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PG Music Band-In-A-Box

Apple Mac/IBM PC/Atari ST Software

Article from Music Technology, July 1991

As technology tears down barriers, people rebuild them. Ian Waugh investigates a composition program that delivers all the traditional elements of music at the touch of a button.


It's symptomatic of an age in which off-the-shelf sounds and samples are big business, that a program providing the software equivalent of auto-accompaniment should also be making good.


A LOT HAS been said and written (more heatedly said than gently written) about the validity of pre-programmed accompaniments such as backing tapes, the live use of drum machines and sequencers (same as taped backing innit?), organ auto accompaniments and Dick the Drummer after six pints of Newcastle Brown and a row with the singer.

I say Keep Music Live (now you know), but I also understand and appreciate the necessity for musicians' working environments to be self-contained. Cocktail lounges, pubs and small venues which can't hold - or afford - x-piece bands all have a need for big-sounding, small-sized entertainment. And where there's a need, some enterprising person will come along to fill it. And it may as well be you, right?

You can buy backing tapes. But you can't be certain of their quality, the songs may not be arranged as you want them, they may be in the wrong key at the wrong tempo - you may not even be able to buy the songs you want off-the-shelf. Alternatively, you can buy an instrument with auto accompaniments - these are fine if you can play, but they can set you back a few bob. (Incidentally, if you think auto accompaniments are still boring and monotonous, wrap your lugs around the Roland E70. If that don't make you wanna play you ain't got no soul.) There must be an alternative.

BACKING BAND



ANOTHER OPTION IS to make your own tapes. This takes time, and not everyone is a mega arranger. Which brings us quite smoothly to Band-In-A-Box (review version 4.1). Quite simply, it's a computer-based auto accompaniment generator - if you're tempted to sneer, let me tell you it's currently outselling a lot of "serious" gear by a frightening factor.

Band, then, has 24 built-in rhythm styles which it plays with three instrument parts - piano, bass and drums. It's available for the Atari ST, PC and Mac. The PC version requires 640K with at least 520K free RAM and the ST version requires 800K free RAM. A special ST version is available for 520ST owners, which restricts you to shorter songs, 14 accompaniment styles and no user-definable styles. Both versions will run on hi- or medium-res monitors.

There is one Main screen which contains 64 "empty" bars. You construct a song by entering the chord names into the bars. There can be a maximum of four chords in each bar, which should cater for all but the most ardent jazzer. If a song requires more than 64 bars you can select another three pages for a total of 256 bars, which should be long enough even for 12" mixes of your songs.

You can simplify arrangements by arranging the song into choruses. From the Song menu you can enter the bar number of the start of the chorus, the end bar number and the number of times it is to be played. You can add a tag (or coda) which you can jump to after any bar in the chorus.

It works fine, but perhaps repeat bars and DS and Coda signs would make arranging easier, certainly more instinctive. The provision of first- and second-time bars would aid flexibility. Having said that, you can enter a song in a few minutes - the manual reckons two and it's not far wrong - so you could argue that it's hardly essential.

MIDI MAPPING



THE FIRST THING you need to do is get the program and your equipment in sympathy. From the MIDI menu you select the MIDI channels for the bass, piano and drums. You can opt to send a program change here, too, and change the octave of the bass and piano.

The drums are mapped to the keys used by Roland's MT32 et al and there are alternate maps for Yamaha's RX-series and Korg's M1. If you have a different instrument, it is possible to create your own drum map by assigning a MIDI note number to each of the 29 drum sounds the program uses. This can be saved to a file which is loaded automatically on booting. You can't, however, actually load different drum maps from within the program.

There are lots of songs supplied with the program, so you can load them and start playing straight away. One of 24 styles can be selected from the Styles menu. These range from swing, country, blues and rock to ethnic, reggae and Irish.

Any song can be played back in any style so you can give a gentle pop ballad the heavy metal treatment at the click of a mouse. The Expand option will double the duration of each chord. Shrink halves it. It may be necessary to apply one of these effects when changing from a rock, for example, to something with a two-beat feel. It's quite possible to Shrink a chord out of existence if it only lasts for one beat. Once you get a library established, you can load songs by style to save you wading through unsuitable material.

