My first encounter with Band In a Box a.k.a bb,biab was well over twenty years ago when I saw it used on a few gigs by local musicians. They dragged their desk top computers to their gig as they had bb installed on it. At the time it was simply midi but very useful for creating accompaniments quickly and easily using one of the several midi styles. There are the basic instrumentation tracks; bass, drums piano,guitar, strings, melody and soloist. Today, it's quite a bit evolved from my first bb which was, I think version seven. Yeah you guessed it, I became an expert at it after so many years of using it for my own professional use. I learned every aspect of the program, what it can do and what it can't.
The program is quite easy to use once you get the hang of it as all you need to do to get started with your first tune after the install, is to type in some chords, pick a style and click play or generate and the program does all of the rest for you. You don't need other musicians and having to deal with ego and personal problems. The best part is that the program will do exactly what you tell it to do instead of arguing with you. As a practicing tool, it don't get any better than this. The tempo can be slowed down to a crawl if need be without affecting the sound allowing the student to work at their own pace and speed gradually increasing it until they can play up to speed.
Today the program is quite sophisticated as there are more styles and audio files created by recording artists in all genres. They have come up with some great midi files also created by recording artists giving the midi files a less rigid sound. The audio files are awesome and the user has a choice of having the entire accompaniment played by recording artists. You can even have some great solos in your tunes, all real played by real musicians. Sometimes if need be one could learn to play one of the solos by following the notes, piano keyboard or the guitar fret windows and slowing down the tempo to what ever. There is even the option of a vocalist altho synthetic. All one needs to do is to write in the lyrics and press create and after a while you can hear someone singing.
There is nothing out there that comes close to bb nor its versatility. I still use it after all these years. I like the external hard drive as it saves me a lot of space, over eighty gigs, on my computer as the whole thing is installed on the external drive. I can literally take it anywhere and connect it to my lap top via USB. Now is the best time to get your bb, that is if you are thinking about it, because they've just come out with a new version and since there are still a few bugs in it, the price is the lowest of the year. Bugs are usually fixed in their several updates/fixes which you will need to keep up with but perhaps the saving will make up for it. The initial cost if you don't already have bb will be a bit more than you might expect it to be but, I would suggest acquiring the least expensive one as they have several packages and then upgrade for a lot less later. To see what I mean, check out all of their prices and compare them. Here are a few links: http://www.pgmusic.com/bbwin.htm
http://www.pgmusic.com/bbwin.packages.htm
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