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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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OK, gotta explain this one. I know a bass guitar teacher who highly recommends creating a custom style in BB that when applied to any entered chord progression in BB, will turn that song into what he calls a harmonic metronome. The concept is that he has created this in such a way that the only thing that plays is a staccato guitar skank right on beats 2 and 4 but with the harmonic information at the appropriate spot in the chord progression. He feels this helps immensely with timing, but also with a slight bit of harmonic information while practicing his bass part through the chord progression of the song. I chatted with PG and they did not know anything about this but referenced something called the BIAB Stylemaker.

Can community members let me know how to start making something like this? I am not sure really where to start or if this is really possible. Thanks!

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Found this. I simply did a search under Harmonic Metronome and it showed up.

There are a couple of more search finds but I did not look in depth at them.

https://how-to-play-bass.com/the-harmonic-metronome-in-band-in-a-box

It says you can register for free and download his styles that he made to use as a Harmonic Metronome but I could not find them.

Looks pretty simple in my opinion. He is using a single midi instrument to play on beats 2 and 4 and the goal is to play along with the song and your playing on beats 2 and 4 should match the BIAB song. You should also be able to use a RealTrack instrument set up to play a shot on beats 2 and 4 and be silent on beats 1 and 3.

Sounds like a timing exercise.

I have not tried it yet. Someone else play with this and let us know if it is worth using or not.

Last edited by Joseph Land; 02/15/25 09:16 AM.

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I did not know Google had a Patent website but here is a very in-depth report on one that was invented back in the 1990's. And this is very in-depth.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5515764A/en


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Thanks for the thoughts. Unfortunately that author no longer provides the custom made "style" for download, but sells a course on using BB for bass practice for quite a high price. Darn.....

Interesting Patent.

Last edited by Moonbeam9067; 02/15/25 09:15 AM.
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Welll I actually had a conversation with the author of that Harmonic Metronome idea and he did not supply a custom style, but gave me instructions on how to experience the idea. He said:

1. Set up a chord progression. Make sure it's on the 'B' substyle.
2. For style, choose the 'CROWDING.STY' which ships with all editions of BIAB. You can search for it and use the 'OPEN STYLE FROM DISC' command.
3. SOLO the guitar channel.
4. Press play.
5. BINGO!

So I did that and discovered that indeed it did work! The guitar stab or "skank" was MIDI and so I wondered if I could replace that sound with a RT sound for better sonic quality??? I fussed around a but was over my head. I am not sure how to replace the MIDI guitar track with a RT sound that would again be a staccato stab but of a RT instrument. Is there a way to do this?

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