Dear Santa,

I’ve noticed that New enhancements and levels of BAIB tend to come out near Christmas Time. Thus, you might be the appropriate one to talk to…

I’ve been working with Band-in-a-Box for about 10 years now, have purchased every level since 8.0, and love it! My compliments to the chef, as it were!!!... As a result of this, I’ve become pretty experienced with its use, and from time to time have had some ideas on how it could be enhanced, made more powerful, or easier to use. I’ve collected these into this compendium, and offer then to you for your consideration.

I might add that much of what I am going to suggest can be achieved by using Power Tracks Pro Audio, but I have found that toggling between BAIB and PTPA is a very cumbersome proposition. Much of what is added in PTPA is lost on the translation back to BAIB, since they are two different tools with two different purposes. It is possible to create “fragments” in BAIB and export them to PTPA, but this requires a lot of deft and error-prone editing. I have found that the best use of the combination is to do as much of the job as possible in BAIB, export to PTPA, and don’t look back! These enhancements would make it possible to delay that “transition point” as far as possible, greatly enhancing the power of the tools.

In any event, here is my Christmas list…

• Dynamic Octave Control:

Often, particularly when scoring jazz, I find it desirable to switch patches and voices in the middle of a chorus. Depending on the instruments chosen, the proper range for one is often too high (or too low) for another, making things like trading-four situations difficult to control in BAIB. The best solution would be a facility that lets me use the “Melody>Edit Melody>Utilities>Transpose up/dn one octave” facility at playback time in the same manner that patch switching is done.

This facility exists now, of course, but it applies to the ENTIRE track of EVERY Chorus. I am looking to transpose SELECTED bars of a SPECIFIC chorus.

Perhaps the best approach to this is to include a dialog box that appears just before transposition that includes Chorus # and a bar range that is determined by the bars selected, and can be overridden by parameters keyed into the dialog box.

• Auxiliary Tracks:

BAIB would be CONSIDERABLY more usable if I had an “auxiliary tracks” facility, which would essentially give me the ability to add and delete new tracks, assign names, channels and patches to these tracks, interchange data with the melody and solo tracks (in the same way that the M&S tracks do now), and give me the same piano roll, notation, and event management tools I now have on the other tracks. The Melody-B and C-tracks might be included in this facility (Indeed, it almost is now; Some harmonies, such as “George Shearing Quintet” and “Les Paul harmony guitars” generate several aux tracks).

User-defined AUX tracks (with “AUX” on the menu along with Melody and Thru) would be very useful. A dialog box that lets me select the “current aux track” (for purposes of accessing the notation and piano-roll windows) would be an easy method of accessing the aux tracks.

An interesting approach to defining these would be to include a “Null” harmony” (i.e. NULL3,NULL4,NULL5,Etc,) , 3 or 4 or 5 tracks, Etc, but with NO notes; presumably to be completed by piano-roll editing, or transfer in total from another track, if recording to these tracks is desired.

How AUX tracks would be treated on the menus is interesting. It would be possible to update the menu with all tracks included, but this would be cumbersome. A more workable approach would be to open a dialog box which could address each of these individually.

• Annotation on Chordsheet window:

Often, I “unfold” a multi-chorus song, and this results in a big chorus, usually 96 or 128 bars long. It would be nice to have the ability to “annotate” segments of the song as displayed on the chordsheet window to remind me of current style and patch, current tempo & volume, or other things an arranger would find handy. These could be either entered manually as simple text, or optionally be generated automatically with each patch, substyle, Etc. change.

This might take 1 of 2 forms, i.e.:

1. “Bars” that do not have chords in them, but do have some kind of annotaton. During playback, these bars are skipped, but otherwise are treated like all other bars (for cut-and-paste purposes, Etc.). Some formatting options (i.e. similar to those that appeared in BAIB 2008) would also be useful.

2. A popup window associated with bar (or better yet, with each beat in a bar) that would contain either user or program generated text (Bar no, style and patch settings, Etc.). These would bear a strong resemblance to “Post-its”, attached to a bar!


• Style/Patch Synchronizer:

In creating arrangements, I often “hop around” on the chordsheet window, i.e. playing the various segments of a piece asynchronously. The current patch and style settings DO NOT follow my jumping around, and this leads to confusion about what those settings might be. It would be VERY USEFUL to have an option that allows the automatic setting of patch and style settings appropriate with each bar, or, better yet, each beat of a bar. This could be done by back-scanning the piece until a patch or style setting is encountered, and making those settings current. A more positive (but in all probability, far more difficult) approach to this would be to embed the settings within each beat, and activate them when that beat is clicked (or double-clicked).

• Configurable (or “Intelligent”) settings on the piano roll window:

Piano roll sets up VERY USEFUL vertical spacings for a bar, but these are determined by the amount of screen space assign to the bars. Often, however, the bar is divided into 12 segments, regardless on the time signature. If you’re writing in 4/4, this means that the VAST MAJORITY of the notes DO NOT fall on a vertical line, leading to some confusion as to the length and boundary of the notes. The “snap to note” feature helps this somewhat, but it’s not a panacea.

This will suggest that vertical bar-and-note definition lines be generated according to the time signature of the piece, with a formula determined by “beats to a bar" algorithm. 4/4 would divide a bar into 4,8,16 Etc. segments, depending on zoom level. 3/4 time would divide a bar into 3,6,12,24 Etc. segments, again depending on zoom level.