He Dan,

Jim is right when he says the patches or plugins matter a great deal.

But more importantly, I think, since the more sophisticated midi supertracks, the stylemaker has become more sophisticated too. More velocity-sensitive and it allows better triplet “management”

Nevertheless, Jim is right when it comes to choosing the right plugins. And it takes some searching since the GM standard is rare among the “better” vst’s. For the moment I primarily use Native instruments’ Vintage drums or 50’s drums and I only use brushes: you have to adjust the mapping and search for the right sound. And for bass I use Fluffy’s simple bass or one of the freebies (Chad’s double bass or xperimenta’s pizzicato bass, these are great, but take some tweaking). Sadly GM ready vsts like roland’s or non gm ready softs like sampletank 3 have very poor sounding double bass or brushes.

But the above setup works great.

By the way, exchanging these styles is easy. But, When they show up in style picker, the info is not there, you should make a Ls-file which I won’t bother myself with. So, yeah, you just copy the style to mail or forum and the receiver should paste it in the bb-directory. And it can be used.

I have made some more modern swing and bop styles, you know: less boring, every once in a while the drums accent the beat or the afterbeat... and bass is more dynamic. Walking bass can be very boring if everything has more or less the same velocity.

Just one quirk that I can’t seem to figurre out: there is an “intro” part to styles, but I can’t edit it in stylemaker, since it doesn’t show up.

Biab, Kontakt, Sampletank and lots of nice libraries, from Fluffy audio to Abbey Road drums.
Check out these great contemporary Jazz Styles: www.jazzstylezz.com