I'm not sure how good it is as a writing aid but it's a create learning tool. I've only had it a month or so and haven't really explored it in much depth. I always end up messing with the styles and jamming along. I've started getting quite good at jazz improvisation in the last couple of days.
Even though there are hundreds of styles, there never seems to be one that's quite what I want when I enter my own progressions so my own songs end up different to what I was originally after. I'll have to investigate the finer points of the program I suppose.
Here's something that I thought was quite cool though: I had a pretty good track going earlier today and I'd worked out a good melody and solo to go with the rhythm and particularly the bass line BIAB had created. I dumped the track out as a MIDI file, read it into Power Tab, printed the bass tab out, loaded the MIDI file into Cakewalk and recorded my melody and solo. Over the weekend, I'll learn the bass line I printed out and record that instead of the MIDI bass line and redo the rhythm. I'll probably have to redo the melody and solo too. I only recorded them today to see what how they'd come out and I hadn't recorded with the computer before and Cakewalk has been sitting around for ages waiting to be used. I should have a pretty good track by Monday morning
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