JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Musician Message Forum Making Great Demos with BIAB

Hi David,

Great post!

I looked at Real Band a few times and never bothered using it..it's good to know it functions as a DAW.

BIAB still needs some work under the hood, imo..the "pushes" aka syncopations are pretty unusable as they make the performance change style to a slow strum and it sounds like just one sample there, used over and over again throughout the song, which can make for a pretty spastic sound, lol..

Try getting any BIAB strummed guitar to mimic the opening guitar sequence of "My Sweet Lord" for instance, where Em starts the strum and the A occurs on the upbeat, the AND of the fourth beat..it can't be done without those awful sounding "pushes." Then there's the 'double the tempo' theory cuz then you could simply write the A major chord on the fourth beat (of the same song at twice the tempo), but this only works well when the doubled tempo is below 200 BPM or so, and one was lucky enough to find a performance that worked well in the given song, at that ultra-fast tempo.

I found the best way is a workaround in one's DAW. I recently did a song for Ricki requiring a chord change on the upbeat after the second beat in every bar in the verses, mid-tempo, swing eighths, and what I did was first create a chart of the song with that chord change on the very next downbeat--in this case, beat three, then render the tracks and load them into my DAW. Then I made a copy of the BIAB strummed guitar and automated its volume down to zero, and moved it one swing-eighth ahead of the original strummed guitar file. Then I added automated volume to that main strummed guitar, and every time it came to the AND (upbeat of the second beat in this case) I'd lower the volume of the main guitar strum and cross-fade it with the copy, sometimes cutting and stretching the syncopation well beyond the third beat--whatever sounded good. When I figured this out, I realized there were many new options that opened up, using this method, and it became a breeze creating a really dynamic guitar part with chord changes on an upbeat, though it did take a couple hours, but it was time well spent, and it won't take that long next time..

I am having fun applying odd effects to some BIAB performances as well..things like their chamber strings--I'll sometimes put a 'gate' on them that allows sound to only pass through on a defined rhythmic sequence, and then either soften the settings to make it sound natural, or go strict "on and off" with the rhythm for a more electronica sound.

But BIAB is a miracle and a Godsend, I agree. Used in tendem with polyphonic pitch correction like Melodyne expands it's usage beyond the given performances into near infintity..

Thanks again for the great post!

Mike