Before purchasing Crooner Big Band, I studied the description. It gave me the impression that I could work with individual voices or a combination of voices. I put the CBB in the mixer and it plays a predetermined mixture of voices and rhythms. To eliminate the above I erased the writing. I wanted to write something that would better fit the song I was working on. However, the predetermined track always came back. Imho the tracks are too cluttered to be useful. Any help would be appreciated.
Before purchasing Crooner Big Band, I studied the description. It gave me the impression that I could work with individual voices or a combination of voices. I put the CBB in the mixer and it plays a predetermined mixture of voices and rhythms. To eliminate the above I erased the writing. I wanted to write something that would better fit the song I was working on. However, the predetermined track always came back. Imho the tracks are too cluttered to be useful. Any help would be appreciated.
Hey NiteSeer,
First of all, I LOVE the big crooner horns! Check it this track I posted of them sometime back, and read the description of how I input the chord data, you might find it interesting.
You can hear my version of Just A Closer Walk With Thee by clicking on my songs link in my signature below and scrolling down my soundcloud page.
I open my biab song in Realband then generate new tracks of the horns both as a group and tracks of individual horns. I generate the whole track several times. I also generate riffs. I'm listening for things I like. I may not use all of it but if I hear anything I really like that fits the song i keep it. I can cut and paste to move them around and repeat or mute it later. I can stack tracks of different horns to get the sound I want where I want it. I do some editing in Realband but most of it in Reaper where I can easily mute the parts I don't need and move things around. And I can use fades, stretch, etc., to get them how I want them to sound. Then it's eq and volume and I'm done. It's a bit of work but the end result is worth it for me. I love horns.
My song Because You Loved Me has horns that I built from many different RT horn single tracks including a few from the crooners. In that song I did the horn arrangement for the bridge first then the rest.
So how did you do it? I want to write backgrounds in the same style as the song.
So Sundance already nailed it in her post above withe respect to the horn selection and arrangement aspect, as you can see in the attached screenshot, many of the horn sections have the option of generating the instruments on a track-by-track basis. Also note that you should experiment with mixing various combinations of "background" and "soloist" type tracks for added flavor.
Finally, I find that you can generate very interesting arrangements using the process I described that I'll copy and paste from what I wrote with respect to the my track Labor Day: Old Friends Passed.
Quote:
Interestingly enough, it's basically just a series of ascending then descending major and minor thirds (and a couple of fourths thrown in) with a high-E note pedaled throughout.
I originally came up with the underlying melody while messing around aimlessly on my battered nylon string guitar, and was enamored by the voicings that resulted from the juxtaposition of some simple thirds and fourths over that same E note.
Back in 2010 or so, I had transcribed the tablature into Guitar Pro 6, rendered it into MIDI, and then imported it into BiaB using an old school MIDI style in order to make backing tracks that I utilized to give a few guitar lessons. .
After acquiring the Xtra Styles PAK 5, on a lark, I re-imported that nearly forgotten sequence, (originally written in 3/4!), into BiaB, and loaded the CRONGA+.STY style, and the result just blew me away. It was nothing like what I heard when playing the pre-packaged BiaB style demo (which is excellent in its own right). But this YEARNED.
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I'm not absolutely sure I know what you mean by track by track basis. And how do you do that?
2b
What I mean is that you have the option to choose a single RealTrack with the 11 or 9 horns (depending on which RT you choose, e.g. Background Crooner Big Band, Soloist Big Band Crooner Shout, etc,) all on the same track which will trade off in some prescribed manner, or you can generate each of those 9 or 11 as indivudal tracks, e.g. the ones that read "(1trackhornsection)" and then export them into your DAW as you go.
Band-in-a-Box 2024. Custom Build Desktop PC W/ Windows 10 Home 64-bit. CPU: Intel Core i5-9600k @ 3.7GHz (6 core x 6 threads) RAM: 16GB DDR4. Storage 238GB SSD + 2.7 TB HDD. GPU: ZOTAC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
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