.. I spend more time now in things like EZ Keys and various UJAM drum and string programs....
You can create UserTracks with Toontrack and UJAM, whatever you are using for your pop styles just make them into UserTracks then make your own styles in Biab using these UserTracks. This maybe a quicker way to as these will just generate up rather than keying chords in EZKeys.
we have UserTracks, sure as I said they still need fixing but you need the popularity for this to happen
Sounds like a catch-22. If they need fixing how do they gain popularity?
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But this approach requires finding music producers who are willing/able to learn to use BIAB/UserTracks. I can do this now and I'm sure I would get a lot of others interested and doing it, but I'm a bit worn out these days from constant giving out So that's why I'm trying to encourage other here to do this.
Who here, other than you, would even know where to start with this? Most of us just want to use BIAB to create music and don't know much about the internal workings aside from a few work-arounds we know to get our desired results.
I love your enthusiasm and your technical expertise but I just feel we have a better shot at near-term results by PGM implementing some modern pop styles based on studying modern pop songs. Nothing at all says we cannot do both though so if someone can convince some producers to create UserTracks I'd love to evaluate those and might even buy some if they were of the same quality I get from PGM.
I suggested User Tracks in my reply to Lazarus...second reply to this tread. No, a musician does not have to know or have BIAB to do User Tracks. They are not complicated to make, once you do one. I have compiled one (with pipeline's help). recorded by a gentleman from Fiverr. He never heard of BIAB. Came out from first try. It was just a short, simple thing that I needed. So instead of making him play something particular, I decided to do a User Track, so I can change things if I needed. You can try it: https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=609080#Post609080
I tried it. Very interesting. And perhaps useful if you needed that for a project.
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Personally I think User Tracks have Huge potential. Why? Because if you find the right boys or girls, it can happen within days and be specific to your particular needs. And consider this... unlike traditional genres, Cont.Pop relies heavily on synths. If musician can do it once, they can change things relatively fast, unlike acoustic or electric instruments.
I am also intrigued by UserTracks and hoped they would take off big time. I believe they have not though. Why is that? Did the fiverr guy you used express any interest in becoming a UserTrack entrepreneur and creating libraries of these for sale? Is anyone creating UserTracks today? Is this feature fully implemented and relatively bug-free? I honestly do not know the answers to these questions.
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Also, there are great thousands of contemporary genre midi things, paid and free that can sound as good as your synth is, which can be incorporated in BIAB arrangement.
If you are suggesting UserTracks could be created using other virtual instruments I have always viewed that as piracy. For example, NI sells tons of synths and other virtual instrument libraries for me to use royalty free in my songs. If I take one of their libraries and convert it into a UserTrack for my own use that is probably not a problem. But if I take one of their libraries and convert it into a UserTrack to sell to others for use in their songs, I believe I have simply repackaged their intellectual property and resold it. But maybe that was not even what you were suggesting.
"Did the fiverr guy you used express any interest in becoming a UserTrack entrepreneur and creating libraries of these for sale?" He was "for hire", and I am sure he would agree to do a 30 min template or longer User Track. I just do not have the funds to sponsor a few hours of his time. BUT....If there was an interest from 5-10 people who would want a few Indian flute UserTracks that would chip in, it would be totally doable. If you are interested in Indian flute (I think they can play Pop style), find few more people that are willing to chip in and we can try asking. If they are not overbooked, I think they will gladly do it. Some instruments that I would gladly chip in to make UTs are: Flute (classical / ethnic) Reggae Guitars / Bass Cello Sax (even rhythm parts / licks)
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"If you are suggesting UserTracks could be created using other virtual instruments I have always viewed that as piracy." If you are are creating / programming your own content, using "paid for" sounds, I believe it should play well with copyright trolls (dont quote me on this). If somebody plays and records on Gybsoon branded guitar and sells chops, does he pay royalty to Gybsoon brand for using their instrument... that he bought? These days.. I do not know. However It should be totally fine that you can use them (User Tracks)for your "personal" self, creating your music.
Also, there are whole buncha of musicians that create midi style files for pay. Unique / on demand. Intro,chorus,verse, breaks and all that good stuff.
In any case, I am not suggesting that PG catalog should not include Cont.Pop, or modernize picker to sift and sort all kinds of data more effectively, I am just sharing an opinion that there are other options available which have their own benefits and can be integrated in BIAB workflow.
"Did the fiverr guy you used express any interest in becoming a UserTrack entrepreneur and creating libraries of these for sale?" He was "for hire", and I am sure he would agree to do a 30 min template or longer User Track. I just do not have the funds to sponsor a few hours of his time. BUT....If there was an interest from 5-10 people who would want a few Indian flute UserTracks that would chip in, it would be totally doable. If you are interested in Indian flute (I think they can play Pop style), find few more people that are willing to chip in and we can try asking. If they are not overbooked, I think they will gladly do it.
I may have misunderstood you. I think Pipeline was suggesting we find producers who would take the initiative to produce UserTracks with an eye toward selling them. I thought you were suggesting these chaps for that. As for hiring them I have no need or incentive to do so at this time.
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"If you are suggesting UserTracks could be created using other virtual instruments I have always viewed that as piracy." If you are are creating / programming your own content, using "paid for" sounds, I believe it should play well with copyright trolls (dont quote me on this). If somebody plays and records on Gybsoon branded guitar and sells chops, does he pay royalty to Gybsoon brand for using their instrument... that he bought? These days.. I do not know. However It should be totally fine that you can use them (User Tracks)for your "personal" self, creating your music.
Playing the instrument is not a good example. A better example would be you buy libraries from someone like NI and then you reformat their libraries and resell them as...wait for it...libraries! Someone here was doing that for awhile when UserTracks first came out and we had several discussions about it. I expect it would be fine for personal use and even selling as long as you were very low profile and selling very few. But the day your sales jumped and NI discovered you had simply reformatted their intellectual property into UserTrack "libraries" I think you'd get the cease & desist letter!
I don't think anyone was selling UserTracks, there were UserTracks made using IKMultimedia for the sound from the Midi tracks then someone said something about it so that users deleted them, but when I contacted IK they said this was fine to share the files made from your midi with other users but if they were making a sample library from IK and selling it this was not. As users can't extract a sample library from the userstracks and remove the reverb, it's like extracting paint from a painting to create new paintings.
I asked them to put a change UserTrack in F5 this will work for Holds but they just need to enable UT again to keep playing where a Hold Shot is as you can mute it manually if need be (or in the new Bar window highlight, right click and mute), this will allow you to change to the Hold UTs with Holds on different beats. It is messing around but when you've asked for UT Holds for 7 years.. Another is a Don't Transpose UT option. The other option is create the UserTrack up in Reaper as it will let you have Holds Shots Rests, then drag it into a Util track, and it won't transpose them unless you do it manually. I think it's the whole reason I made the ReaTrack for Reaper, to do things you are not allowed to do in Biab & RealBand.
Going by the views below there is lot of interest and lot of disappointment.
The main problem with UTs is they are in the RealTracks folder on the Biab Hard Drive so when you get the new version of Biab you format the old hard drive and they are lost so you need to download them all again
"You can create UserTracks with Toontrack and UJAM, whatever you are using for your pop styles just make them into UserTracks then make your own styles in Biab using these UserTracks. This maybe a quicker way to as these will just generate up rather than keying chords in EZKeys."
Pipeline's assertion that you can turn EZ Keys and UJAM instruments into BIAB User Tracks is tantalising.
Is it a real thing? That would be more useful than just using EZ Keys and UJAM instruments themselves? If so, please explain how.
I would want the full range of chords and am not interested in doing 30 minutes of playing to get that.
If it's as easy as you suggest, I'm sure lots of BIAB users would love to do it so please let us know how!
