I would suggest taking a look at the Presonus bundle with Studio One and Notion. Notion will give you your notation needs and can integrate pretty nicely into Studio One (so changes made in Notion will be reflected in your DAW mix. That way, you can write exactly what you want to hear and easily see what's going on as the creative process progresses.

BIAB is a great tool for backing tracks, but it is not a "cover band transcription tool". You might get something similar to what you hear on the radio, but there is no button to "create a song that sounds exactly like whatever". For me, that's exactly what I want, because I want it to retain some flavor of the original, but still want it to be mine. If not, then I'll just listen to the CD since it's already been done. But you know your audience and if that's what they want, that's cool. BIAB probably won't get you where you need to be.

Regardless of whether you use BIAB or not, you'll still need an arsenal of good sounding VSTi's, especially if you want to sound like the original bands. It won't be one size fits all, in that case.

There are a lot of good VSTi's out there (some even free or low cost; others in the thousands). Each one of them will require a learning curve, because they all behave differently. You may not like piano, but using VSTi's is going to put you in front of at least a piano roll view for MIDI, so I'd suggest getting more familiar with the piano, whether you do it playing on a keyboard or clicking on a screen. You'll need to understand key switching, various ranges on the keyboard that do different things, and each one is going to be different. A lot of work, but in the end, a satisfying sound.

John

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