User Guide

Chapter 5: Guided Tour of Band-in-a-Box
70
Choose a Key
Click on the Key Select List and choose the key of your song instantly.
It's easy to change the key by simply selecting another key from the list. Click on “YES” when the
program asks, “OK to transpose WorkSheet” and Band-in-a-Box will automatically transpose the
entire song into the chosen key.
Type in the Chords
Chord Box
The chords we will enter are F, Bb, and C7. Mouse click on the first cell in the Chordsheet
and type f. The letter f will appear in the chord box. Press the Enter key to enter the chord
F on the first beat of bar one. The Enter key advances the chord cell ½ bar at a time, i.e.,
2 beats in 4/4 time. Next, type the letters bb and press Enter to put a Bb chord on beat three of bar one. The
highlight cell will advance to bar two, type c7 and press Enter.
Tip: A chord can be entered on each beat. To enter two chords in the highlight cell type a comma between the two chord
names as shown in the example above.
This song will have no intro, and the chorus will be 32 bars long. The chord sheet we want to end up with will look
like this:
Chordsheet and Song Title window with chords and song settings.
Copying and Pasting Chords
Since many songs repeat the same sequence of chords throughout, a faster method to enter a song into Band-in-a-
Box is to COPY and PASTE the repeating chords. Highlight a section of chords by dragging the mouse over them
while holding the left mouse button. The area will be highlighted in black.
Press Ctrl+C, or select the Edit | Copy menu item. The highlighted area will be copied to the Windows clipboard.
It can then be pasted back into the Chordsheet at any location, and reused as many times as you like.
Use the arrows keys or the mouse to move the
highlight cell to the destination bar where you
want to paste the chords.
Paste the copied section with press Ctrl+V command, or select the Edit | Paste menu item. The chords will then
appear at the new location.
Choose a Style
Pressing the [Style] button will open the Select Style dialog box where you can choose from the
hundreds of available styles.