Today was Django Reinhardt's birthday, so I whipped up this little tune for fun (with a LOT of help from Band-in-a-Box!) as a little tribute to the Master of acoustic jazz guitar.
I had BBox make most of the chords from scratch, only edited it very little in order to get that standard AA-B-A form. Then ran the gypsy swing with fiddle soloist style on the progression, which I then took to my DAW (Cubase) to get the soloist lines I had selected to sound like repeated melody lines, doubled them with midi guitar and presto: A brand new song was born - of which BBox wrote & performed almost everything!
Have a listen HERE

Hi Eddie,

Ahhh ... nice music! I enjoyed the listen.



Reinhardt and Grappelli opened new pathways in jazz. This tribute does them proud

Regards,
Noel

Love it, nice uptempo; feel like kickin' my heals. Nice lead work; thanks for sharing!

Eddie,

Very nice - cool feel and swing to this one.

Bob

Hi Eddie,

I'm curious, why do you share this song on here?

Guenter

hehe, nice one .... ok, it's quite simple, really. I shared it because to me this was mainly an exercise/demonstration of what I could do with the application, an experiment if you will (and the first time I've tried this at that). I even put it on SC as a completely public piece, since I don't really consider it to be my own composition. See, BBox wrote the chords and BBox came up with the notes that the fiddle soloist plays - not me! All I did was pick one decent take and then do some cut'n-pasting with it to make it conform to the standard AA-B-A song form.
As a result, it's of no real personal value to me per se, so I had no reservations about sharing it.

Mind you, I have shared other samples of my work on here already, including my own composition from years before BBox (i.e. things of true personal value). The thread your question here alludes to, was never intended to be about questioning people's motives & incentives for sharing, only to enquire what they might be.

Wow, it's amazing what can be done with BIAB in the right hands. I'm sure Django himself would be impressed.
Thanks for sharing.

Rec

Great Title for the song Eddie.
And, You've really demonstrated the absolute power of BiaB with this one!

Thanks, the title was probably the thing that gave me the biggest ponder. I did consider "The Reinhardt riff" for a brief moment, but in the end I figured he was much better known as Django...and I got a soft spot for alliterations
And on your second point, that was indeed my purpose, a pure showcase of the program itself.

Hi Eddie,

Nice tune, really sounds like Django Reinhardt.!

Rob and Anne-Marie

Well, this would've been a rather lacklustre 'tribute' if it didn't at least have that!
Thanks for that observation, still. Nice to get positive remarks from someone who actually listens to that sort of music.

Lovely to get such nice feedback from fans of the genre, thank you

And thank you for suggesting my hands may be in that 'right' category... let's hope I can keep them there!

Hi Eddie,

First question: When you say "MIDI guitar" do you mean something like this?

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/StratGK3SB

or do you mean a keyboard playing a DAW gypsy guitar patch? I had one of the first MIDI guitars ever made - by Charvel, a guitar, with strings and a special pickup. It was virtually impossible to play with accuracy. I've heard that guitar controllers have come a long way since then.

Second question: You say the tune was "created by" Band-in-a-Box. Does that mean you yourself entered no chords? That there is a radio button or drop-down menu that says, "compose a song of ___ measures in the key of ___ a tempo of ___ in style ___?" You do say BIAB can really do that?

I'll come back for the answers. Thanks.

Aleck Rand (aka Dean Clark)

The latter. I'm not a guitarist, my 'musical venue' is primarily keyboards and other things alike.
Yes, I entered no chords - and yes, BBox 'can really do that'!
Although it has to be said, in my case I went a rather obscure way about it to get there, e.g. did not use the Melodist (where you can find all those features you've just described, not just to make the melody). I'll break it all down for you:

First I selected "New" from the main menu and picked my desired RT style, fast Gypsy Jazz with drums.
As I said above, I opted not to use the Melodist feature for making the chords & melody as one might expect, since I find it clunky and confusing, Instead I decided to try the Chord Substitution way, but started with a blank sheet without any chords. To my utter joy, this worked like a charm and without coming up with a single chord myself, I had a full 32 bar sheet of chords in mere seconds!
Next thing I did was copy the first 8 bars of chords and paste them into bar 9 (replacing the chords already there), and with that I had the first two A-A parts. I leave the 8 chords at bar 17 as is, marked as part B, and then paste those first 8 bars into bar 25 to make the remaining A part, and voila: A standard 32 bars A-A-B-A chord sheet is formed.
Now to the melody, and again I went a rather unconventional way by not using the Melodist, since my intent was to see if I could make a more convincing melody using a Realtrack rather than midi. So instead, I used the Soloist menu! There I picked my desired Gypsy Swing fiddle RT soloist, and set it do a solo over the whole 32 bars. Then, for the guitar doubling (just to really 'sell' it), I picked Harmony #111, and that's where my 'midi guitar' came from.
I then took this to a DAW, since there's no Copy Realtracks function nor any Realband for the Mac yet. In the DAW, I really just did the same with the fiddle as I had done with the chords earlier; copied the first 8 bars to their proper places, while leaving the 8 bars at bar 17 be.

And a 100% BBox-composed song was born!