Technical information

Chapter 5: Guided Tour of Band-in-a-Box

With Band-in-a-Box you can arrange, record, save, and print your own song ideas. Just type in the chords to any

song; choose a style and press [Play] to hear the “band” play a full arrangement. Then record a Melody - either

MIDI or live audio – or have Band-in-a-Box write an original Melody for you. Add Melody embellishments and

harmony, an automatically improvised Soloist, an Intro, and print out a multi-part Lead Sheet or a Fake Sheet with

repeats and endings in a “handwritten” Jazz font. Edit the notes for the Melody or Soloist track in the Piano Roll

window, with precision graphic editing of controllers. Use the Melody Pitch Tracking feature to “tweak” the pitch

of your Band-in-a-Box audio track, and then add amazing “stylized” 4-part audio harmonies.

Loading and Playing Songs

Open any song file with the familiar dialog box, just like any other file on your disk.

Start song playback.

The [Loop] button plays the highlighted section of the chordsheet or notation in an endless loop.

Click and drag the mouse to highlight a section of bars to loop.

Replays the song without regenerating the tracks, so the current arrangement is preserved. ( Save the

song to a MIDI file to permanently save the arrangement.)

Stop song playback.

Pause playback with the [Pause] button; resume by pressing it again.

Jump to any bar in the song. Press the [From] button to choose which chorus and bar number to

jump to.

The [Song] button opens the SongPicker window, a resizable window that lists all of the songs in the

current directory and, optionally, its subdirectories. For example, if you get a song list of c:\bb,

it can include songs in subfolders like c:\bb\styles34. You can lock the SongPicker to always open in the same

folder and use the same list to keep track of all songs on your disk.

The first time that you select the [Song] button Band-in-a-Box automatically writes the song list. The current folder

name is displayed in the title bar, with the total # of songs displayed.

From then on, the SongPicker opens when the button is pressed and songs can be selected by title from the

alphabetical list. Songs can be sorted by any of the column headings, like Song Title, File Name, Style, Tempo, etc.

Check “Play when chosen” to automatically play the selected song.