This is nothing new, the debate over live VS sampled. Is not any synth in the world just sampled sounds? there is not a synth made that does not use some sort of sampled or replicated sound from some live instrument. Are only accoustic piano really keyboards? Are not most songs just bit and piece mimicry of other songs? Should we toss out the 12 bar blues cause they are rooted in the same base structure? Are only instrument players artist? With loops do we draw the line at one shots or are all wave file drums not artistry? Is a drum machine not cool, or does it have to be a set of drums with a live drummer? All programs like BiaB or Jammer do is to build structured backing tracks for what ever chord structure you program in, the same as if you had three other musicians sitting in, they would play the chords and note to accompany you, they sound similar, so because it is sampled from a computer it is not real?

I guess it boils down to one's interpretation of what music is. I mean should i never play a "C" chord cause someone else played it first. Maybe that is going to far, but what difference does it make where the music was put together from, as long as it sounds goodand people enjoy it.

ORIGINAL: Robomusic

I guess it boils down to one's interpretation of what music is. I mean should i never play a "C" chord cause someone else played it first. Maybe that is going to far, but what difference does it make where the music was put together from, as long as it sounds goodand people enjoy it.

Because over time, the level of craftsmanship is slowly creeping down, as is the level of artistry. The public audience is also slowly lowering their standards of what they "enjoy". What difference does it make? It makes a HUGE difference if you really care about music as an artform. If you don't care, and just want to puke out more mediocre garbage that people will "enjoy", then by all means....acidize...

Michael,
I'm not sure if this is still the case, but my BIAB 2005 came with the Roland VSC, which I have found to be a fairly decent GM sound module soft synth. (Better than Cakewalk TTS-1 at least!).That alone might make it worth your while. As far as the rest of this thread is heading, you have to draw your own line between inspiration and plagiarism. You can take either argument to ridiculous extremes. Everything in man's evolution, mentally, physically, philosphically,spiritually,has been arrived at while standing on the shoulders of those before him.
So, is the question, "is this inspiration/tool or cheating/shortcut?" or is the question "who cares?"

Peace,
Tim

There has been a ton of "craftsmen" over the years trhat were really crapsmen, and there are a ton of young talent from the computer age that are just that Talent. There are those who bang out a bad drum track on a accoutic drum kit, and those who excell at it, then again there are those who loop together a bad drum track with Acidized loops, and those who excell at it. Not everyone is a drummer, or a guitarist, or a keyboard player. Both electronically and analog wise both take talent to do RIGHT.

I will grant you it is easy to acid loop together a cheap pop song today and there are those who will buy it, but I submit that that has to do with the fickled consumer, and the marketing arms of record companies. There were cheesy poorly made pop songs selling millions long before acid loops came out. I have heard some real garbage "puked" out from live musicians.

This really has nothing to do with Acidized loops or Synthesized music being made with REAL talent or not. It is part of our society today. I have heard Acidized tracks that sound as good as anything played live, and i have heard live groups that can't play worth beans as well. We accept far less today for entertainment in all arenas TV, Music, Theatre, you name it.

I just think to lump all artist who use "artificial" instruments together as puke is being a tad (no offense meant) narrow minded. I mean is not 90% of what we do here Digital reproduction of analog sounds, So what do we have to do to be true artist go back to old style tape machines?

Although i will admit it all started to go bad with flock of seagulls!!

And, Band In A Box doesn't get drunk and puke on your floor.
And it works at 3 am on Sunday.
The Chet and the Merle patterns are great.
And I have yet to hear it complain.

That said, it is only a good starting point.

ORIGINAL: dewdman42


...over time, the level of craftsmanship is slowly creeping down, as is the level of artistry. The public audience is also slowly lowering their standards of what they "enjoy". What difference does it make? It makes a HUGE difference if you really care about music as an artform. If you don't care, and just want to puke out more mediocre garbage that people will "enjoy", then by all means....acidize...

Whoa, that was a pretty ostentatious statement, man. Okay, we get it. You're an ARTist. Ooooo!

