Thanks all for the very helpful information. The reason I am experiment with this is mainly because I am not a good musician but I do love to be able to get a computer to do something I have created - with a little help from real musicians.

I want to create some original melodies (at least that's what I dream of - lol). I have studied the music theory but this does not get me too far when I am faced with a blank screen. In Ableton I can come up with a nice chord progression and a drum track and this does get me the ability record a melody by recording myself humming to the backing. The humming is then converted to midi in Ableton and then, with some adjustments, I get my melody (for what it's worth)

Anyway, since I have a vast range of midi songs on disk I thought I might be able to press these into service by giving me at least a chord progression and a drum track. RealBand is really good at letting me load a midi file and automatically connecting the appropriate instrument (albeit Coyote, but that's good enough for this purpose). I can also correct the instrument names in RealBand before exporting to Ableton (quite often if I load directly into Ableton I get names like 'track 1, track 2' etc which doesn't help when I want to connect an appropriate VST in Ableton.

I also like the chord detection feature and I appreciate the caveat pointed out regarding it's reliability, but anything that helps is great for me. What I do is discover the key and then transpose it to C for a major scale and A minor for a minor scale - so that I only have to deal with the white keys when working with my midi controller keyboard in Ableton.

The only problem I had with this is how the detected chords on the chordsheet align with the midi tracks on track view of RB. During playback it didn't look like the chord position on the chordsheet was playing the chord on the midi track so I had sometimes to adjust the offset but I wasn't sure if this really helped. I think this is to allow for a lead-in.

There might be many better ways of doing this but this seems to work for me.

Thanks to all

John