Hello all. I'm asking this question on behalf of my ensemble-friends.
We're all pretty new at this game and suppose our ideas have passed through many a mind before they passed through ours! Our apologizes if these questions are too broad or this isn't the right forum. Would you please address our question(s) based on whatever you feel your level or area of expertise is. We're happy to be new BiaB players and thankful for a forum like this to help us along. Thank you in advance!
We just bought BiaB for our ensemble. We also bought a program called SmartScore so we can import scans of our collection of sheet-music to BiaB.
One of us plays keyboards, one guitar and the other trumpet. We enjoy the play-along features of BiaB. We use a lot of the Real Book stuff and Hal Leonard play-alongs to learn and play our favorite jazz tunes. BiaB is affording us the ability to quickly create our own renditions or arrangements and this is exciting! We're all 'old guys' now and nobody is looking to start a music career and in fact, it's kinda nice that we're all retired and have the time and desire to do this -- nobody MUST do this, we WANT to.
Playing together is our hobby of course but we've recently been talking about playing local piano lounges. As our 'setup' guy, I envision using the BiaB technology as our accompaniment along with another member (a sound / lighting engineer), controlling the PC, recording, board, lighting, etc.
We want to know if any of you have done this before or if you are currently doing this (using BiaB to perform in public). We want to know if you can give us some specifics as to how an ensemble sets up for something like this -- none of us know how. I guess it would help if I tell you what we DO have:
- A brand-new quad-cord PC with 1TB hard drive & BiaB (and all the other stuff).
- A Yamaha non-midi electric keyboard (with headphone out jack).
- An Electric / Acoustic Guitar with Pickup.
- Trumpet - With Yamaha electric mute.
A final question is, what specific kinds of equipment do I need to get us set up to play in a piano lounge environment based on our instruments and using BiaB with a PC?