ORIGINAL: holderofthehorns

And, Band In A Box doesn't get drunk and puke on your floor.
And it works at 3 am on Sunday.
The Chet and the Merle patterns are great.
And I have yet to hear it complain.

That said, it is only a good starting point.

Haha. Cute.

Greetings all,

Thanks to the earlier posts (ahem) in this thread, I went ahead and downloaded Jammer for comparison purposes to BIAB. I was amused to see quite a number of similarities in the nomenclature as if one program was based on the other plus or minus something.

I would give BIAB a big thumb's up for styles and for style design. I would give Jammer a big thumb's up for allowing better MIDI control in many ways. While using Jammer early on I was wishing that I had it. However, now that I've used the demo for awhile, I'm not so sure that I would use it after all. My impression is becoming solidified around the conception that BIAB plus some MIDI editor is probably more useful for me than Jammer plus the same MIDI editor. This is because I typically work with songs first in BIAB, then export to MIDI, then do massive edits in a MIDI editor. While it would be very nice to have even a little better MIDI in BIAB, it would be even nicer if Jammer had a LOT more musical expertise built into it. Although the control in Jammer is fantastic compared to that of BIAB in terms of MIDI editing, there really isn't much that I can think of that cannot be accomplished with BIAB + MIDI editor if you understand a little bit about how these styles are produced. One BIG omission that Jammer has is that it appears to have no way of constructing styles from scratch, so it's more like a MIDI loop tool. This combined with the lack of extensive musical knowledge (for example, the extensive heuristics options in BIAB) makes Jammer seem significantly more primitive, musically speaking, while at the same time a much better MIDI tool.

If you wanted to go from start to finish without MIDI (uh, I meant "without MIDI editing"), then BIAB would be fine. If you wanted to go from start to finish inside of one tool AND do MIDI editing over details, then Jammer would be better. But if you don't mind exporting/importing and editing in a MIDI editor, then I would go with BIAB again --- based on my very limited exposure to Jammer Pro.

Regards to all,
Dave Clark

ORIGINAL: DaveClark

Greetings all,

Thanks to the earlier posts (ahem) in this thread, I went ahead and downloaded Jammer for comparison purposes to BIAB. I was amused to see quite a number of similarities in the nomenclature as if one program was based on the other plus or minus something.

I would give BIAB a big thumb's up for styles and for style design. I would give Jammer a big thumb's up for allowing better MIDI control in many ways. While using Jammer early on I was wishing that I had it. However, now that I've used the demo for awhile, I'm not so sure that I would use it after all. My impression is becoming solidified around the conception that BIAB plus some MIDI editor is probably more useful for me than Jammer plus the same MIDI editor. This is because I typically work with songs first in BIAB, then export to MIDI, then do massive edits in a MIDI editor. While it would be very nice to have even a little better MIDI in BIAB, it would be even nicer if Jammer had a LOT more musical expertise built into it. Although the control in Jammer is fantastic compared to that of BIAB in terms of MIDI editing, there really isn't much that I can think of that cannot be accomplished with BIAB + MIDI editor if you understand a little bit about how these styles are produced. One BIG omission that Jammer has is that it appears to have no way of constructing styles from scratch, so it's more like a MIDI loop tool. This combined with the lack of extensive musical knowledge (for example, the extensive heuristics options in BIAB) makes Jammer seem significantly more primitive, musically speaking, while at the same time a much better MIDI tool.

If you wanted to go from start to finish without MIDI (uh, I meant "without MIDI editing"), then BIAB would be fine. If you wanted to go from start to finish inside of one tool AND do MIDI editing over details, then Jammer would be better. But if you don't mind exporting/importing and editing in a MIDI editor, then I would go with BIAB again --- based on my very limited exposure to Jammer Pro.

