Originally Posted by MarioD
Originally Posted by Bass Thumper
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My understanding is that currently, BiaB is king of the mountain when it comes to computer-assisted music accompaniment and backing track production.

Steve that is a big generalization. That is may true, right now at least, with some audio music accompaniment,
Yes, it is a big generalization/opinion/understanding and I am certainly not aware of all the competing products out there. When I say "king of the mountain" part of that includes the high quality RTs, the breadth of styles available and the fact that it is chord-based. I'm slowly becoming aware of "loop software" and even some AI assisted programs but although some of these programs do sound good to my ears, many don't have the chord basis that BiaB has.

I do agree that there is a (steep?) learning curve with BiaB and it's a bit clunky/dated. Because of that I'm only using a fraction of what it can do. But being relatively new to music, that fraction is plenty good for me; so all is well. Moreover, I learned from you early on to "get out of BiaB as soon as you can" and do volume automation and other post-processing in your DAW. Early on I had massive problems with RealBand.

Are you aware of other programs that you would put in the same category as BiaB?

My limited understanding of MIDI is that you're moving rectangles around on your screen or capturing info from a connected controller that is physically played. Neither of these approaches necessarily captures a complete chord progression of an intro, verse, chorus, etc. BiaB does capture the progression in an intuitive spreadsheet-like grid, which is powerful. Even this guy says that BiaB is probably the "most capable program on the market".

Much of this is personal and everyone has their own workflow and is somewhere on their musical journey. Young people are very tech-savvy and could figure out BiaB. I wonder how many college-level music schools promote BiaB vs other software.


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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.