Hi All,

Still very much a Newbie here, but learning. I am working on my 2nd song here and I'm having 2 issues with a track.
It's an old style Country song with a background Pedal Steel track. In writing the song in BIAB, I did not use repeats, but just copied and pasted the verses and choruses.

Question 1. The song is in the key of C, and the Chorus or B section starts on an F. On the first Chorus, the pedal steel does not play on the first bar (F) of the chorus for some reason, but picks back up on the 2nd bar, yet it does play on the first bar on next 2 choruses. I've tried using cutting and pasting, drag and drop, and even just deleting and manually re-creating the first chorus, but the same thing happens.

Question 2. There are 3 verses and 3 choruses in the song. Coming out of the 2nd chorus, on the 3rd verse, the pedal steel plays what sounds like an ending figure on the first 2 bars of the verse and then totally drops out for the rest of the verse and well as the last chorus.

I'm guess there is some setting I need to change but I can't find it, and it's driving me nuts! Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks so much!

Hello Boots49!

Welcome to Band-in-a-Box and to the forum.

I don't think as a new member you can attach to messages yet or I would ask you to attach a copy of the song file.

What you can do is to select the MEMO button and then copy and paste the "Song Summary" into a new post. That will tell us useful information like the tempo, what style and instruments are used and key signature.

I'm thinking the pedal steel guitar may not like the tempo or something like that.

Hi Boots,

Is the Pedal Steel track frozen? This will show up as a lit up snowflake icon on the mixer.

If it is, click on the icon to deactivate it and then regenerate your song.

Regards,
Noel

Hi Noel96
I do have the pedal steel track frozen. I did that because, after regenerating it a lot of times, I finally found the exact pedal steel pick up figure that I wanted for the song. If I unfreeze it and regenerate, I have to keep regenerating again to find that pick up figure/lick. Do you think the issue is just on that particular regeneration, so that if I want that pick up figure, I'm stuck with the other issues?

Hi Boots,

I think that part of your problem is due to the track's freezing. It's possible that the pedal steel could have been frozen when the song has less bars than what it does now.

When I get something I like, I do exactly what you have done and freeze the parts I want to keep.

Then I save the song.

Then I save the song with a slightly new name.

With this newly named version I unfreeze the track(s) and regenerate. (Because I've already saved the song with the previous name, I can always get back to it and save anything from it that I've frozen.)

I usually end up with around 10-15 versions of a song I can return to if I want to. To change the name, I just use a number. For example, if my song is called "MySong", I first save it as "MySong1", then when I save and move to more experimenting, it becomes "MySong2", then "MySong3", etc.

BIAB files are not very big (usually around 20-30 kilobytes) so they don't take up much room on the computer.

Following this plan of attack, I usually regenerate my song around 1,000 (estimated) times during its writing. This gives me a chance to hear tons of generations and often there is an even better one waiting to be found.

Regards,
Noel

• my latest song: I Will Always Be There

Not necessarily. But you might have to move to Real Band..... freeze the track and copy it to real band. In real band, you can easily use the same exact Steel Guitar real track in multiple additional tracks. You can then easily generate as many new and different versions of the same steel as you need.

I don't work in Real Band except to use it to generate tracks. However, I have in the past used it to generate 5 different guitar solos. I then loaded the 5 tracks into Sonar and used volume automation to comp the 5 tracks into one really smokin solo. You can hear it in this song..... https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11971116 I also did the same thing with the piano fills using 2 tracks. The guitar fills are comped from the various 5 tracks. But they are fully used in the solo. None of them alone cut it for the solo.

Using a DAW like Sonar really lets you do things that are difficult at best in BB

Hope this is useful.

Edit: If you get something you like..... freeze it. Sometimes you can get it back through a few regeneration but there's been times that I spent a full hour or more trying to recover a particularly tasty lick to no avail. And there are times where it does exactly what it did for you.... doesn't play in a particular measure, usually at the start. I've had that happen.... If you're not already doing this.... unfold your project to ONE CHORUS. Don't use the repeats in the default mode.

Hi Noel96
Thanks for the reply!
As to the pedal steel dropping out on the last verse, you were right on the money. I did freeze the steel track before I added that last verse. So un-freezing and re-generating solved that issue. Thank!
Thanks for the other tip. I already do that, and have multiple versions of one song. My big problem there is I will re-generate to fix one section and won't lick the new intro lick. I guess I have to learn more and try opening the song in RealBand, and then try cutting and pasting sections. Any other thoughts would be appreciated.