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makes you feel like playing."

"This is a great program for learning more about jazz and for developing your playing skills."

Books

• The Desktop Musician
• Becoming a Computer Musician
• Macworld Music and Sound Bible

Magazines

• American Music Teacher, October/November 1995
• Macworld, August 1993
• Electronic Musician, January 1993
• Macworld, November 1990
• Downbeat, October 1990
• Keyboard, October 1990
• Electronic Musician, September 1990

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Selected Review Quotations

If you're into jazz, you'll like MiBAC Jazz...[it] does what it does better than anything else. This product is constantly compared to Band-in-a-Box because it works in a similar way. Chords are entered into a lead sheet, and the program generates music based on the selected musical style. MiBAC Jazz concentrates all its energies on one type of music: jazz. Not surprisingly then, MiBAC Jazz produces convincing results in various jazz styles. These include Jazz 4/4, Jazz 3/4, Slow 4 (l2/8 feel), and Latin, each with different grooves that change according to the tempo. For example, MiBAC Jazz's "piano player" comps quite differently in a burnin' bebop tune than in a medium swing tune. It is intended to be used as your own personal jazz rhythm section for practicing improvisation, but it may be useful as a composition/lead sheet-creation tool as well.

MIBAC JAZZ is Band In A Box's hipper, ...more serious cousin... MiBAC is dramatically easier to use, too; its manual and interface are all-Mac, all- readable, all-nice ... especially in light of MiBAC's song-structuring features and its superb printing options, it may be better suited for players, teachers, arrangers, and jazz fans of any ilk.

Ostensibly, MiBAC Jazz Improvisation offers similar features to Band In A Box. Both advertise themselves as improvisational aids offering a back-up group of piano. bass, and drums; yet the different philosophical approach behind MiBAC makes it more complete and flexible.

The piano part has some interesting options. Chords can he voiced in open or closed positions and you can specify all manner of chord alterations to be randomly substituted for the original progression. Both piano and bass parts can be transposed up or down an octave, and the actual timing of the bass can be set slightly backward or forward with a menu option called Tweak Time.

The Chord Help tool is a utility for listening to any chord in MiBAC's vocabulary and then transferring it to your song. A clever and useful feature is that chord symbols can be renamed in case you're used to different nomenclature (a common situation, since there is little standardization).

Three types of substyles are possible: up tempo, ballad, and normal. These invoke textural and rhythmic variations in the accompaniment. Like their parent styles, they too can appear at any specified moment in a song. A difference from Band In A Box is that substyles are determined by tempo settings. You adjust a range of metronome markings between which changes automatically kick in. To change the rhythms of individual parts, just change the tempo marking for selected measures and use the Write tool.

As with the other parameters, you can selectively add new drum sounds to parts of the song. First you define a new drumset file by entering the appropriate MIDI note values alongside the ten default descriptions. After saving the file, select a passage and invoke the Change Drums command so the song can temporarily load a drumset file.

MiBAC is also quite flexible after you leave the writing mode. Performance utilities are well thought out. For instance, up to ten songs can be chained together and you can program the time delay between each of them.

MiBAC Jazz is an excellent example of software that targets a specific musical problem-jazz improvisation... Installing MiBAC Jazz is a breeze... How does it sound? The rhythm section sounds real - not a mechanical drum machine feel. You can tailor your drummer to suit your own tastes...considering the well-thought-out manual, excellent musical feel, printing and chord options, this is a wonderful tool for developing jazz improvisational skills. Nice work.

What's great about MiBAC's rhythm section is how much it sounds like the real thing...MiBAC's complete MIDI implementation makes it easy to set up the program so that it works properly with any drum machine, synthesizer and MIDI system.

There were a lot of nice things going on that immediately set it apart from any 'auto' bass-and-chord-generator I have heard. This program makes you feel like playing.

The program produces very authentic sequences, and does so much more quickly than one could enter the parts with a MlDl keyboard and sequencer. It seems to be specifically designed for the improviser lacking in keyboard proficiency, making it possible for an instrumentalist or vocalist to work on the changes to any tune without the need for a rhythm section or a play along record. It also allows those creating their own jazz compositions to hear the rhythm section play the changes in a stylistic manner. The manual is well-written and contains an excellent tutorial that takes the user through virtually all the features of the program... the transpose function is excellent and will be a time saver for instructors.) The ability to customize rhythm-section backgrounds will be helpful to individual students at any level of improvisation ability, and will be especially helpful to teachers, both in private studios and in the classroom, who want to provide accompaniment tapes for their students.

MiBAC is full of helpful little extras. A defeatable two-bar count-in will help you start in time with the piece. During playback, you can independently mute any of the three parts. Based on tempo and the song form, MiBAC can calculate the song's duration in minutes and seconds. You can string up to ten songs together for automated playback, with a programmable delay between songs. A tuning function will transmit a user-selectable MIDI note for tuning up your instruments. There's a display mode that highlights the current chord name during playback. You can print a chord chart based on your MiBAC song, and an option will automatically transpose the piece into the key of your choice. We haven't seen many manuals more complete than that supplied with MiBAC. [If you're looking to get into jazz improvisation...MiBAC covers the bases.

