| Subject: | RE: [RESOGUIT-L] Band in a Box | | Date: | Sunday, January 14, 2007 08:20:28 (-0800) | | From: | Pete Grant <pete @.........com>
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| In reply to: | Message 5678 (written by Tom Lawson) |
> Looking for some comments about Band in a Box? Anyone
> use it to practice or make their own stuff? Is it any
> good? Thanks in advance.
Absolutely. Do be patient, though, with the irritating and often
counter-intuitive way it works. It has its own rules, and once you get used to
them (there are good video tutorials that come with it), it's a
delightful-yet-continually-mildly-irritating practice tool. I have a little PC
laptop in my studio that's an 'appliance'; it's there to do Band in a Box and
that's it. It's hooked up to some computer speakers with a woofer and I use it
not only to practice tunes and intonation myself, but also in lessons. One use
is as an occasional tool to use for me and BB to back up a student (that way,
the student knows for sure which person is trying to speed up). I also use it to
demonstrate how a particular note or phrase works against a chord or series of
chords. I can also record a tune for a student with and without BB, or give them
a tape of just the BB tracks to work with, though I usually encourage the
purchase of BB to all but the computer utterly hopeless. Those with BB at home
can take a thumb drive and get copies of the BB files we make or use in the
lesson.
Styles are really fun. In Band in a Box, each style has rhythmic, harmonic, and
melodic elements that are characteristic of a particular style of music and its
variants. I find it fun, when I'm working on a solo, to change the style and see
how that affects my phrasing. Then, when I have acquired some phrasing I might
not have used in the original style, I change back to the original style and see
if I can still retain the phrasing. It would be something like playing Dark
Hollow in G_JETHRO style (having brought the 'banjo' volume down to zero) or
what's called 'Country 4/4' but is much more like two bars of 2/4, then
switching to Reggae style, getting something fun out of it, then going back.
I've also used BB to lay down reference tracks when I'm recording. I have BB on
my studio Mac, too, and can put a chord progression and style and tempo in,
convert to MIDI, then import it to Pro Tools. It comes in with each instrument
on a separate MIDI track. Fun stuff. I've also used it for a quickly produced
publishing demo, adding a voice and a couple of instruments and sending it off
with a minimum of time and expense.
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RE: [RESOGUIT-L] B
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