User Guide

Chapter 6: Making Songs in Band-in-a-Box
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- "Defaults" resets to default settings, which is no style filter, and all styles will be displayed.
Settings:
This sets the StylePicker to show ALL styles in the selected category.
Loads in a song demo for the currently selected style.
Reduces the duration of chords in the song by half, i.e., 4 beats becomes 2 beats. This is
useful when the new style has a different feel than the original style for the song.
Doubles the duration of chords in the song so that 2 beats becomes 4 beats. This is useful
when the style you are auditioning has a different feel than the original style for the song.
If this is set, Band-in-a-Box will ask if you want to change the feel of the song
or auto expand/reduce the chord durations.
Categories
The StylePicker window allows easy selection of styles by category or from a complete list of all styles. For
example, you can select Jazz styles and see a list of all of your Jazz styles. Then you can select any style to see its
full title, description, and examples of songs appropriate to the style.
Other Styles
These are styles that you have made yourself, perhaps by editing and renaming an existing style, or that you have
obtained from third parties. If there are no memos for the other styles they would need to be added by editing the
style descriptions in the BBW.LST file.
Favorite and Recently Played styles appear in this dialog as separate lists.
An “F” appears beside the name of any style that is a favorite. You can filter any list by only showing favorite
styles. Over time, you can build up a list of favorite styles, and only show them when needed.
The favorite styles are the ones that you’ve identified as favorites, either by pressing
the [Add Favorite] button in the Favorite Styles dialog, or the similar button in this
StylePicker dialog.
The StylePicker automatically keeps a list of the last seventy-five styles that were used.
RealStyles, Classic RealStyles and Styles with RealTracks
RealTracks, made from live audio recordings by top studio players and recording artists, can be used for any
instrument part in Band-in-a-Box, including the Melody and Soloist tracks. They can be controlled just like MIDI
instruments (volume changes, muting, etc.), and, best of all, they follow the chord progression that you have entered,
generating an authentic audio accompaniment to your song. RealTracks are not “samples,” but are full recordings,
lasting from 1 to 8 bars at a time, playing along in perfect sync with the other Band-in-a-Box tracks.
RealTracks can be built in to styles, so you can have styles that are all MIDI, a mix of MIDI tracks and RealTracks,
or all RealTracks. Styles that use RealTracks only are called RealStyles.
There is a separate category in the StylePicker for RealStyles. There is also a
Classic RealStyles category in the StylePicker. It contains styles that are
intended to be commonly used RealTracks. The style names for RealStyles
are prefaced by an underscore, _.