Regards to all,
Dave Clark

Hi, Dave,

Good, thoughtful post. Having never used BIAB, I'm very interested to see your comparison to Jammer Pro. I'm still debating whether to upgrade Jammer or get BIAB, though I still may just solve the issue with the shotgun approach and get *both*. I just spent some disposable income on some other music toys, though, and it might be hard for me to justify to my lovely wife buying both programs........ ;>)

I suppose the bottom line is, how do each of us, individually, use the tools we have. I really use Jammer as a means of getting some (much needed) inspiration for bass, drum and keyboard parts. I typically feed Jammer an already composed song, in terms of it's chord progression and form, and simply use it to generate some cool ideas for drum parts (which I typically edit afterwards in Sonar) and bass parts (which I typically edit in Sonar, then let my bass player hear as a *concept* on which to base his own ideas). I rarely even use the extensive MIDI capabilities in Jammer because I'm not trying to "compose in the box" with it, I'm letting it be my " personal rhythm section", as it were. Indeed, what Jammer generates is rarely what I'd wind up using verbatim, but it really does come up with some very cool stuff as a good starting point for further embellishment. For this purpose, it's a very adaquate program for my uses. Still, I'm very interested to see what BIAB has to offer me, too.

I'm curious: You mention "a MIDI editor" in a couple of your posts. Which program do you use? I'm not a MIDI guru by any stretch of the imagination but I do find that Sonar 5.2 can be a bit frustrating when it comes to MIDI editing. I wind up using the Notation View for everything other than drum tracks because I find it easier to use actual music notation to enter/edit MIDI data than the Piano Roll View. And, the Notation View in Sonar is not it's strongest point, in my opinion......

Thanks for your input on the two programs.

Bill

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your response.

BIAB can also be used as accompaniment. There are many ways to do this, maybe even too many! BIAB can detect chord structure in both audio and MIDI files (audio to a lesser extent, as one might expect), can import MIDI into the "Melody" track (probably also "Solo," but I'm in Linux at the moment so cannot verify easily). You can also manually enter or edit chord progressions, choose alternate chord progressions from a list of recommended alternatives, and so on. I would not think that you would be disappointed in the musical abilities of BIAB to provide accompaniment, but you may be disappointed in the clunkiness of the MIDI interface and in MIDI import. BIAB doesn't have such a thing as the ability to forcibly use (say) certain bass measures in a certain place *other* than through the Styles capability as far as I recall as I write this. You cannot simply place it in where you want and "freeze" it, or not easily that is. I wish there was more of a MIDI editor type capability in BIAB, but this would potentially seriously compromise its ability to provide musically wise assistance.

The most interesting thing you can do is to import patterns from MIDI files into patterns in the Style editor. You can also simply record brand new patterns there, but what BIAB does with the imported patterns is pretty interesting. It chops up the MIDI sequences into 8-bar (maybe also 4-bar etc.) measures and attaches weights to the occurences which you can then modify. You can then impose a new chord structure upon the style and generate a new "song." This new song will remind you of what you imported, but believe me, it will most likely sound radically different. This is where the heuristics become important. You may need to modify what type of patterns can be played, where they can be played, how to play them, and so on. This is BIAB's forte --- which I don't think is matched by anyone. The editor for Styles is Notation, so you would probably feel at home there, even if the keystrokes and mouse stuff is odd at first.

-------------------------

As far as MIDI editors go, I've tried probably between one and two dozen of them, including all the ones in Linux that were available up until late 2005. IMHO most MIDI editors suck bigtime, to be quite frank. The best path for what I do with BIAB is BIAB -> simple MIDI editor like MIDI Orchestrator Plus (now Record Producer MIDI) -> second MIDI editor like SONAR for recording. I've never found a better pure MIDI editor than the Voyetra series for what I do. I *like* the fact that they don't include audio. Many people here cannot use this; I have external synths with enough sounds to get very close to what I eventually use, so I can use the Voyetra editors alongside whatever audio program simultaneously, including SONAR or WAV editors. I would prefer MIDI and Audio to be separated with interprocess communication being limited to what I set up, if that makes sense to you (i.e. common Transport, port connectivity to VSTi's if required, etc.). I would also like to see GUI's separated from the underlying programs, but that's not Windows style of programming, unfortunately.

Best regards,
Dave Clark