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Norton Music's EXPANDED Styles

You can now put up to 8 chords in one Band-in-a-Box bar of music

Plus download a FREE Norton Music EXPANDED style

What is an EXPANDED style?
It's a solution to 2 Band-in-a-Box Problems (or Limitations)

PROBLEMS (Limitations):

  1. Band-in-a-Box will not allow you to put a chord on both a beat and the eighth note directly preceding that beat

  2. Band-in-a-Box will not let you put more than 4 chords in one bar of music

SOLUTION:

   Norton Music's EXPANDED Styles for Band-in-a-Box

Frustrated with these limitations, Bob "Notes" Norton of Norton Music invented and developed EXPANDED styles in the 1990s to solve both of these nagging problems in Band-in-a-Box.

Can you enter & play this 12 bar blues progression in Band-in-a-Box?

Problem #1: in bars 1, 2, 3, and 4 there is a chord both on a beat and on the 8th note before that very same beat. Band-in-a-Box will allow you to push a chord to the 8th note before a bar, but if you do, you cannot put a different chord on the first beat of the next bar.

Problem #2: In bars 8 and 12 there are chords on 4 consecutive 8th notes. Band-in-a-Box will not let you put chords on consecutive 8th notes. To play this you would have also had to put 5 chords in the bar. If I wanted to get unmusical about this, I could have put 8 chords in those bars, one for each 8th note.

 

With Norton Music's EXPANDED styles you can!

How does it work?

  1. Think of the numbered sections in the Band-in-a-Box matrix as cells instead of bars. With an EXPANDED style, two Band-in-a-Box cells equal one bar of music. What was a quarter note is now an eighth note.

  2. The tempo is doubled, but the EXPANDED style plays at half time to compensate for that (note the fast count-off). The style is designed to play properly at that doubled tempo.
Listen to the EXPANDED style for the chord progression above.

This demo was played on a Ketron SD2 synth's General MIDI bank
using Band-in-a-Box and recorded with PG Music's Power Tracks Pro Audio app.

If your browser does not support the HTML5 Audio Element, Click Me

 

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, so here is how it's entered in Band-in-a-Box...

Notice the old Windows XP version of this example? Norton Music's EXPANDED styles work on all versions of Band-in-a-Box, from 1990 to the latest Windows and Mac versions of today.

Did I say a FREE style?

 

I made a simple EXPANDED demo style and song to show you how the EXPANDED styles work.

Download your FREE style here (free_e_style.zip)

The style and instructions for both PC and Mac are in the zip.

For an e-disk of 24 more EXPANDED styles Click Me!
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