Hi everyone, this is my first post but an important one for me as I am trying to figure out if BB is really what I need, so I thought I would get some input from some of the great commentators here on the forum. I purchased the "Everything" Pack and am on my 30 day eval. I should mention that like many, I am a novice with this stuff. Mac's tagline referenced "You must be Audiominds" site (love the wordplay) is education and helpful as well.

So here's my deal: I am an accordionist who specializes in French music, especially "musette" type (although I play other genres). I would like to use BB and/or other software to create my background music and then play live over that so that I will be able to make some decent recordings, and also to use for gigging.

So over the holiday break I started out with a little test. I took a musette waltz from an existing recording and then tried to duplicate the background as much as possible.
I first entered the chord progressions in BB and then selected various styles, limiting to only bass and drums. The result was not that great in that it just did not sound cohesive, a jumble of sounds with no direction. The basic style/idea /background and technical chord changes are there, but it just didn't fit.
I tried various combinations of RT's for both drums and bass, again with mixed results. One real problem was the bass, in that really for it to blend well I would have to change the bass so that it more closely followed the bass line on the recording, or for that song.

So at this point my testing took another parallel direction - I started experimenting using Reaper, NI Bandstand Acoustic Bass, and Jamstix to create the background track. In this case, I was able to enter the bassline exactly as the recording, and use Jamstix (another learning curve there) as the drummer.
Results - Bass sounds good, but Jamstix sounded a bit robotic and has a million variables to control how the drummer plays which looks like an enormous learning curve.

I realize that BB is not primarily for making perfect copies of background tracks. ( Although - when I was researching on the web and on Ketron's SD2 site (Ketron SD2 Demos)
and came across Mac's cover version of "Peg", just blew my socks off how close it was. The other sounds on the SD2 are incredible as well - including the accordion sounds. )

Also, during all this I also had a slight case of that feeling of "Gee, I'm not playing my instrument, I'm on the computer"), which is why I strayed away in the first place of trying to create background music myself. I know, I know, there are trade-offs!

Anyhoos I think my post itself lost it's direction and point, but I thought I would relate what I am doing so far. I think next I might try inputting the bass as a melody line in BB via the NI VST plugin to see if I can do something similar in BB as I was doing in Reaper. My goal now is not to emulate *exactly* what the recording is, but to simply get a background track that fits and mixes well with the live instrument so I can scream "Yes, that's it!".

WinXP Pro / BiaB 2010 / Fast Track Pro / Ketron SD2