[Harp-L] Band-in-a-Box

[Elizabeth Hess <TrackHarpL@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since my earlier post about Band-in-a Box (BAIB), I have received an 
offer of help, a request for help, and a nod from list-owner, so I will 
feel free to post questions here and cheerfully share what I've learned 
so far.

Band-in-a-Box is a very cool program that lets you enter chords in a 
highly intuitive way, make a zillion adjustments and refinements, and 
then you have music (or, for any live-music purists in the audience, a 
very useful facsimile of music).

I can tell that I have only begun to scratch the surface of what the 
program has to offer.  Its weak point is the User Manual, which is very 
disjointed.  The index is downright terrible:  I wanted to change the 
time signature for a piece, looked up "time signature" in the index, 
and found no entry.  Likewise "meter".  There is an awful lot of 
verbiage in the manual about "tracks" and "patches" and MIDI sequencing 
that is frankly over my head, and not enough about things like how to 
make it play all the way through the song, or stop playing when I think 
it should stop playing.

It often seems that the more complex and flexible a program is, the 
harder it is to  *learn*  to use, and that seems to be the case, here.  
At least for me.

I can just imagine a team of software engineers putting the finishing 
touches on it and collectively shouting, "Yay!  It works!  Let's party! 
 Oh.  We have to write documentation??"  The manual got sort shrift.  I 
think it deserves better.  But the program seems GREAT for creating jam 
tracks and backing tracks for practice.  I suspect that in the hands of 
a power user, it can also create tracks suitable for public 
performance.

There is a seminar about BAIB on the schedule at the Garden State 
Harmonica Festival.  I don't know who's presenting it, but I encourage 
people to go.  I wish I could be there.

For the rest of us hoi polloi, I will send a follow-up post explaining 
how to set up the second-simplest-possible jam track for a 12-bar 
blues.

Elizabeth (aka "Tin Lizzie")