I think band in a box has some paradoxical elements.

I think the more you know about music and learn about music and study music, the more band in a box starts to blow your mind as you begin to consider how much more you can learn from it, if you want to understand the power of complex chord progressions and how other people get the sound that they do.

It's literally a bottomless pit in that regard.
You simply don't have enough lifetimes to live if you had ten or 20 or even 100 to learn all of the things that can be taught by studying band in a box solos, chord progressions, demos styles, instrumental approaches and variations, etc etc etc.

Because I've written songs and played songs and produced songs all by myself playing most of the instruments for decades before I even came into contact with band in a box, I definitely don't lean on band in a box to help me because I don't know how to do anything else. It's quite the opposite.

First, band in the box is more powerful than any music school I can conceive of and I took plenty of music classes from private tutors and as electives in college and stuff like that. If you want to learn a certain jazz soloing technique or comping technique or anything else from any genre, you can simply pull up a band in the box demo and play along with the notation sheet music right in front of your face and see how people do the things that they do. That's mind-boggling.

It's like being able to take guitar soloing lessons from Carlos Santana in your bedroom.

What's not to love.

On top of that the technology efficiencies that are created by band in a box and real band are astronomical.

Say I have written a song in the key of G and I want to record it and make the production process as efficient as possible.

I simply pick the tempo, find a style that is reasonably close, and create a G chord drone backing track for the entire song at that tempo.

Then I sit down in real band with my working lyrics and chords and play along and record with my acoustic and sing along as well to that G chord drone.

When I'm done, I start over from the beginning and just start typing in the right chords measure for measure along with the scratch vocal because I can tell what I'm doing now and I know what the chords should be.

4 minutes later I have a complete demo mocked up.

I can then start adding in as many of my own guitar tracks as I want til Kingdom come, lay down more vocals backing vocals, electric tracks, percussion, use the band in a box tracks, what have you.

But it cuts the whole production cycle grunt work down to about 10% of what you would have used otherwise.

That's only about 1% of what band in a box can help you with.

It just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

So in the end, band in a box is not for people who can't play, band in a box is absolutely for people who can play, and who want to up their game and explore infinitely new horizons.

David Snyder
Songwriter/Renaissance Man
Studio + Fingers

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