Hi Jareth,

Thanks very much for your post. I am very glad to hear that you will be developing what BIAB offers to contemporary pop songwriters.

Thanks also for taking the trouble to make the Modern Pop Styles Google sheet so that I can find them. I look forward to checking out the styles you listed.

With regard to future BIAB Modern Pop styles, I suggest that the first place to look for inspiration would be the charts and songs like those I listed above. These have proven popular appeal and would result in styles that would be more attractive to your customers. I referred to toplining backing tracks for an indication of their production level, format and vibe but there are a lot more backing tracks out there than proven hits and many of the former will never become the latter!

One thing occurred to me when listening to the style demos: I may have got this wrong but BIAB demos seem to have all the instruments playing all through the song. This might work well for blues or country or maybe jazz when that could be appropriate for a song in that genre. But in pop you almost never have all the instruments playing all through the song. So your modern pop styles might be more effectively showcased with a demo song that has maybe a stripped down intro with a loop, verse arrangement then fuller arrangement for the chorus. It might make the demo sound more recognisably like a pop song. With utility tracks, you would have space for an instrument used just in the intro, bridge, breakdown or added to the chorus. The more it sounds like a pop song, the more it will appeal to new BIAB users.

You mentioned ways to improve the workflow for people writing modern pop songs. Charlie wrote in his post above lots of things that BIAB can apparently already do. I have no idea how to do the things he mentioned. While I am waiting for your new developments, I would like to be using the existing features of BIAB to their full potential. I checked out the video tutorial part of the PG website today. I found a tutorial by you for how to make a user track. That was interesting though I don't think it would give me chords like augs that I would want to use. Several of the videos there were quite old so they don't look like they're up to date on things like making styles.

What would help people like me would be some video tutorials that pull together the kind of things Charlie was talking about, using BIAB 2021, to develop songs from existing chart songs or toplining tracks.

Thanks