User Guide

Chapter 1: Welcome to Band-in-a-Box!

Congratulations on your purchase of Band-in-a-Box 2010 for Macintosh, the favorite of

musicians, students, and songwriters everywhere. Get ready to have fun!

What is Band-in-a-Box?

Band-in-a-Box is an intelligent automatic accompaniment

program for your multimedia computer.

You can hear and play along to many song ideas and go

from “nothing” to “something” in a very short period of time

with Band-in-a-Box as your “on demand” backup band.

Band-in-a-Box is so easy to use!

Just type in the chords for any song using standard chord symbols (like C, Fm7, or

C13b9), choose the style you’d like, and Band-in-a-Box does the rest, automatically

generating a complete professional-quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar, and

strings or horns in a wide variety of popular styles plus optional live audio tracks with

RealDrums and RealTracks.

And that’s not all...

Band-in-a-Box is a powerful and creative music composition tool for exploring and

developing musical ideas with near-instantaneous feedback. Over the years, many

powerful and practical features have been added to Band-in-a-Box, earning it a reputation

as the “one music program you can’t do without.” In addition to its basic ability to

“think” like a musician, the musical intelligence of Band-in-a-Box has grown to include

improvisation, harmonization, and even songwriting! Its musical content embraces

literally thousand of musical idioms and styles, all taken to new levels of quality and

professionalism with the addition of RealDrums and RealTracks - live recordings by top

studio musicians that add the human element to Band-in-a-Box arrangements, bringing

your work to life.

As well as essential features like on-screen notation and professional lead sheet printouts,

Band-in-a-Box supports your music making with unique and powerful features of its

own. The Audio Chord Wizard has the amazing ability to analyze, extract, and show the

chords from audio recordings on-screen for play along, and then write them to the Band-

in-a-Box chordsheet. The MIDI Chord Wizard does the same thing for MIDI files. The

DAW Plug-in Mode makes it easy to drag and drop tracks from Band-in-a-Box into your

favorite sequencer (GarageBand, ProTools, Logic, Nuendo, Reaper and more).

Output your Band-in-a-Box songs in print or as a graphics file for web publication or to

e-mail to a friend. And when you're ready to let others hear your composition, you can

quickly and easily render your song to popular audio formats for burning to CD or

uploading to the Internet.

There are many, many more features for song creation, practice, study, and fun waiting

for you in the one-and-only Band-in-a-Box.

Let’s get started!

A note about this manual. This book is your everyday reference and guide to the

program and its features. See Help|View Band-in-a-Box Manual for the full manual.