Band in a Box with scaler

This is the dream…
Being able to drag’n’drop to Band in a Box.
I know it’s not a scaler limitation. That’s why i didn’t post this into the Feature Request section. But imagine the mischief you could get up to if it was that quick and simple to use BIAB.

I’m still trying to figure out the best workflow for this combo. Once I have something, I’ll make a video to share what I’ve learned. I’m sure 41 fingers has already dome something, but it’s good to have a variety of takes on these things.

1 Like

search within Carlo Eduardo Arellano videos, his posts here in the Scaler forum, and the BIAB Spanish forum as well: he was a BIAB superuser & teacher so his tips can be useful to you

1 Like

@swingmix is also a keen BIAB / Scaler user, so if the gets notifications of being mentioned, he will probably chip in.

1 Like

Yeah he has some very nice music on his channel. I dropped a comment. Amazing guitarist.

I find BIAB challenging so say the least. I am not great with music theory and it seems like BB is geared more towards established musicians. Hard to believe you have to type your chords in LOL I’m sure there are reasons. It has a midi chord import thing but I cannot get the results I expect. The tool is esoteric but full of potential. I managed to sqeeze a guitar solo out of it so I was happy (cos I can’t play any instruments).

I just tried and discovered that although you can’t drag and drop into the VST, you can into stand alone BIAB. You can then manipulate it from there, by maybe creating other parts (base, solo) over the top of the imported progression and then take it to a DAW.

So I just fired up a standard Scaler progression

and dropped that in to BIAB

called up a DANCE3 style, and generated the song. I then exported that as a type 1 midi, and dropped it into LIVE

c3

So although it’s a bit round about, you can embellish Scaler progressions via BIAB abd then do the rest in a DAW.

BIAB (which I have had for over 20 years) I don’t use much at all, except for a few utility functions. However, it’s quite good with jazz styles, so picking a jazz progression from Scaler and then generating the accompaniment in BIAB might work OK.

" it seems like BB is geared more towards established musicians."
That surprises me, because as one’s musical knowledge grows, people will find BIAB far too restrictive. It essentially has pre-canned styles and songs, and it you want to move away from that and be more creative, then Scaler + DAW is the dream combination for many.

I didn’t quite understand the comment “believe you have to type your chords in LOL”
because maybe a majority of BIAB users will use the song picker … I just have the vanilla version, but it has 3200 song frameworks in there.

so picking some ‘song’

loads up a jazz progression

1 Like

Unfortunately Carlos passed a few months ago and it was a triple misfortune

He was a friend, very great at helping others with tips and tricks, even total newbies like me, and very willing to collaborate like in this work with @Bernd

3 Likes

Oh man. That is very sad :frowning:
Sorry for the loss of your friend.

Thanks for all the info, I tried dragging the scaler chords into the standalone, it produced a MIDI import dialog that I hadn’t seen before, but despite me selecting a destination track, it did not import anything when I hit okay. Obviously I am doing something wrong. But who knows what that is, because there is no error message and no feedback.

Honestly, I find this app bewildering - despite reading parts of the manual (that were relevant to what I was trying) and looking at a bunch of tutorial videos. A lot of the stuff just doesn’t work when I see that it clearly works for other people. I don’t know if it’s a version thing or what. I’ve gotten it to work in the past (same installation as the one I am currently using).

For instance, I go to the song picker (never really noticed it before you mentioned it) and it’s empty. So I click the REBUILD button and it’s still empty. This sort of thing happens a lot with BiaB. I suppose I should create a support ticket and all that, but honestly, I can see why you haven’t used it much. It’s like the promise of perpetual motion - never works out because you always have to put in more then you get out.

I think I would always use scale to make my own progressions rather than the popular workflow of using the song picker.

I’d be happy just to generate my own jazz things and then chop em up for hip hop samples at this point. I’d definitely use the song picker for that!

If it worked :frowning:

BIAB is an enigma - mysterious, puzzling, and difficult to understand. On top of that it can be prone to error. But at the same time is simply does what no other software music making app does. It combines audio and midi in a framework of thousands of pre-defined styles to allow you to create your song with an entire band. However, the real trap with BIAB that many fall into is that they get stuck in the box and attempt to do the entire arranging, mixing and recording in the single application. And it does not help that BIAB does not play well with other apps. So the secret is to create a workflow with BIAB in your DAW where you can bring multiple tools together. With that said, it is possible to drag/drop midi chord sequences between Scaler and theBIAB-VST in Reaper. Not so much in other DAWs. If you want to know more, just visit the BIAB forum. Lots of helpful users to point you in the right direction. Tell them Dan sent you.

1 Like

Yeah I should really just continue this conversation on that forum. I’ll mention you sent me :wink:

I know BIAB is worth the effort, but it’s frustrating when what works for others doesn’t work for me. I tried drag and drop from scaler to BIAB using Bitwig, Studio ONE Pro 5.5, Reaper 5.99 (I haven’t renewed my subscription yet), and Ableton 10. None of them populate the chord sheet. All of the attempts behave in the same way. I have the latest BIAB 2022 with the latest update installed. I dunno what I am doing wrong.

I will come back to BIAB every now and then and keep hacking away at the sequoia with my pocket knife. Thats how it feels anyway. Right now it’s all just work and no reward. It’s like working on an old clunker in the garage. The workflow will be worth it in the end. It’s just weird that it’s such a battle. Not like I don’t know computers. I used to be a software developer for many years, now I can’t figure out a music tool. Just bizarre. A new experience for me…

Right now, the only thing that’s keeping me going is that I spent do much money on it. I got the “Ultimate” edition (I think that’s what it’s called) and I’m not getting much bang for buck right now. Doing data entry into a spread sheet is not my idea of inspired creative flow. Right now it’s stubbornly refusing any other entry point to core functionality.

I finally got the song picker to work after many, many attempts.

1 Like

One hidden part in BIAB is that it wraps up a series of utilities which I suspect were written as stand alone. Some of these can be quite useful, so I do find myself turning to BIAB for a variety of things which are the answer to “how do i…”.

My tests on audio chord detection showed that in many cases BIAB was better than Scaler, but primarily because Scaler has no time dimension, and BIAB does.

Also the Real Tracks thing can generate a useful quality audio clip for some purposes. If I wanted to generate quick vanilla country song, or some lift/ pub background music, it’s a credible low cost tool.

certainly cheaper than paying a session musician, and there are loads of them embedded into BIAB. That one time I typed in chords and generated a song with a guitar solo (which I used in Studio ONE) still gives me hope.

Scaler and BIAB are my favorite music software.
But can’t work together.
I get inspiration from the SCALER hit chord pads.
I also enter chords in BIAB to produce different styles of songs.
In the future, with the continuous improvement of SCALER and BIAB, it will be better to use

1 Like