PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist Use of MIDI pedals - LONG OVERDUE!

I am a long time user. I have a very capable studio. I use BIAB every day for piano. Here are two suggestions that would greatly improve BIAB

Please bear in mind that if you use BIAB and are a musician, you might have a harp between your legs, or a dodgy music stand with an iPad with which to enter. You might be in a pub with a pint in one hand and a lead guitar - in the dark......
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It's always been hard to keep a looped part of a track stable, if the app receives some rogue input from a long list of things, the loop fails and the music cursor travels onwards out of the loop. What we need first is stable looping, so first...

What I would suggest stable visible looping. Using virtual "push pins" (seen on cork boards), be able to set the beginning and end of a chosen section. The area would then highlight itself and STAY like this, until one push pin was deselected.

The second thing is the use of stops and loops - USING A MIDI PEDAL. I mean here the use of a sus pedal like MIDI pedal like can be plugged into various systems and receive and transmit MIDI data. An on/off kind of instruction.

Here are some examples of the vast difference this could make:


1] You're going around the cycle of fourths, you have four bars for each key. You're vibing on while, you feel your done with this, you press the MIDI pedal and BIAB goes on to the next four bars - etc.

2] At a certain point in a song, you want a stop, not one with a prescribed period, but a part where you can show off your astonishing air guitar impersonation of Eddie Van Halen. This might go on a while.....unfortunately . Then you want the virtual band to pick up with the beat again. All that is required for this to happen is a MIDI pedal! In brief flexible tacets. NO hands required!

3] On performance of Girl from Ipanema you want to start with a free impro on Jobim's chords. Your going to try to disguise the well known melody and then pull it in in bits - your not sure how this will go until you do it, it might be eight bars, or if you have ideas then 12 or 16..... once again a MIDI pedal could do this.
4] In similar ways MIDI pedals can control the timings of outros, various repeats, introducing in segments.

Broadly, using a pedal offers the musician escape from the creative constraints of fixed patterns, in my opinion if this feature ALONE could mean that the 2025 BIAB is worth the price of admission!


Perhaps some would not agree initially, but if you think about this, such a feature can (with the right interface) be used to control any MIDI signal so there are many ways to explore this idea. It can transform BIAB. Expression pedal data could be used too, to control velocity and more. It will bring the interface up a level and offer better ways to use BIAB.

If the interface is well constructed this can be a highly intuitive list of options, the user can be shields from MIDI programming.


Z

Sounds like a great idea.
I thought some of the functionality was already available but I've never dived into it.
+!
Lloyd S