The Steel Guitar Forum

I was just messing around with Band In A Box 2006. I've used the program (in all it's different inversions) for several years but today I was just playing with all the different buttons. I came across two really cool ear training games.

Music Replay - it plays a series of notes that gets longer and longer as long as you can repeat the notes in the correct order. Remember the game about 20 years ago with 4 colored buttons and 4 different sounds - Simon Says - or something like that. Band In A Box has the same thing. And you can select the number notes to be repeated. Anywhere from 2 notes to a full 12-tone octave.

Pitch Invasion - has spaceships coming from the top of the screen. They want to steal your instruments from the bottom of the screen. When the space ships appear, they play a note. You must play the same note to fire the correct cannon to shot them. Playing the wrong note will fire, but it results in a miss. Too many wrong notes and the space ship will steel your guitar or other instrument.

I had my 8-year old playing the game for a few minutes. She was able to do okay on 2 to 4 note games. See how well you can do.

This is in version 2006. I don't remember ever seeing this stuff in other versions but who knows.

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Gary Shepherd

Carter D-10

www.16tracks.com

I've also used BIAB for a few years now and can get it to do what I want but I know I've only scratched the surface. BIAB does so much more and now and then I just go through the help files and try to learn more about it.

In a dead heat to see which I learn first, PSG or BIAB, Pedal Steel is winning by a length and a half...Just using the drums is good enough for me tho I learned to write my own background note by note and thats a lot for a musical "genius"? like myself.......

I haven't tried it yet but there's also a button for training on chords and intervals. I suppose it helps you practice recognizing major, minor, diminished, augmented, 6th, 7th, 9th, etc chords and intervals.

If you've never taken any music theory, chances are that you (I'm speaking of the average musician) have trouble recognizing all the different sounds and/or transposing them between keys. Well, if this game works like I suppose it does, that would be a big help in practicing that area of music.

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Gary Shepherd

Carter D-10

www.16tracks.com

Another thing that I've messed with some in BIAB 2006 is its ability to generate new music.

You tell the program to "go" and it will create a new song, with new chords, new melody line, new rhythm. It's cool how many tunes the program creates that actually sound nice. It even creates a randomly generated name like today's tune, Consenting Rhapsody.

Some of these tunes would make nice pedal and lap steel instrumentals.

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Gary Shepherd

Carter D-10

www.16tracks.com

Hey, thanks for the heads up - I didn't know BIAB had an ear training section. I think ear training is the "secret weapon" for steel guitar!

But dang, looks like the ear training is disabled in the demo.

I currently use this program: http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/software.htm

trains for both relative and absolute pitch.

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Sierra "HJ Custom" D-10, Peavey Session 500, Goodrich L10k<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Bryan Daste on 10 December 2006 at 11:38 PM.]</p></FONT>