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

I play sax, guitar, bass, drums, flute, wind synthesizer, keyboard synthesizer, voice, and computer. I play music for a living and have done so for decades.

I create backing tracks for my duo sometimes with lots of BiaB, sometimes with some BiaB, sometimes with none.

I also write aftermarket styles for BiaB.

So I look at BiaB from 'both sides of the fence'.

The first thing I want to mention is that BiaB is primarily and auto-accompaniment app, with lots of useful features added on.

The reason why you don't have SOYL or other song specific riffs in the styles is that auto-accompaniment styles need to be generic so they work for more than one song.

Early in my aftermarket style writing business, one of my customers asked me to write a style for the Elvis Presley song, "Don't Be Cruel", so I did and included it in one of my style disks.

Well the style turned out well, but the problem was the signature guitar riff. When I tried to use that style on any other song, the riff 'screamed' "Don't Be Cruel". If I wanted to do "Rock Around The Clock", "Mountain Of Love", "Wagon Wheel" or any other rock/country swing song, the "Don't Be Cruel" riff simply got in the way.

So the style was good for one song, and one song only. Same would be true for SOYL, Smoke On The Water, Sweet Child O' Mine, Superstition, and so forth.

Since 1955 there have been well over 10,000 top 40 songs on the Billboard Pop/Rock charts alone. That doesn't include Country, Jazz, or popular album cuts that weren't released as a singe. So if the styles weren't generic, we would need perhaps 20,000 styles or more and each one would be good for one song.

Besides for that, if I were to start from scratch and write a backing track for "Don't Be Cruel" it would have taken less time than writing that style and getting it to work right.

Before I continue, let me stress that there is more than one right way to make backing tracks (or pretty much anything else in music). I don't pretend to know the best way for everybody, just the current best way for me, that might be changed if I learn something applicable tomorrow.

When making backing tracks for my duo, I generally prefer MIDI tracks. Why? MIDI tracks are thousands of times more editable. Then I export to MIDI and work in a Sequencer/DAW.

In the sequencer/DAW, I can insert song-specific riffs without changing the sound of the instrument that plays the non-specific parts. --- I can edit the BiaB generated parts so that they fit the particular tune I'm working on --- I can use different BiaB styles for different parts of the song and change the instruments on one or more of the styles so that when the style is changed, the instrument is not --- I can edit the drums and do things like bring up the snare, change the kit, exaggerate the groove, etc. --- add vocal harmony parts with a synth instead of a voice so I don't sound like I'm using karaoke tracks to accompany myself --- and do many other things.

With good MIDI sound modules and synths, I can get sounds that are 95% as good as the real sounds, and with the ability to change the instrument sounds, often I can change it to something more appropriate for the song. Plus with MIDI being so editable, I can almost always get a better interpretation of the song than I can with Real Tracks.

Not that the RTs aren't great, they are. If I played in a jazz combo, non-cover band, or didn't need song-specific riffs, they might be a better option.

If interested, here is how I make and use backing tracks with Band-in-a-Box and a MIDI sequencer http://www.nortonmusic.com/backing_tracks.html you are welcome to take whatever you like from the page and apply it to your own method.

Excerpted from Keyboard magazine, March 2014 by Craig Anderton:

…Today you can easily record 100 tracks of digital audio on a basic laptop, so MIDI may seem irrelevant in the studio. Yet MIDI remains not only viable, but valuable, because it lets you exploit today's studio in ways that digital audio still can't.
…
Deep editing. Digital audio allows for broad edits, like changing levels or moving sections around, and editing tools such as Melodyne are doing ever more fine-grained audio surgery. But MIDI is more fine grained still: You can edit every characteristic of every performance gesture: dynamics, volume, timing, the length and pitch of every note, pitch-bend, and even which sound is being played. MIDI data can tell a piano sound what to play, or if you change your mind, a Clavinet patch. With digital audio, changing the instrument that plays a given part requires re-recording the track….but MIDI can do much more…


Insights and incites by Notes

There are lots of good suggestions in this thread. Thanks.

If you want to do the whole arrangement in BiaB....For adding song specific MIDI riffs, you can use the melody or soloist tracks. Those don't get overwritten by generated tracks. You can also record an audio track. If you want multiple audio tracks, you can do that too, by either overdubbing, or moving an audio track to an artist performance track (using the audio menu).

Hi Mr. Gannon,

And -

I'm sure we all agree:

Thanks much, for checking this thread out, and adding your advice, and feedback!