What do you guys think of Band In A Box?

[Kolstad]

There is is no confusion on my side. PG Music provided the styles and tracks to Digitech’s pedal.

BiB does not make much sense as software on a computer to me, but having it in a guitar/keyboard/electric instruments pedal does, because it is intuitive and easy to use, which may or may not work in your workflow.

It is of course not the same product, but they are in the same family of products, which are tools that can help you develop parts and flesh out arrangements, on the fly.

The cool thing about Trio+ is that it will recognize not only guitars and bass, but also keyboards and electric cellos and violins among others. So it is very flexible.

See this example with violin https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZbxGX_upFk

You are of course free to think otherwise.

[Casey H]

One thing to keep in mind is there are songwriters out there who will never master using a DAW, doing home production, etc. They may not even play an instrument! Some great songwriters (e.g. Jason Blume) do not play an instrument. However, they have good melody and lyric skills. Typically, they rough out a song and have it produced as work for hire elsewhere. It's easy to take for granted that everyone plays instruments, does home recording well, etc.

BIAB offers one possible approach for those folks. Within minutes, you can set key and tempo, style, and chords measure by measure. You get instant rough track to sing against for your rough.

Although I do play acoustic guitar and have a DAW, I often use BIAB for my rough idea backing track, export that back track to a wav file, import the wav into my DAW and sing my song idea against it. And if I need to insert/delete measures, change the key, tempo, or anything else, I can regenerate the backing track in seconds. It's especially useful to me when I'm not sure about how many measures in certain places such as between sections. Or if I need to shift the key a whole bunch to change from male to female singer for my rough. I know most of this can be done with a DAW but BIAB makes it so easy and you have a visual layout of measures with chords in front of you.

Here is a ROUGH of a song I'm working on with Steven Guiles. Steven is singing here over my BIAB track. This will be re-done without the BIAB instruments (a bridge added too) but having the track allowed us to get the basics down. Not saying this is GREAT. Just saying it serves an excellent purpose.
https://soundcloud.com/caseyh/hanging-b ... es/s-h37k2

BIAB is a tool that may be right for some in the right situations. Like everything else, good for some folks, not good for others.

Casey

[Kolstad]

No hate comments needed at all. Thats not how we roll.

The OP was asking about BiaB, but for fleshing out arrangements and such, so that is why i mentioned the Digitech pedal with BiaB in it.

I use the digitech pedal for exactly that, fleshing out arrangements and tracks, record that to my daw, and use that recording as a temp track.

A temp track is a track that has the ideas for the track/song in it, but needs to be replaced with better recordings.

Working from the temp track, you can record drums with the right style of beat and tempo.
You can record guitars to those new drums, add bass, and a whole lot more.

But what kicks it off is the temp track, and both Band in a box and the digitech pedal is great for that, as Casey and others also report.