As was discussed previously, new modern pop RealTracks is a great idea, and is something we'll definitely be working on this year.
One thing I wanted to point out was that in the initial list of modern pop tunes, someone made the point that we don't have styles in the vein of ANY of those examples. We've looked through our existing styles, and there are actually quite a few of those song examples for which there are very similar Band-in-a-Box styles. Now, just to be clear it's never our intention to duplicated parts from an existing song, but rather to put together more generic tracks in the same genre/groove, so that's the point with this demonstration as well.
Now, just to allay your fears, the purpose of this post wasn't to try to claim that it wouldn't be a good idea to record more modern pop styles! I think it would be great to expand our choices of modern pop RealTracks & RealDrums. I simply wanted to show that we do currently have many styles in this genre.
************************* Tobin Frank (he/him) PG Music Inc.
Thanks for posting those links. Although I have thousands of styles, I don't have those ones.
While those PG demos may have one or two similar elements, to my ears they are not 'very similar' but there's no reason why they should be! I think the styles as a whole don't sound like contemporary pop and much of that has to do with the drums/percussion. BIAB's ability to have different drum styles and loops could lend itself to more contemporary drum & loop track combinations.
As I wrote earlier in this thread, I think BIAB has lots of good realtracks (often hidden away in styles of other genres whose other elements are not contemporary pop). They are what I'm normally looking for but usually fail to find. I'm not saying they're not there but there's not enough life to spend wading through styles in the hope of finding realtracks for my purposes.
Originally Posted By: Lazarus
As a longtime BIAB user and upgrader, I find the way PG bundles together styles from different genres as an incentive to upgrade doesn't work for me. I have so many styles now, in everything but contemporary pop, that more styles actually makes things worse because there are so many to wade through (and oompah and celtic styles seem to evade your filters... I can't get away from them cluttering up my searches!)
There are some excellent realtracks and drums that are very useable for pop and they are what I'm usually searching for (I rarely use all the instruments from a style). It would be great if these could be grouped together by PG, maybe under some foolproof search filter term, to help us find them easily (and close alternatives). That could be another step in making BIAB more useful and accessible to contemporary pop songwriters.
My request to Make BIAB more useful to contemporary pop songwriters is not only about making new pop multistyles. I also want to be able to find the good stuff that's hidden there already and make the most of BIAB's existing features. Peter said it would be good to have videos to demonstrate that and I look forward to seeing them.
I appreciate Jareth posting the list of what PG classifies as 'Modern Pop'. I have almost none of those styles in that list. I have listened to some of the demos listed and I wouldn't rush to buy those bonus styles sets. After many years of upgrading BIAB, I gave up buying mixed genre bonus packs. But if PG recalibrates its conception of Contemporary Pop, by checking out the songs on my list and studying the Adult Contemporary charts, I would love to buy a set of AC multistyles where all the tracks sound modern and complement each other. But not if it's outnumbered by jazz and oompah styles.
To sum up, my wishlist would include 3 elements
1. New mainstream contemporary pop multistyles, as discussed in detail previously. 2. Some new search term or filter procedure that can help me QUICKLY find my existing realtracks, drums, loops etc. that are useful in contemporary pop. 3. Someone at PG to go through the charts and regularly update the song list so that if people type in Hot Girl Bummer, Ring or Good in Goodbye, the search filter will direct them to styles and realtracks that are similar.
One of the songs in my list, River, is by Charlie Puth, who writes and produces his own contemporary pop songs.
He will be teaching a month-long class which takes you through his whole writing, arranging, recording and mixing process.
If there are any BIAB users or PG staffers who want to know how someone at the top of their game makes contemporary pop, you might like to check out this course.
Sometimes a demo song does not accurately reflect how a style sounds playing your chord progression.
One way to get around this obstacle is to listen to styles play your chord progression. But, as you said, few people want to spend a long time waiting for tracks to build. However there is a way to greatly reduce the time it takes to sample styles.
