BIAB really comes in a tiny box

As I continue practicing and improving daily with Band In A Box (BIAB,bb), I'm only re-confirming that it's due to having the ability to play to accompaniment tracks. Without it, I could create my own midi tracks for accompaniment but there's nothing like having a real band playing right behind you rather than some hoaky sounding midi files and I would undoubtedly get bored fairly quickly.

I've turned many of my musician colleagues onto bb and they all agree with me that it's an invaluable tool to practice with. They all use it even tho they have been playing for over 4.5 decades. No, I don't have anything to do with PG music and never will. Yes there are things about bb that just gets my goat and frustrates me so much. But, I've learned to overcome my hostilities towards it and take it for what it is.

I just can't understand why anyone learning to play a musical instrument or someone interested in improving themselves don't have this in their arsenal. You don't even have to install the program onto your computer. It comes on a tiny hard drive with way over 100gb of space already to go right out of the box (hd). All you have to do is plug it in to your laptop or computer, install the PG music fonts along with a couple of soft synths like the Coyote or Roland VST/DXi synth or IK Multimedia's Sample tank and go to town on it. Everything else (Real Tracks, Real Drums) comes right out of the little hard drive. A program called Real Band also comes with bb. The program is similar to Cakewalk with less bells and whistles but it allows you to record your own several tracks or include the ones from bb. You can cut and paste to make your own custom arrangements. I don't use it as I have a much more sophisticated one on my desktop for my studio work. For someone just learning home recording the Real Band will get you on the right track.

Here's the setup I use when practicing. As you can see, there's not too much involved.

my practice set up 1

I had a couple of old Roland studio monitors which I plugged in to the headphone outlet of my lap top. Sometimes I'll just use some headphones instead. That mini hard drive just left of my lap top is band in a box. I can take the program anywhere my lap top goes. I purchased the program with the mini drive because if I had downloaded everything that's on the drive, about 80 gb of files, it would have taken me days to download it all. Not only that but my lap top just didn't have all that space left available.

that mini drive just left of my lap top is Band In a Box

Not only do I create backing tracks for scales and exercises, I have about a 100 fake books that have accumulated throughout the years and all I have to do is to punch in the chords into bb, click on any of the hundreds of styles and within seconds, I have a backing track for that song. If I wanted to have a melody along with it to play along with, all I have to do is to copy the notes like in the book and click play. Here's a link to find out more about bb. http://www.pgmusic.com/

Since Band in a Box is such an integral part in my learning to play the horn and since I am quite versed in the program, I will be including it with each new post.