Gonna chime in here, as Steely Dan is my ALL TIME FAVORITE band (my username comes from one of my favorite Steely Dan songs).

The thing about Steely Dan is how incredibly versatile they are. Now, my experience thus far is that BiaB--due to how it's programmed, structured and how its algorithms work--performs some styles/genres faultlessly, and others not so much. For instance, I find the metal styles terrible...but that's OK in my opinion, as metal music is extremely riff based. A measure that could be notated as an E5 chord (for lack of other more plausible options) might contain upward of a dozen notes with pinch harmonics and palm muted chromatic triplets. (I'm not kidding btw, next time you're at your local music store browse through a Pantera tab book).

Steely Dan has complex chords, incredible song structures, and assembles various stylistic elements into wonderfully unique arrangements.

Now this may be a very controversial opinion of mine, but 90 percent of the time I would strongly recommend AGAINST using the Stylepicker filter to make a cover song or backing track (and this applies not only to SD songs, but to many others). Yes, many times you will get a perfect match (Sultans of Swing), but I find that a lot of the recommendations are very far off.

Another caveat: as a general rule, the earlier the Steely Dan album, and the more likely it got/gets played regularly on the radio, the more likely you will find a good fit with the Stylepicker filter.

For instance, you will find perfectly serviceable matches for Reelin' in the Years and Rikki Don't Lose That Number, then you will find for Deacon Blues, Gaucho, or Third World Man. The former examples have simple bare-bones progressions. If I wanted to make a backing track for the latter songs, I would cherry-pick my Realtracks rather than trying to load a style.

Now that we're on the subject, I would love to know which particular SD songs you would like to find styles for, @Tomko.


Band-in-a-Box 2021 PlusPAK w 2019 Bonus Pak. Custom Build Desktop PC W/ Windows 10 Home 64-bit. CPU: Intel Core i5-9600k @ 3.7GHz (6 core x 6 threads) RAM: 16GB DDR4. Storage 238GB SSD + 2.7 TB HDD. GPU: ZOTAC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB