PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Message to Oliver Gannon - [Guitarists]

I'm a guitarist -- been one for longer than most people have been alive. One thing I've noticed is that music software in general is not very guitarist friendly. BiaB is no worse than most, and better than many, I find.

I've used BiaB for years, and am currently running 2017, but I consider myself to be still pretty much a noob with many of BiaB's finer points. I traditionally used BiaB mostly as a convenient backing tracks program. Mostly for the old jazz standards, which it usually does a pretty good job with. Much less when you start getting into more contemporary or "rock" tunes.

One of my biggest beefs with music software in general is the guitar sounds that I have to work with. Seldom do they sound like actual guitars, and when they do, there are usually problems with the sound in one way or another that make it not so pleasant to use them. One thing I really would like PGM to do is, rather than just using Coyote as a wrapper for the Microsoft Wavetable, have it provide realistic sounds for its instruments. Yeah, we have Sforzando now, and that helps some, but what we get in Sforzando is a greatly reduced number of instruments to choose from. Why is that? And in one particular case, we get an instrument that sounds as if it's being played by someone's feet instead of their hands (nylon string guitar).

I don't know from shots or holds or whatever you want to call these things. But I do know this, and I know how to use it: musical notation. PG's musical notation editing capabilities, coupled with the ability to control a note's velocity and position in the music, gives me all the control I need. It may not be displayed accurately on the staff, but at least it sounds the way it's supposed to. Only problem is, after I've written out a guitar part, I'm forced to choose between the instrument selections available. The selection is poor at best. But in this respect (instrumentation, specifically for Guitar), BiaB is no better or worse than just about every other piece of music software I've tried.

I do find that some very interesting guitar parts are available with many of BiaB's styles -- and many of those have guitar RealTracks. Just quite recently, in fact, I ran across a style that I tried out on a chord progression I'd written, and I liked the rhythm guitar's sound so much I ended up using it as the melody. It is a RealTrack and is complex enough, fortunately, where, even though it was designed I guess to be a rhythm track, there is sufficient complexity such that it works well as a melody. And it definitely sounds like a guitar, too. And as an added bonus, this particular RealTrack displays what it's doing in musical notation (not all do).

Since it appears that the OP is attempting to build parts in BiaB by manual input of some sort, I do have a recommendation. Consider trying out a guitar synth, like Roland's GR-33 or -55. Using one will write what you play directly to MIDI, so you'll be able to get all your nuances into the program. And then you get to have fun trying to decide which instrument to use. Heh.

I own a GR-33, and I've found that, while it does not contain a large variety of instruments, those it does have are quite good. I've ended up using its own voices with almost all of the parts I've generated with it. A couple of my favorites are a percussive Hammond B3 instrument that supports string bends (think on that for a minute), and, of all things, 12-string guitar.