Technical information

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

Congratulations on your purchase of Band-in-a-Box, 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 when you have

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

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

Just type in the chords to any song (like C or Fm7b5), pick a musical style from the hundreds

available, and click the [Play] button. Band-in-a-Box then automatically generates a full backing

arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar, and strings.

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 features have been added

to Band-in-a-Box - Notation, Piano Roll, Lyrics, Melody Tracks, Harmonization, the

StyleMaker, and StylePicker. The Soloist and the Melodist are popular “intelligent” features; the

Soloist generates professional quality solos over any chord progression, the Melodist can create

songs from scratch with Chords, Melodies, Intros, Solos, and even a Title!

The inclusion of digital audio features makes Band-in-a-Box the perfect tool for creating,

playing, and recording your music with MIDI, vocals, and acoustic instruments. Band-in-a-Box

for Windows

can also record an acoustic instrument or voice to add to the composition, with

processing through DirectX audio effects. Its built-in audio harmonies will turn your audio track

into multiple harmony parts or adjust its pitch by tracking the Band-in-a-Box Melody track.

Audio harmonies include vibrato and scooping effects for realistic styles.

You can print out your finished creation with repeats and endings, DC markings and codas, or

save it as a graphic file for web publication or to e-mail to a friend. And when you're ready to let

others hear your composition, you can burn it directly to an audio CD. Or save your composition

as a Windows Media File or in other compressed formats for a file that’s “Internet ready.”

Let’s get started!

This guide will have you making great music with Band-in-a-Box in a matter of minutes. We’ll

begin with the easy installation and setup procedure.