Band-in-a-Box Rocks

BitWorks Music artist Photon composes and arranges compositions using many different instruments and tools. He has scored pieces for dance performance (DC's Next Reflex Dance Collective) and released a multimedia album on BitWorksMusic.com under the name "Unit Vector".

Today he reviews the composition tool Band-in-a-Box, from PG Music.

"Like a lot of people, I always thought that Band-in-a-Box was nothing more than a glorified drum machine, but after playing with the demo I can say it is a lot of fun. Adding and substituting chords is really easy, and I'm no chord expert. Then I read this:

The amazing “Chords from MP3″ feature (Audio Chord Wizard) automatically figures out the chords from any MP3, WAV or WMA audio file, and displays them in Band-in-a-Box. Just load in any MP3 file and you’ll instantly see the chords. The Audio Wizard also figures out tempo, bar lines, key and fine-tuning from the MP3, WAV or WMA audio file.

Does it work? This function is unfortunately disabled in the demo but if it works it is a miracle to me. By converting audio to chords, it would also allow me to export these chords as a standard midi file and or an arrangement. I also could imagine improvising midi without a metronome. The metronome stifles my creativity, yet it is important for notes to fall within the bars when sequencing music."

Thanks for that review Photon! Another amazing tool we have come across is Sibelius. One feature we discovered is that you can scan in a piece of sheet music and Sibelius will convert it to MIDI and play it. It's great if you don't have sight reading skills (like me).