Creating your own songs is easy. You can use the cursor keys or the mouse to move from bar to bar. You type in the name of a chord or chords. These appear in the chord entry box at the bottom of the screen. Pressing Return enters the chord and steps you onto the next chord slot. The program correctly interprets upper and lower case so you can enter everything in lower case - couldn't be easier.

THE LOST CHORD



BAND-IN-A-BOX RECOGNISES ABOUT 130 chord types. Over 100 come under dominant sevenths and sustained fourths. You can enter alternate - "slash" - bass notes, too, such as G sharp/B. As you might imagine, this caters for most eventualities although if your favourite key is G flat, you'll have to convert C flat and F flat chords to B and E chords.

If you enter a chord Band doesn't recognise, the program blanks the box, beeps and steps on to the next chord slot. Not exactly Mr Helpful. Also, the only way to edit a chord is to re-type it. How friendly it would have been if the name of the highlighted chord appeared in the chord entry box. As it is, if a chord follows a chord with a very long name, its name may be forced completely off the screen and there is then no way of knowing if it exists.



"Creating styles is pleasurable, although to produce anything decent you'll have to have some arranging ability and/or imagination."


If you mess up the order of the chords or want to change the arrangements, there are insert, delete and copy commands to help.

Band allows you to enter lyrics, too. These appear at the top of the screen and become highlighted as the music steps from bar to bar - karaoke, anyone? You can transpose the song - useful if you're a singer or a guitarist with a capo.

On playback a keyboard appears at the bottom of the screen and shows which bass and piano notes are playing. You can stop or pause playback - which is useful for examining the notes if they clash somewhere with the melody.

I've got to concede that the patterns really are very good. You might think a program such as this, budget and all, would produce Mickey Mouse patterns, but there's not a bit of it. Most styles have several pattern variations which play at, well, it's not exactly random as we'll see in a moment.

You can insert markers at a bar to select one of two style variations called a and b, useful when moving from verse to chorus, for example. This also produces a drum fill in the bar prior to the change. Neat.

STYLE MAKER



WHILE THE STYLES are good, they can't cater for every type of song you might want to play. So Band-In-A-Box lets you roll your own. The most basic you can get is to create one bass, one piano and one drum pattern. That would sound pretty boring but the program actually lets you create dozens of different patterns and assign them weights so they play with controlled randomness. Let's give it a try.

The Style edit screen consists of a large grid with drum, bass and piano boxes down the left.

The Drum Editor is also a grid on which you can select a time base of 12 or 16 (no 1/32nd notes). You can record "a" and "b" drum patterns plus fills and an end pattern. You enter a hit by typing a velocity value 0-127 at the required step. Thankfully, there's a "hot key" which inserts a preset velocity value.

Each hit can be assigned a percentage chance of using an alternate drum sound. This allows you to add subtle variations to a pattern to break up any tendency towards mechanisation.

The bass and piano patterns provide a choice of recording a and b substyles of various chord durations. Different patterns can be created for chords lasting one, two, four and eight beats in duration. On playback, the program looks at the duration of the chord it is about to play and picks the most appropriate pattern. If a chord only lasts two beats, for example, and there's no two-beat pattern, it will default to a longer pattern but only play two beats of it.

Bass patterns are recorded in real-time from a MIDI keyboard - record everything based on a chord of C7 and the program works out the other permutations. Clever stuff.

As well as a weight setting, for further flexibility you can give the patterns a mask. A playback mask ranges from 0 to 11, where a setting of 0 allows the pattern to play on any bar, a value of 1 will only let it play on odd bar numbers, 2 on even bar numbers, 3 on every third bar and so on. Settings of 9, 10 and 11 control the fills. There's also a Late Triplets setting which facilitates addition of a "lazy" triplet between the third triplet and fourth 16th note.

Piano patterns are entered in a similar way. There are similar mask settings plus an embellishment option (let the program do your jazz). A Lead Voice setting will smooth chord transpositions. For example, changing from C7 to F7 would normally produce the notes C, E, G and Bb followed by F, A, C and Eb. The Smoothing function will play the F7 as C, Eb, F and A. More clever stuff. And if your real-time recording is not as accurate as you would like, you can always quantise the patterns.



"Any song can be played back in any style - so you can give a gentle pop ballad the heavy metal treatment at the click of a mouse."


