Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
Anthony.
Heres some tips.
Really peruse the faq’s and vids in pg support…includeing tutorials on you tube.

Make sure you save your settings by saving option with patches.

If you have a big commission // project split it into more than one bb file.

In the style picker..dont just go thru a few styles when youve laid out in bb your chord arrangement. Ive found many golden nuggets of sound by not following standard procedures. For example i do mainly rock, and occasional ballad…but i might explore other styles outside the rock and ballad genres. Ie happy accidents. I know it can be a lot of work going thru thousands of styles..but ive some v interesting results.

I make my own custom drum intros , and dont bother bout metronome…so lets say i have a ballad in key of E i enter in bb e.d/e.d/e.d/e.d ie 4 bars lead in only playing drums. This also useful for drum solos in conjunction with part markers….also lets say you need a 12 bar drum solo…experiment with 12 bars of e.d with different part marker colors at each or other bar. The KEY is experiment cos bb is very deep.

A final tip as i dont have loads of time today….what i do is …lets say i’ve done my chord arrange, what i do is go thru loads of styles , and lets say i go “hmm i like that soloist”..then what i do is save…and i give the save a filename like 2356NICESOLO as the file name whereby the number is the bb instrument number OR i might save as INSTRUMENT ID + INSTRUMENT TYPE + COMMENT eg 857BASSVERYFUNKY…now i’m on pc so on mac things might be different…

what i’m trying to say and its very important is i apply my final chord arrange to a ton of styles and then as i come across nuggets i save…THUS on any song i might end up…like a song i’m doing now 40 saved files….
FROM THESE 40 saves i then assemble my final bb song file….think of it like in a big studio a project one auditions session musicians for a major project , and then one decides which musicians are in the band.


Thanks for all these great tips!

Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso


ps..and please keep an open mind, try reaper for mac from reaper.fm...try a test run. its fast and nimble with small footprint. if you doubt me read up the thousands of fans at reaper.fm. and talk to users who have moved from other daws.
happiness.


I know about Reaper, for sure. I've even made some plugins for it years ago. Now the reality is that film scoring is mostly done using one of the "heavy-hitter" DAWs (Cubase, DP, Logic, ...) and the mixing done with Pro Tools. My setup relies on Cubase, slave machines wired using VEPro, video on another slave runnning Video Sync 5 and everything routed to Pro Tools for stemming/mixing.

Originally Posted By: Uncle Paul
You may also want to look at "EDIT" "SONG FORM" "SONG FORM DIALOG" and generate your own Song Form.


Awesome! This is even more what I was looking for.

Originally Posted By: Matt Finley

One thing you will run into for song form is that BIAB uses the term ‘chorus’ in the jazz sense, meaning ‘once through the song’. For example, ‘take a chorus’ means to blow a solo once through the tune. There are a few things in Edit, Song Form you might like to look over.

EDIT: I see Song Form was mentioned. Good. There’s more. There’s almost always more in this program.


This is something that was puzzling me, yes. Thanks for pointing it out.

Originally Posted By: pghboemike
i Suggest you explore the user showcase choosing different genres where folks who use Band-in-a-Box post their creations and usually indicate which real tracks they use and sometimes other production details


Very good tip! Will do!

I'm still going through the manual. Should be done shortly :-)