.
Computer: Macbook Pro, 16 inch 2021 DAWs: Pro Tools, Logic, and Maschine plays drums, percussion, bass, steel pan, keyboard, music producer/engineer
Band-in-a-Box 2026 Video: AI Stems & Notes - split polyphonic audio into instruments and transcribe
This video demonstrates how to use the new AI-Notes feature together with the AI-Stems splitter, allowing you to select an audio file and have it separated into individual stems while transcribing each one to its own MIDI track. AI-Notes converts polyphonic audio—either full mixes or individual instruments—into MIDI that you can view in notation or play back instantly.
Bonus PAK and 49-PAK for Band-in-a-Box® 2026 for Windows®
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MIDI Styles Set 92: Look Ma! More MIDI 15: Latin Jazz
MIDI SuperTracks Set 46: Piano & Organ
Instrumental Studies Set 24: Groovin' Blues Soloing
Artist Performance Set 19: Songs with Vocals 9
Playable RealTracks Set 5
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Instrumental Studies 25 - Soul Jazz Guitar Soloing
Artist Performance Set 20: Songs with Vocals 10
RealDrums Stems Set 10: Groovin' Sticks
SynthMaster Sounds & Styles Set 2 (sounds & styles with audio demos)
Join Tobin as he takes you on a tour of the new user interface in Band-in-a-Box® 2026 for Windows®! This modern GUI redesign offers a sleek new look with updated toolbars, refreshed windows, and a smoother workflow. The brand-new side toolbar puts track selection, the MultiPicker Library, and other essential tools right at your fingertips. Plus, our upgraded Multi-View lets you layer multiple windows without overlap, giving you a highly flexible workspace. Many windows—including Tracks, Piano Roll, and more—have been redesigned for improved usability and a cleaner, more intuitive interface, and more!
Introducing XPro Styles PAK 10 – Now Available for Windows Band-in-a-Box 2025 and Higher!
We've just released XPro Styles PAK 10 for Windows & Mac Band-in-a-Box version 2025 (and higher) with 100 brand new RealStyles, plus 28 RealTracks and RealDrums!
Few things are certain in life: death, taxes, and a brand spankin’ new XPro Styles PAK! In this, the 10th edition of our XPro Styles PAK series, we’ve got 100 styles coming your way! We have the classic 25 styles each from the rock & pop, jazz, and country genres, and rounding out this volume's wildcard slot is 25 styles in the Praise & Worship genre! A wide spanning genre, you can find everything from rock, folk, country, and more underneath its umbrella. The included 28 RealTracks and RealDrums can be used with any Band-in-a-Box® 2026 (and higher) package.
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Introducing XPro Styles PAK 10 – Now Available for Mac Band-in-a-Box 2025 and Higher!
We've just released XPro Styles PAK 10 for Mac & Windows Band-in-a-Box version 2025 (and higher) with 100 brand new RealStyles, plus 28 RealTracks and RealDrums!
Few things are certain in life: death, taxes, and a brand spankin’ new XPro Styles PAK! In this, the 10th edition of our XPro Styles PAK series, we’ve got 100 styles coming your way! We have the classic 25 styles each from the rock & pop, jazz, and country genres, and rounding out this volume's wildcard slot is 25 styles in the Praise & Worship genre! A wide spanning genre, you can find everything from rock, folk, country, and more underneath its umbrella. The included 28 RealTracks and RealDrums can be used with any Band-in-a-Box® 2026 (and higher) package.
Here’s just a small sampling of what you can look forward to in XPro Styles PAK 10: Soft indie folk worship songs, bumpin’ country boogies, gospel praise breaks, hard rockin’ pop, funky disco grooves, smooth Latin jazz pop, bossa nova fusion, western swing, alternative hip-hop, cool country funk, and much more!
Special offers until December 31st, 2025!
All the XPro Styles PAKs 1 - 10 are on sale for only $29 ea (Reg. $49 ea), or get them all in the XPro Styles PAK Bundle for only $149 (reg. $299)! Order now!
XPro Styles PAKs require Band-in-a-Box® 2025 or higher and are compatible with ANY package, including the Pro, MegaPAK, UltraPAK, UltraPAK+, and Audiophile Edition.
Introducing Xtra Styles PAK 21 – Now Available for Mac Band-in-a-Box 2025 and Higher!
Xtra Styles PAK 21 for Mac & Windows Band-in-a-Box version 2025 (and higher) is here with 200 brand new RealStyles!
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Rejoice, one and all, for Xtra Styles PAK 21 for Band-in-a-Box® is here! We’re serving up 200 brand spankin’ new styles to delight your musical taste buds! The first three courses are the classics you’ve come to know and love, including offerings from the rock & pop, jazz, and country genres, but, not to be outdone, this year’s fourth course is bro country! A wide ranging genre, you can find everything from hip-hop, uptempo outlaw country, hard hitting rock, funk, and even electronica, all with that familiar bro country flair. The dinner bell has been rung, pickup up Xtra Styles PAK 21 today!
In this PAK you’ll discover: Energetic folk rock, raucous train beats, fast country boogies, acid jazz grooves, laid-back funky jams, a bevy of breezy jazz waltzes, calm electro funk, indie synth pop, industrial synth metal, and more bro country than could possibly fit in the back of a pickup truck!
Special offers until December 31st, 2025!
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Note: The Xtra Styles require the UltraPAK, UltraPAK+, or Audiophile Edition of Band-in-a-Box®. (Xtra Styles PAK 21 requires the 2025 or higher UltraPAK, UltraPAK+, or Audiophile Edition. They will not work with the Pro or MegaPAK version because they need the RealTracks from the UltraPAK, UltraPAK+, or Audiophile Edition.
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