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Post your own Tips and Tricks here
Joined: Oct 2008
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Joined: Oct 2008
Posts: 1,259
I've been buying Bob Norton's fake disks for a few years now. There are so many fakebooks with so many songs that buying his disks has saved me some time. One disadvantage is that he sometimes uses his own styles. If you don't own his style then you have to spend time searching for 1 that fits your needs our you could buy his style/style disk. This can take a lot of time or little time...and a bunch of time for some of us who want to use real tracks. There are lots of midi styles that have no corresponding real styles for replacements, too.

Using karaoke files (and we do) is another factor. I used to try and get these for free and joined up in a file sharing group where you could download from the files of others. Well, I got a virus, even with antivirus software, that crashed my computer so bad that I had to have Geek Squad reformat my hard drive. I buy my karaoke songs now. I just bought some from Chartbuster and they now come on sd cards rather than cds. The songs are in mp3 format. Some are done quite well and others we don't want to use at all. If I want a single, I get it from Amazon.

Stan


Cornet Curmudgeon
Post your own Tips and Tricks here
Joined: Aug 2011
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I've used quite a number of free biab backing tracks for jazz standards with good results but I have to admit it's not exactly easy. Generally, I open in biab and convert to all realtracks with realtracks generated solos to provide raw material and to run through it playing to the chord sequence. Then I open it in realband and do a little mixing before saving as a file AND individual wave files.

That way I can open it in reaper to use as a very listenable set of backing tracks that I can play along to while hearing the realtime fx applied to my guitar input as I play. Finally, I can mix down choosing from the various solo parts (from the realtracks set or generated solos or my playing) to produce the final studio recording.

So the only thing I'm really using for free is the chord structure input. Everything else is added. But the results are satisfying.

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Band-in-a-Box 2026 Video: AI Stems & Notes - split polyphonic audio into instruments and transcribe

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You can see all the 2026 videos on our forum!

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