PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows A question about styles

I have a audiophile drive. 2020 I think.

I have not used BIAB for a while and perhaps I just don't know what I am doing.

I went to file, load styles from stylepicker and cleared everything. I selected Doo [*****] and most everything that comes up is not even remotely related to doo [*****].

The first thing that comes up is a 12/8 slow blues defined as being related to "Green Onion"

Well...yes I know that 12/8 is is a common time signature for doo [*****] but what does Booker T have to do with doo [*****]?

The second selection is called New Orleans Swing and on it goes.

It is beyond frustrating. What am I doing wrong?

Billy

EDIT: Perhaps it just does not exist in BIAB. What I expected was Tears On My Pillow or Duke Or Earl or Earth Angle or something like that. Yes 12/8 is correct because much of that style of music in triplet based with descending chords. It is very simple stuff that even I can play on piano. I just don't get it!!

Here is a screen shot of what comes up.



Billy

Indeed it does sometimes come up with unusual suggestions. I find this also.

I think the method that works is to be prepared to discard many of the suggestions, and keep experimenting. Not a great answer, I know.

Ditto, same here.

I don't want to give people the wrong impression because BIAB is a pretty useful piece of software. It is also a true PITB to use unless you just like spending hours looking and messing around trying to find things that work.

Earth Angel is such a well known Doo-[*****] song why something like that is not included is beyond belief.
I don't know how PG Music comes up with their examples. It is beyond my comprehension.

Billy

Earth Angel is there for me. In Style Picker I enter that Song name in the (Familiar song title) field <enter> and it fills the search criteria [Lite Pop] [4/4] [Sw8] [75bps]
loads of styles to choose from

True there is a lot to the BIAB program. I find the same. It is a journey to learn more and more about it's capabilities.
Roy

Try searching in the Familiar Song search bar to set your Style Picker filters. When we tried searching "Earth Angel" in the 2020 version of Band-in-a-Box, it automatically changed the category filter to "Lite Pop", as well as changed the other filters to match this song. You may get more specific results this way.

Yes, I looked at this. It has absolutely nothing in common with the song in question. Earth Angel has a super common chord progression like Blue Moon, Heart and Soul. There is no copywrite issue with playing this chord progression for P G Music.

I am not asking or expecting a copy of the original song. I do expect it to be somewhere in the ballpark of the original style of the music. It does not even have to be played in the exact same manner as Earth Angel. One could use a triplet pattern or arpeggiate the chords.

Jeezs...where not talking about some complex from of music here. C, Amin, F, G or C, Amin, Dmin, G often in 12/8 triplet based music. The song is mostly about the vocal harmonies to began with.

Lite Pop, perhaps. Acoustic guitar Ballad? Really?

If I wanted to do a cover of the song I would just play it on the piano myself and create the drum lines in EZDrummer. If I have to do all that what is the point of using BIAB?

Billy

It's commercial, but you might check out Silhouettes
(On the Shade)/#silhoet.sty here http://www.nortonmusic.com/styledemo.html#ss

Lo-Fi demo
http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/silhouettes.mp3

Notes

Thanks Bob. This is not really about a certain song. This is about about a generally great piece of software that has some obvious issues that needs attention by P G Music.

With the current defects I would still recommend BIAB to anyone. I am beginning to hear a good many complaints my many people both in private and here in public. At some point that has to negatively effect sales.

Why have a named style that automatically defaults back to something else that has little or nothing to do with the style.

Billy

Thanks you for responding. I was aware of what you posted. I don't want to give the impression that BIAB is not a very good product. There are issues that are as well known to you guys as us users. They need to be addressed where it is economically possible.

Thanks,

Billy

When I wrote my first style disk, back when BiaB was "version 4", still on floppy disks, and only 3 instruments, I figured I'd run out of styles to write pretty soon.

However, the more I write styles, the more I realize that there are never too many. Different songs even in the same genre and style require different styles, even if they are similar.

Of course, the huge library of styles creates another problem; How to find the one you need in the proverbial 'haystack'. But then that's better than not having the right style for the song you have in mind.

I've done 45 fake disks http://www.nortonmusic.com/contents.html#fake (were working on 5 more) and the hardest part is assigning styles to the songs. I contract this work out, as if I did it myself, I'd pick mostly Norton Music styles because I know them so well spending so much time creating them.

I tell the contractors, pick the best style for the song, if a Norton and PG style are close, go with the PG style. But be true to the music, that's the important thing.

Sometimes I override a choice made by the subcontractor, but those instances are few and far in between.

When doing music for myself, I'll come across a style I might like, and I save the song. Then I keep going and when I find another I save the song with a "2" suffix. And so on.

When I think I'm through, I play them one after another (semi-finals) and eliminate until I get "The Winner".

