However, many people find them useful in various ways and so onto my question. I know there's a hate following amongst composers and musicians for Band-In-A-Box/Jammer type things and I do have some sympathy with this. if it could produce high quality results consistently. I think there is huge potential for a product like this. I agree, most of the Rock styles flat out stink.
Sometimes I've gotten some good results by mixing it with Stylus RMX and groove quantizing the parts together. There a few gems in there that will work with certain types of songs. I have gotten some usable results out of BIAB, but sometimes due to accident as much than anything else. I think the technology will get to the point to where this will happen at some point. It would be great if you could input a chord chart and come up with tracks that were usable without editing. I guess I was excited about the technology but I don't think it ever evolved enough. I could just start from scratch sonar and come out with much better results. Years ago I use to use it quite often back in the late 80's early 90's but I found that I spent more time editing my songs than it was worth it.
I couldn't imagine anyone actually just creating a song in any style and it be usable without editing except the jazz and swing styles and even then I probably would be to picky to use them without editing. I almost forgot Bluegrass is pretty good but all styles need editing. If you work with them and do a lot of editing either to the styles in biab or export to sonar as smf and edit them there you can get some nice tracks. Country, Rock, and most styles that most users here on the forum might use are just so-so.
BAND IN A BOX REAL DRUMS NOT FOUND UPDATE
Sorry, forgot, there was actually a recent update after 2 years, but only minor bug fixes, no development of the program.īIAB is superb for Jazz, Swing, Big Band, and even funky Rhythm and Blues. My guess is the programmer has disappeared and they bought the stuff and just sell it without it ever being updated again.
they haven't updated for almost 2 years, even obvious bugs, and they don't respond to support questions. The first which could convert midi files to styles. One style in BiaBi is equivalent to about 12 styles in Jammer. Well, in their adds it sounds like a lot of styles, but that is because they split things up. I like the whole approach and the way you can manipulate things yourself, including modifying or creating new styles. There a regular updates, a forum and more. Even the rock ones sound like a jazz musician doing his best to play rock. There are, however, lots of styles (if you buy them), though they have a tendency to sound jazzy. A lot of things are done with numbers and strange menus. I have Band in a Box 2007 with all styles, Jammer 6 without any extra styles yet, Onyx arranger with all styles.īiaB 2007: Clunky interface.
BAND IN A BOX REAL DRUMS NOT FOUND FULL
Sometimes a good bass line can make or break a song and I'm not a bass player, so having a tool like this could be really useful to get a full song moving along. I do think it could be a great tool for scratching out ideas. Which version of Jammer do you use? I have an old version and see there are newer ones out there. Its a great creative tool and always gives me good ideas on where to go a with a particular piece of music I'm working on. I just save the JAMMER file as a MIDI file and open that in SONAR, tweak any MIDI, bounce to audio and start on any real instruments, vocals etc. Once I have enough of the MIDI work set out like I want it. To get it to work I use MIDI-OX to connect Jammer & SONAR so that SONAR runs as a slave device controlled by JAMMERs midi output. Unfortunately it doesn't run inside SONAR as it is a standalone program. I sort out the general feel of a piece with rhythm, tempo changes, vocal arrangement etc then set that up in Jammer. I always start working on a piece of music with acoustic guitar. I use JAmmer as my goto tool for fleshing out a piece of music/song.