Hi, from somebody who owns the whole set on hard disk, I feel qualified to speak about this.

When you write a lot of songs, 90% will never make it to recording because there is just too many to do all that work, if you can actually play all the parts too.

I think Band In a Box was meant for blues musicians and jazz musicians. If you take a standard I, IV, V chord progression, and want to jam on top of it, it's great for that.

it's great for creating a background drop to standard jazz numbers, and jamming over that with your instrument. great for practice that way.

When it comes to creating an ORIGINAL arrangement, that's not going to happen. I think we can dupe ourselves into believing that our song is nicely arranged or that it sounds like a unique song, because nobody has heard our song before. Everything the band in the box plays is going to sound like it THATS the song.

All you need do is try a cover song, and see how that turns out.

It will sound like some guy who at the last minute gets a call for a gig at a small bar or restaurant, and he's working with midi or something else to come up with canned arrangements of the songs.

The question is not how it sounds, it sounds pretty good at times, it's how it feels, and how it supports your song.

That is why it can only serve as a personal demo of a song.

If you get lucky and it so happens that one of the canned arrangements works really well for the song you wrote, it can sound pretty darned good.

But I think if you are going to place the song online somewhere where other well produced and arranged music is placed, you only give an instant weak impression of your music.

It kind of sounds elevatory no matter what you do, and it's just not exciting enough to knock somebody out with.

But it does work well for a demo you might give to your band, or to an engineer or producer who is going to take those idea and expand on them.

The temptation to roll with it is heavy cause its so convenient, easy and cheap, and you control it all, no back talk from the drummer or bass player.

But at the end of the day it's about having a great demo/production not having an easy time making one.

It's light years away from replacing real on the spot musicians adapting to your song

Last edited by Bugsey; 06/25/13 02:49 PM.