Logically enough, copy and paste allow you to copy and paste patterns from one grid position to another. This makes drum editing particularly easy although the only way to alter a bass or piano pattern is to re-record it.

The Style Maker is a great idea although it's implemented in a text mode, and operation could have been made simpler and the screens more informative by adopting a graphics approach. Perhaps I'm nit-picking. If so, another gripe would be that you can't edit the pattern while it's playing. It's a shame, but it's not devastating. My main niggle, however, is the fact that you can't save a song along with a user style. You have to load the song then the style.

You can't edit the preset styles and it would be useful - interesting at least - to look at them. However, this would entail some sort of note display for the bass and piano parts, which the program isn't quite up to.

Creating styles is a pleasurable pastime, although to produce anything halfway decent you'll have to have some degree of arranging ability and/or imagination. To produce a good style you need lots of patterns and these take time to create. The grid will support 660 patterns in total although only the zealous would attempt to fill them all. A style disk containing 25 styles is available and these typically contain 70-100 patterns. That's still a lot of work. Styles tend to be pretty economical with memory and typically take around 5-12K of disk space.

Accompaniments can be saved in MIDI File Format for further editing in a dedicated sequencer.

You can print lead sheets from the chords, although these are simply empty bars with chords above them. They follow the layout on screen, not the arrangement set on the Song parameters page although it would be easy enough to construct an accurate arrangement and add your own repeat bars. Resident musos are used to reading such parts.

UPDATES



IF YOU SPLASHED out on Band about six months ago you'll have v3. The major enhancements in v4.1 are the user-definable styles (and endings), lyrics mode, playback from any bar, the ability to change style and tempo at any bar and make program changes. ST users will also notice an improvement in speed - screen redrawing, part generation and so on. You can upgrade for £20.

While Band is easy to use, there are some functions which can only be accessed from the keyboard (why do designers insist on doing this?) which means you have to read the manual. Which you should do anyway.

Although you can alter the tempo and fast forward (what, no rewind?) during playback, it would be useful to fiddle about with the styles, too.

Version 3 promised that styles with more instruments (brass and strings) would be coming but I guess we'll have to wait until version 5 for that. Do we need an index in a 48-page manual? Hmm, wouldn't go amiss. Possibly the most irritating thing they didn't update is the inability to see the full name of a chord whose name has been truncated.

If you want a selection of songs to get you started, there are two fake books (disks, actually) containing 560 songs, mixtures of standards, pop and jazz. If bought separately, they're relatively expensive (when compared with the program) but more reasonable if you buy them and the program at the same time (shrewd marketing going on here).

VERDICT



THERE'S NO GETTING away from it - Band-In-A-Box is fun. It's not as sophisticated as Roland's E70 but then it is only 1/25th of the price. You've probably decided whether or not it's for you - but just in case you haven't, here are some applications: if you're not a keyboard player, use it to provide backing to play your guitar/balalaika/bandoura along to. If you are, use it as background and solo on top of it. Club singers could use it to produce "instant" accompaniments - just add guitar and voice. Songwriters could use it to try out song ideas and arrangements very quickly. Use it to produce a basic accompaniment, save it as a MIDI File and tart it up in the sequencer of your choice.

The accompaniments really are very good indeed. All Band needs is the extra instrument parts and it would be pretty close to being a Musical Arranger equivalent of a workstation. As ever, the value of this software is tied in with its cost. You must have glanced at the price by now. If you haven't take a look. Niggles apart, Band-In-A-Box is amazing value for money.

As the suggested retail price in America (from whence it hails) is advertised as "less than $100", it seems that the distributors have gone for a fair price and not done a simple $ = £ conversion as appears to be the normal practice with imported software. Let's hope this heralds a new era of honest pricing. Well done Zone!

Price Band-In-A-Box £45; Fake Books Vols I & II £20 each, £35 together; Band-In-A-Box plus both Fake Books £69; 25 Styles disk £20.

More from Zone Distribution, (Contact Details).


Also featuring gear in this article



Previous Article in this issue

Beats Working

Next article in this issue

Roland JX1


Publisher: Music Technology - Music Maker Publications (UK), Future Publishing.

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Music Technology - Jul 1991

Review by Ian Waugh

Previous article in this issue:

> Beats Working

Next article in this issue:

> Roland JX1


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