Thanks in advance for your replies.

Most honestly, I think it's a drum software question. Where shall I focus my learning time to accomplish my 'drum' goals? Also, I guess my question would be, which software to use for what.

This are the riches in my man cave (some were free with the Focusrite Scarlet 2i2):
Band in a Box
Real Band
Bias Amp2
Bias FX2
Amplitube 4
Ableton Live Lite
Focusrite Drum Pack
MT Power Drum Kit
Novation Bass Station
Pro Tools First
Reaper
Syntronik Free
T-RackS 5
various audio plugins
a couple 'intro to music theory' books
access to YouTube & the innerwebs

My goals:
1. learn to play electric guitar (tone, scales, chords)
2. practice playing lead to backing tracks
3. input songs of my own to create backing tracks to practice lead to
4. make a recording of a full song, played by a virtual full band, as I hear it in my head (long term goal)

what I feel most comfortable about:
recording
mixing
effects
chords

what I feel most apprehensive about:
drum tracks creating with software

You already have BIAB, why not use that to create your drum tracks? BIAB does a great job of building drum tracks with very little effort or knowledge of drums required.
Unless I'm not understanding you?

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your reply. Your answer is pretty much exactly what I was looking for: it looks like I can focus my learning on BIAB to accomplish any drum needs I may have.

The damn program can do so much, it's a bit overwhelming. Also a voyage of discovery, learning the program.

Happy tunes!

BiaB drums are already done for you.

As a guy who plays drums, sax, bass, guitar, keys, flute, wind synth and vocals, many of the drum tracks are quite good and for an auto-accompaniment program, I haven't found any better.

I have a web page on how I make backing tracks and use them on stage http://www.nortonmusic.com/backing_tracks.html feel free to take what you want and leave the rest.

Insights and incites by Notes

Absolutely....

The way I was introduced to Band in a Box was through a friend in another forum who used it to make his drum tracks. It's super easy to do.

Oh, man! Thanks, Guitarhacker. The fewer complicated programs I have to learn the better.

NN - I will head right over and sponge all I can. Thank you for the work you put into that.

I did also find a couple YT vidz showing the whole process from writing to uploading a song. Am currently reading the manual some more.

Today I worked on my music reading skills (at this point scarcely any) by trying to enter a melody (chords were easy).

Excited to learn all this!

Last Wednesday I got a call to recreate the drums that a certain drummer had recorded on a song.
He decided for personal reasons he didn't want to do the drums on this song on the final recording.

After auditioning a few BiaB rock drum styles we found one that fit, and by chance it had pretty much the needed signature drum lead in included in the RD preview!

So we rendered a few different versions in RB, cut and pasted together one final track to get everything just how we wanted using the A section from this track, the B section from that track, fill from another track, etc, and within a couple hours had assembled a pretty much final drum track for a CD that needed to 'resemble' the original.
Granted we got lucky in that one of the fills was almost a perfect match for a section we felt was important.
But if you don't have to 'exact match' a drum part, RDs can get you a long way very quickly.
It only took 2 hours because we really wanted certain fills and we found enough of them that were close and would work to assemble 'what we had in our head' (which was actually what we already had recorded with an actual drummer).

Like I said, it took a little work and a little luck, but the rest of the band was astounded when they heard it.
They were worried they would have to ditch the song, but we fixed the issue with RDs.
Creating a new song is much easier if you can give a little on what you are hearing .. and sometimes what gets generated is actually better than what you were hearing.
Often enough I generate something and think "wow that was nice .. why didn't I think of that?"

Wow. That's encouraging. Thanks for that story.

I did experiment with putting in chords and letting biab generate a melody, which wasn't at all what I had in mind but definitely had some passages with good ideas for soloing. I look forward to knowing enough to build a drum part for a whole song.

Remember that you can change the style and the song will sound totally different. There's over 3000 styles to choose from.

I used to use the "generate a melody" function for some of my early musings with BB. Mostly jazz based stuff. But now days I have a melody and just use it for the backing tracks to a song I am writing.

This is a jazz tune with some live guitar https://www.soundclick.com/html5/v4/player.cfm?songID=9012413

A mellow acoustic based song that was submitted to one of those 16 and pregnant shows https://www.soundclick.com/html5/v4/player.cfm?songID=10085025

Holy Moly!

The duets!