MiBAC Jazz ... is an intelligent "auto-accompaniment" program- but that description really sells the product short. When I loaded up the Jazz demos, I was amazed. You can tell that Jazz was designed and recorded by real jazz musicians who want computer assisted music to sound like real music - not like computer games. Work (don't just play) with the [software], and you will be greatly rewarded.

 

The program transcends simple production of traditional play-along material. Because it offers digital and computer assisted instruction MIDI based, you can instantly change tempo and key and playback. Students can adjust the tempo to practice lines, voicings, intonation, etc. and then turn off the piano or bass part on the software's song and create their own. Singers and instrumentalists will appreciate being able to play the same tune or exercise in all 12 keys, allowing them to master their favorite improvisation patterns. (Consider learning John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" first as a ballad, then a medium bossa nova, then a medium-fast tune and eventually as a bright up tempo tune!). By using the program's songs as accompaniments for wind auditions, the teacher also has an experienced rhythm section and can achieve more "even" results. Or a teacher can create and record accompaniments for jazz ensemble solos or a combo selection for more effective student practice...Bass players can control the "groove" by choosing the exact rhythmic placement of the bass. By pushing ahead of, or pulling back from the beat, songs with a "laid-back," "on- top-of" or "ahead-of-the-beat" feel can be created, making for a more "authentic" practice than traditional metronome ticks. Drummers can practice drum breaks/fills because each instrument can be turned off at any time letting the user first perform the break/fill unaccompanied, then with accompaniment coming in "on-time" at a designated place in the music. With enough practice, drummers will improve to the point where they will not rush or miss beat one after a fill.

The Export command will create piano and bass parts for students who do not understand the stylistic and harmonic implications of a chord chart. Using compatible printing software, piano and bass players can be given print-outs of your newly created play-alongs to study the piano voicings and bass line construction. The Edit Qualities command lets you customize your most commonly used chord symbols. For instance, if you call a C major seventh chord a C "triangle" 7 instead of the software's default, ''CM7," you can change the name using the Edit Major Qualities command. All 28 chord qualities can be adjusted with the Edit Major, Edit Dominant or Edit Minor Qualities commands. The Write/Transpose command will instantly transpose a song to a specified key, and display the chords in either the new or previous key.

Because of its applicability to jazz education I highly endorse "Jazz Improvisation Software." Though geared for educators, it can easily be operated by older students. It is convenient to play back in any key, and with an incredible variety of tempos without changing pitch or style. Piano voicings are easily altered with 28 preslected chord qualities (including common 9th, 11th and 13th tensions, various suspended, diminished, augmented and other altered chords); while drum parts are sometimes predictable, they are never boring; and the logical bass lines are extremely spontaneous. The finished product is quite musical, especially for a first generation recording. [It] is an innovative product that offers many features. Its many jazz education applications will provide new and exciting vistas for teacher and student alike in contemporary music instruction.

[MiBAC Jazz] has its own assortment of sophisticated features that make it ideal for jazz players and others interested in working with jazz styles.

MiBAC's large harmonic vocabulary includes 28 chord "qualities." And if you don't like the way the program names chords you can substitute your own names.

Once you've entered your chords, MiBAC analyzes the progression and applies sophisticated algorithms to produce a highly musical sounding accompaniment. The piano voices move logically from measure to measure, the bass lines step smoothly through the changes, and the drum parts swing.

Creating a basic accompaniment, however, is not all this program can do. MiBAC lets you customize the performance in a number of ways. For example, you can vary the rhythmic placement of the bass part to provide a laid-back feel. Or you can have it right on the beat or slightly ahead of the beat. And you can have these changes throughout the piece or only in sections that you specify.

You can also save custom drum setups and have them available for special rhythmic and textural effects. And you can apply the Piano Voicing feature wherever you want to change the quality of the piano parts from a closed voicing sound to an open voicing sound.

Furthermore, MiBAC Jazz includes a powerful Random Chord Alterations function. It lets you specify any of several chord substitutions within the piano part. The program then randomly substitutes these chords to impart an improvisatory quality to the piano accompaniment.

And that's not all. You can change the dynamics (independently for each instrument) and tempo anywhere you want in a piece. If you'd like to play a solo you can use the Write Rests command to insert one or more measures of silence for any combination of instruments. And you can transpose into any key, send Program Change messages, and "humanize" the rhythms by varying amounts.

Each song can have up to 96 measures with a 16-measure introduction and coda. You can repeat the song as many times as your computer memory will allow and each repeat will be unique. That's because the program draws from a large assortment of piano voicings, accompaniment rhythms, bass lines, and drum phrases. And these variations combined with the different styles create a back-up band that's exciting and occasionally surprising, just like a real band.

When you're finished with your arrangement you can print out your chord changes or save the accompaniment as a Standard MIDI File. This is a great program for learning more about jazz and for developing your playing skills.

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web: http://www.mibac.com
email: sales@mibac.com

MiBAC Music Software
P.O. Box 468
Northfield MN 55057

phone: (800) 645-3945
phone: (507) 645-5851
fax: (507) 645-2377