Find a four bar chord progression that repeats throughout a song or represents the feel of a song.
Temporarily place the four chord progression at the beginning of the song chart.
Open the StylePicker.
Enable the 4 bar preview option.
Single click to highlight a style.
Set the tempo to match the song tempo.
Use the Play Using Current Chordsheet for Song "Play" and "Stop" buttons to preview the style.
Highlight another style.
Set the tempo to match the song tempo.
Since the track instruments are playing only four bars, it doesn't take long to preview each style. Since every style plays the same four bars it is easy to compare styles.
I always use my own chord progressions to audition styles that I have in my computer. I only use the audio demos for styles that I don't have.
It would be handy if you could fix the tempo when auditioning styles with your own chords. While working your way down the styles in the picker, you have to set the tempo again each time you select the next style. It would save time if you could lock it to the current tempo of your song (unless that is an existing feature option that I have not yet discovered?)
I don't limit myself to the 4 bar preview, I let the song keep playing. I'll try the 4 bar option to see if it lets me lock tempo while auditioning different styles.
That's really handy, being able to browse styles with fixed tempo.
One thing I find is that, if you are auditioning styles to your own chords in this way, if you click on Cancel, when you return to your song you have lost your original style. It's been replaced by the last style you auditioned.
Is there a way to stop this happening? It would make more sense if you click Cancel for you to return to the style you had before you went into the stylepicker.
That's really handy, being able to browse styles with fixed tempo.
One thing I find is that, if you are auditioning styles to your own chords in this way, if you click on Cancel, when you return to your song you have lost your original style. It's been replaced by the last style you auditioned.
Is there a way to stop this happening? It would make more sense if you click Cancel for you to return to the style you had before you went into the stylepicker.
AFAIK you can not return to the original style. If you start another wish list with this you will get a +1 from me.
When you are at the checkout line and they ask if you found everything say "Why, are you hiding stuff?"
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
One of the songs in my list, River, is by Charlie Puth, who writes and produces his own contemporary pop songs.
He will be teaching a month-long class which takes you through his whole writing, arranging, recording and mixing process.
If there are any BIAB users or PG staffers who want to know how someone at the top of their game makes contemporary pop, you might like to check out this course.
This thread is one of the most informative threads in our forum.
What if we add "modern drum beats" to the BIAB songs? Will it make the song sound more contemporary?
As you know, there are many commercial drum packages, by Loopcloud or Big fish audio.
Will the BIAB songs sound more modern if we replace RealDrum with those commercial drum beats?
I agree that this has been a wonderful discussion. To answer your thought, personally I don't think so. However, I believe the limitation lies within the Band-in-a-Box (BiaB) user base, not the program.
I don't think there are many Band-in-a-Box (BiaB) users that are familiar enough, and enjoy modern music well enough, to make the effort needed to create modern music.
Look no further than the loops PG Music already include with EVERY BiaB package. Go the bb\RealTracks\Loops. I believe you'll see folders for Chillout, Drum N Bass, Dub Step, Hip Hop and House-Techno-Trance. The loops are there to get you started. If you have a commercial library then place your loops in the Loops folder and BiaB will recognize them.
If you have the desire and know the music well enough, go for it.
I'm sure PG Music is taking steps like adding the loops library to attract a new generation of producers and musicians. New producers and musicians means new energy and direction.
Band-in-a-Box® 2025 pour Windows est disponible en Français.
Le téléchargement se fait à partir du site PG Music
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PowerTracks Pro Audio 2025 is here! This new version introduces many features, including VST3 support, the ability to load or import a .FLAC file, a reset option for track height in the Tracks window, a taller Timeline on the Notation window toolbar, new freeze buttons in the Tracks window, three toolbar modes (two rows, single row, and none), the improved Select Patch dialog with text-based search and numeric patch display, a new button in the DirectX/VST window to copy an effects group, and more!
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So that's why I'm trying to encourage other here to do this.
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