<<< regardless of whether I ever want to try and earn money from YouTube videos or not, I definitely want my music to sound as distinct as possible, so I'm going to make a concerted effort to rely less on Realtracks >>>

Hi Andy. You certainly don't have to ditch the RealTracks to get a more unique and distinct sound with your songwriting and using BIAB as your 'recording studio'. The key is to focus on your actual strengths and not stretch yourself too far into areas you may not be as competent in. If you browse through the Forums you'll see the majority of 'songs' normally get lost in discussions of DAW's, mixing, effects, VST's, and other production techniques. Unless one is equally versed in the working knowledge of a DAW, mixing, applying effects and mastering as folks such as Graham Cochran, Joe Gilder, Warren Huart, Dave Pensado your productions are not going to - well, you know how your productions will stack up against these guys. You can get there but you will spend lots of time and money and all the while, your songs and songwriting suffer.

Using RT's is not the issue anymore, it's how they're created and used. There are thousands of RT's and hours of recorded audio that have overcome how several years ago it was so easy to identify RT riffs and phrases in a song. I'm pretty much a minority of one on this subject and honestly most times when a forum poster is having an issue, my easy solution is either completely ignored and a response of success or failure is never posted or a reply is posted that they prefer to find a more complex and difficult technique in their DAW. That's ok. I'm not attempting to change your or anybody's mind or sway you or anybody's away from your workflow. I'm just telling you a different way you may want to consider.

In my opinion BIAB can be broken into two distinctly different programs with each benefiting approaching different aspects of music production. BIAB is extremely effective in either area of music production. The two areas are music accompaniment and the other is creating custom audio tracks for studio recording productions. Both can effectively work together for songwriters writing and producing their own original pieces.

Using BIAB Styles, RT's and MIDI, is a great tool to flesh out ideas, find the groove for your song and overcome writer's block. MIDI files is your friend in this situation. Here's why. There are about 7,000 total BIAB Styles. There are literally hundreds of thousands of MIDI Styles. More importantly, roughly 5,000 of the BIAB Styles are RealStyles and 2,500 or so are MIDI. RealStyles are combinations of Real instruments (recorded audio files) that PG Music staff have reviewed, tested and found they work well together. There is no particular groove built into a Style, meaning that any instrument, in any style will gather audio snippets from a set amount of recorded audio. Whereas with MIDI, everything is editable and in most cases, contains the groove and elements of a specific Song or genre. You will find that a Jazz electric guitar RT solo may work exceedingly well in a country song because it is recorded audio that is never changing and may be suitable for many different genres than just the genre PG Music identifies it to. If you're writing a song in the 'Style' of the Bee Gees, starting off with a Bee Gee song MIDI file goes a long way to getting you started on the right path. Then using the BIAB StylePicker over your song's chord progression allows you to quickly and efficiently audition dozens of Styles and hundreds of RT instruments in minutes.

You can write your song, enter the chord chart, set the tempo, key signature and structure your intro, verses, chorus's, bridge and outro, choose a Style, generate your song and be done with it. But what you've completed at this point is an accompaniment backing track. For a studio recording production, this should be your starting point.

This phase of your songwriting is where DAW's, mixing, effects, VST's adding EQ, Compression, bussing and such begins. It's where the fun really starts but in reality, it's also where most songs start to fall by the wayside and where the artist begins work in an area of weakness, inexperience and ineptness. If you were to think of unlimited tracks, unlimited MIDI instruments, unlimited VST's, unlimited plug ins for what they really are until you are well versed in the knowledge and applications of them, you'll realize they are unlimited rabbit trails for you to lose your way ... Expect to spend hours, if not days in this phase of your production.

What I do, what I recommend and what nearly no one does is to use BIAB as an multi track emulated recorder or use a stand alone multi track recorder or better, combining the two.

You can learn to operate a multi track competently in less than a day. It will do every basic operation required to record, edit, apply effects, mix and produce a high quality recording. Many commercial releases have been successfully produced with these devices and are still being produced today. A famous example is Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album was done completely with a Tascam Portastudio that even the cheapest model today exceeds the specs of the unit he used to record on. Importantly, the tracks you record can be easily exported to a computer for more work using a DAW or sent to another studio for mixing or mastering. If you have an expensive, high quality pre amp or the equivalent in a quality audio interface, you can use those pre amps to record into even the cheapest multi track and achieve stunning results. I've had a Presonus Eureka single output channel strip that originally cost nearly $1,000 to record into a Tascam 2488 neo Mark II, Zoom R16 and later a Tascam DP-24. At the time, the Eureka pre amp matched the best pre amp for all the Presonus Studio Live mixers. Thousands of commercial studios were installing and using Studio Live mixers during that period. Today, you can buy a Presonus Studio Channel for $329 and a Tascam DP006 for $129 and for less than $500 match the recording track quality of a DAW and interface costing thousands more plus no latency, crashes, or an expensive computer is necessary. Actually, the pre amp of the DP-006 is good enough to use without an additional pre amp if you have a quality microphone.

What I'm saying is that 60 hours spent learning a DAW will improve your DAW skills and 60 hours spent songwriting will equally improve your songwriting skills. People judge if they like your song solely by what they hear. They never know how your song was recorded and mixed. What mic you used or the gear you used is irrelevant. It's also irrelevant whether you recorded live tracks or created custom tracks from BIAB RT's.

There are three situations you should consider BIAB to create your tracks.

1. If you can't play an instrument you want to include in your song.

2. If you can play an instrument you want to include in your song but a BIAB session player can give you a better performance.

3. If you can play an instrument expertly you want to include in your song but it's inconvenient to do so, even if you plan to overdub it at a later time.

Band-in-a-Box has a lot of features to take advantage of letting professionally designed presets handle a lot of the workload. Each track can have up to 10 instrument changes so a single song can contain up to 70 instruments. This can be separate instruments or a fewer number instruments but placed in multiple places throughout the song.

Band-in-a-Box can also use its single audio track to record multiple times by converting the audio tracks to Performance Tracks giving the capability to move them to other BIAB mixer tracks and freeing up the Audio Track for another recording. The multi track feature of bouncing tracks provides nearly an unlimited amount of tracks without having to move your project to a DAW. These two features combine to allow 70 or more instruments onto dozens of tracks. Band-in-a-Box will also automatically do crossfades between the instruments changing out. Using Band-in-a-Box Bar Settings allows for Style Changes, RT and MIDI instrument changes, Volume automation, panning, tempo and key changes.

In a song about a year ago, I did a complete project in this manner just using BIAB tracks and taking advantage of the multi riff feature in RealBand. Multi riff creates 7 individual and different variations of a selected area of a BIAB generated RealTrack. On this song, I broke the soloist guitar into 18 sections. Doing it this way, provided me with 126 (18 X 7) separate punch-ins for fills and solo work. As far as I'm aware, such a track can only be duplicated in another DAW using a live session player.

Here is a link to my song: "SAY I DO "

There are many options that allow one to focus on songwriting and creating a completely unique and statistically astronomically unduplicable tracks for a song without the cost, learning curve, equipment and additional software to arrange, perform and produce a commercially viable audio.







Last edited by Charlie Fogle; 07/08/19 08:49 AM.
BIAB 2026:RB 2026, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.