Some advice on M.Baker books, and BIAB.

[fep]

The only BIAB I have is version 2008 Ultra Pak, and it doesn't jibe well with Windows 7, the real drums don't work - etc.

So, I guess if BIAB is like real human beings, that would have to be cool. Even if they're computer-generated reproductions of notes once played by human beings, it's still in metronomic time. The only thing I can see that one would be missing is what seems to me a benefit (and you have every right to question it) of playing without the "singleness" of the metronome's beat. With a band, there are so many "rhythmic prompts" - reminders, cues - of when to play; this versus the single and clear "clack" of the metronome.

And about FUN. Yep, that's the bottom line - for me anyway.

Metronomic time in the sense that the tempo is locked in, but not in the sense that the musicians have been 'quantized' to play exactly on the beat. I would bet that when the real tracks were recorded, the musicians were playing to a click track.

Here's an image of some BIAB tracks with an time line expanded, on this track, notice that on measure.beat 25.1 the drums are ahead of the beat the bass is right on and the guitar is slightly behind. For this section, the drummer is 'pushing' the beat slightly. At 25.3. The drums are still pushing and the bass is slightly behind. These RealTracks are scary close to being real, even to the point of that little bit of noise on the guitar track right before 25.1.

Time wise, it's just a matter of stretching or compressing the time of the performance. I have software that can do that. Morphing the notes or chords into the appropriate chords for the song? I'm at a lost on how they do that. Some sort of magic.

[Kojo27]

That's absolutely amazing. The guy who originated this, Mr. PG, is loaded, has probably sold a million of these, at least. So he has the best minds going for his product. I have no idea how they could do this stuff! None.

I do know that I need to get the new version, upgrade. It comes now on a solid-state hard drive, I think. If it really FEELS like jamming with human beings (my version does NOT), then I couldn't argue against it. *Some* metronome, coupled with this - seems that would be perfect, and you've already said you do metronome work, so cool. : )

[Jonzo]

Impro-Visor: Welcome to Impro-Visor

is the poor man's BIAB. Free! It also has some unique features all its own. You might experiment with it and see if it meets your needs.