It's time-consuming, but it's playing with music. And they don't call it PLAYing music for nothing.

Insights and incites by Notes

I have been following this tread closely. In fact, I tried to make my own "Style" for EA. Started with a good midi version and then used the "Style Maker from Midi" feature. This automatically created all the chords for A Section and B section. I then moved and separated the individual midi tracks into the new Utility tracks. I especially wanted to be able to reuse the melody from the midi.

I made a EAngel1.sty. And then EAngel2.sty. And finally EAngel3.sty. Now I had a style with bass, drums and piano with the midi melody on a Utility track.

Roughly 60 minutes of manipulations. If I had any satisfactory results I would have been glad to provide them, but alas, as you see - nothing is attached. But I had fun.

Hi Dan,

I would not know how to do exactly what you tried other that try to find a midi version on the internet. But the song is so simple most anyone could play the chord progression on a keyboard in about five minuets. The piano part is a combination of triplets and chord arpeggiation...is that a word...lol The drums sound like old slingerland drum kit, easy enough to reproduce in several drum software programs.

My business partner's kids and I were messing around trying to make a funny version of this in Spanish. I assumed I could easily do this song in BIAB. The style is listed, and the song is listed. But...oh well, it is what it is.

Billy

It would be interesting to hear from Dan what didn't work for the song or style from his hour's time spent. I'm guessing it's the feel of the song. Billy's statement the song is carried by the vocals is spot on in my opinion and that's also the source of the groove/feel of the song along with the Piano is secondary. At least that's what I found listening to the various versions. Which version is another issue, there's quite a difference between versions I listened to. Between The Penguins, Marvin Berry and the Starlighters, the piano is busier in the newer version and many of the backing vocals are replaced by a saxophone. Elvis Pressley version is nothing beyond the chord progression and lyrics close to the original.

I took a different and faster route than Dan to recreate a BIAB version of the original 1956 version by The Penguins. I downloaded a copy from YouTube and imported the audio into a new project in BIAB and processed it through the ACW. This took the most time as the ACW only produced a fair chord interpretation. That was an easy fix since as Billy pointed out, it's an easy chord progression. The ACW also determined the key to be Ab which may or may not be correct, but it worked for the BIAB project. I will say that the original uses more chords than only the basic 5 chords of the song and there's one half bar twice in the song that I don't believe are exactly correct but I settled on db7 and it got me past those two half bars.

What was most interesting was the tempo. The tempo varied between 73-75 bpm throughout the song. I believe this was due to the backing vocals as well as the lead singer wasn't always right on beat between ending and starting phrases and this affected the band. To me, this was also evident in comparison to the Marvin Berry and the Starlighters version that was less dynamic and obvious it was recorded likely to a click track. It seemed to be a more quantized sound to me.

The song form was V-V-B-V-B-V. The Bridge may actually be something else, Chorus or something but it seems more of a bridge to me than a Chorus. Either name works for establishing the song structure for the BIAB project.

The song changes fairly dynamically between the verses and the bridges so just using A/B Part Markers wasn't sufficient to make the transition. However, it was easy and quick to find BIAB MIDI styles that worked for me. I found I also needed to use the A/B Part Markers to vary the instruments, the piano in particular because the piano pattern was too busy to use continuously throughout the song and inserting to alternate the pattern differently made the instrumentation interesting and more realistic to me.

I used SAM_COOK.STY a 12/8 time signature for the verses and SWBALLAD.STY a 4/4 time signature for the two Bridges. Both styles are sw8 feel and I changed the regular MIDI patches to BIAB Hi-Q patches.

It sounded pretty good and a song I wouldn't be surprised to hear a soloist or duo perform in a lounge somewhere. So, for fun, I used Spleeter to isolate the vocals and overlaid the Penguins vocals onto the BIAB project instrumentation.

I think BIAB captured the feel of the genre very well. Certainly would work in a Karaoke contest. I've concluded that using the ACW to analyze and input the tempo map made the difference for BIAB styles to create a workable rendition.

I do have a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me capable of replicating reasonable facsimiles of tunes from the early 60s in BIAB. But creating a new BIAB style from a midi file is not one of those skills.

I had a nice midi melody track, but it would not synch with the chords in BIAB. The style I created could not replicate the multiple sections of the song in the style, nor could I create a bass line or drum style to accompany the Piano style. Basically a total failure.

Conclusion, find and existing style and add chords. But that is where we started this, right?

You probably had something quite reasonable but maybe not perfect. However, that cause may be a result of the attempt to create a style rather than a cover. Create a great cover and modify that into a style. So, how good was your cover? A good midi file should have given great results that could be modified or used to create a song that was accurate in genre and feel. I trust your skills...