PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Need help with style selection

As promised, I’ll post the details of my process to quickly find a suitable style for a BIAB generated backing track cover of “Sober” by Little Big Town. I use Audacity set to record what the computer hears and download the YouTube video audio track. Settings are 16/44.1k resolution. I record the audio at a low volume (18-12db) to avoid distortion or clipping. I use Audacity effects to lightly compress the downloaded audio and then normalize the track. I export a stereo WAV file to my desktop and using the ACW button on the main screen, import the audio into BIAB. I process the audio through the ACW using F8 to align the beats as necessary. F6 should be used to set the first beat before processing the audio. Once I have processed the audio with the ACW, I export the track and it is imported into my BIAB chord sheet. My BIAB version defaults to the style being disabled. I play the song through correcting the chord progression and verifying the tempo is tracking the song correctly.

This was a good song to use because on my machine, the ACW did a fairly accurate job with the chords and tempo. It correctly calculated the key signature of < G >. That should mean for those less experienced with the finer points of the ACW, they should get a fairly accurate rendition like I did. I had to adjust a few chords but the tempo map was only 0.15 beats over an average of 155 bpm so the chords and audio matched up ok to set the BIAB chord chart to 156 bpm. With the chart complete, it’s time to head into the Style picker and find a suitable initial backing track.

My version of BIAB has more than 5,000 styles. I use three tools to help reduce the styles to a more manageable search. The first tool is to use the function to search for the song, by name, artist and similar song of the particular song I’m working with. In this case, the song couldn’t be found. I filtered the song the following way. I manually entered the parameters of 4/4; ev8; 155bpm; and left the category and type blank so other styles than country would be displayed as well as midi styles. This yielded a quite manageable total of 755 styles. Additional filtering could have reduced the total even more but I found this total to be sufficient to manage.

755 is still a substantial number to deal with but I was searching for a style that would be an accurate feel and vibe to the original. Many styles could be passed over by genre.

I go about matching the feel of the song using the two different audition play options. One option plays the demo of the style while the other plays the selected style to the chord chart sheet. The latter plays in the correct key, and also provides the capability to set the exact tempo of your song. You can speed your search by choosing the 4 bar option.

This is where the magic happens. There can be a dramatic difference between the style demo and the style playing over your chord chart. I have learned that I cannot listen to the style demo and get an accurate feel to how the style will play over my chord chart. I want to stress this point. The two options can yield dramatically different feel between the two.
I get an accurate audition how a style will sound to my particular song I’m working on by doing the auditions in the style picker of a mix between the downloaded audio and the style playing together. I turn down the audio to the point that the BIAB style is more prevalent than the audio track. I can hear the vocals or lead instrument but with the style louder, I can quickly tell how the beats, rhythm, bass/drums mesh. Styles that may work instrumentally can be quickly eliminated because the style and audio are not in sync. I can tell instantly when they do sync. I only had to audition 3-4 tracks before I found a great match.
Sober has a lead mandolin, strumming acoustic guitar, electric bass, electric guitar and a background organ as the necessary predominant sounds.

The BIAB style _Bramble from 2016 Xtra Pak 5 was the style I chose. It provided everything but the mandolin, organ and electric guitar. _Bramble has two strumming guitars and a fingerpicked guitar. I replaced one guitar with the mandolin and with the last available clear track, I placed the organ and alternated the track between the organ and electric guitar on the same track.

I was able to quickly locate suitable mandolin, electric guitar and organ the following way. After importing _Bramble style into BIAB chord sheet and generating the song, I saved the file to my desktop. With the file saved, I returned to the style picker and entered searches for organ at 155bpm, ev8, 4/4. I typed the search word organ in the search box located above the other perimeters. This returned a list of styles with suitable organs. I repeated the auditions using the style playing my chord chart and chose the best fitting organ. I noted the RealTrack number. I repeated this process for the mandolin and electric guitar.
Returning to the chord display page, in the mixer I replaced and imported the RealTracks my search yielded.

At this point, I can either use the audio track as a guide to place my lyrics into the chord chart or erase the audio track and my backing track is ready to be generated and used.
This process did not yield a note by note pure copy but did produce an authentic cover version that precisely and accurately reproduced the chord progression in the right key at the right tempo that would be similar to what any cover band would play live. Hope this helps.

Charlie