To add to what others have hinted at, I thought I would add my favorite feature of Real Band, and that is midi chord detection.

If you set up a piano synth and play it in real band and capture what you're playing then real band will tell you the exact chord names of what you just played.

It is hard to describe how invaluable this is for a songwriter.

I think it's pretty much an absolute must, and this is just me, to have at least a cheap keyboard where you can fiddle and fool around with chords at least in the key of C. It's not that hard.

The most important part of a song and the part that you absolutely cannot do without is the melody line.

You don't have that many notes to choose from and in pop it's usually seven.

Anybody can sit down at a piano and fiddle and fool around and come up with a melody line if you give yourself an hour.

Then once you have that and have recorded the notes so you can look at them, you only have to ask yourself, man I wonder what chord I should use to go along with that note.

Say one of the notes in your Melody is an A. Well the chord could be an A Minor it could be a D Minor 7 it could be a D minor, it could an A major, it could be an F, or even something else as long as the A sounds good inside of that chord. Every songwriter that's any good sits in front of (or holds) an instrument and fiddles and fools around to find the chord that sounds the very best for that particular note at that particular moment in the melody.

It's kind of impossible to do this if you're just shuffling experimental chords around from a 200 Page jazz theory chord manual on all the different possible chords you can play. (I'm not saying that you shouldn't understand what chords are all about and what the chords are, I'm just saying that you can't shuffle them around like playing cards in order to arrive at a song.)

That's doing it backwards, and I've never found that to work at all in any shape form or fashion. At least not for me.

The reason why I love real band is because when I am sitting there playing the piano and I come up with something that I like, and recording it in MIDI, I will often go, man that's awesome, now what the hell was I doing?

Real Band will show me what I'm doing.

And then once I see it, I usually go oh I get it, it sounds good because..... And Real Band just gave me the chord chart right in front of my face.

But that's the only way that it really works for me, and it's the reason why I don't really bother that much with theory after a certain point. It is because I just don't find it to be all that useful. The theory part can explain why it sounds good later after I've already figured it out but it does me absolutely no good to try and use theory to get to the right chord.

The theory only helps me to understand why it is good once I've already found it.

Does that make sense?

In other words the melody line is everything. The melody line is what drives or dictates the final chord progression. It's not the other way around.

David Snyder
Songwriter/Renaissance Man
Studio + Fingers

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