"Band-in-a-Box is bad at generating professional guitar solos"
Nope. I'm not talking about notation, I'm talking about the quality of a generated guitar solo. You can sit there for an hour to partial regen, the result is still not guranteed. Try it yourself. I'm not talking about humanization here. RealTracks are already humanized. I'm talking about musicality and quality. Why don't you give yourself less than an hour, generate an easy 16 bar solo, and send me the mixed MP Go with key of C, 65 bpm, even feel, use a typical pop melodic chord progression:
F-G-Em-Am-Dm-G-C-C7 F-G-Em-Am-Dm-G-C-C
Whatever RealTrack you choose, partial regen however you want, get it done in an hour or less. If you can get a decent enough electric guitar solo in your mp3, then you can forget about Guitar Pr and string note input all the nonsense. =======================
Hey MusicVillain,
OK, I generated the solo that you requested, with your exact specs, chord progression, tempo and feel.... and you can listen to it here ...
Just pressed play. The soloist sounds fine to me, actually sounds great. So I don't follow your comments about "Band-in-a-Box is bad at generating professional guitar solos"
(Note: please don’t hijack this thread with a different topic. Start a new thread in this case)
I hate to say this, but that was possibly the most boring guitar solo I've ever heard! I kept wanting to click "Stop" but I thought I should listen to it all the way through if I was going to comment on it.
It was the kind of pentatonic stuff you'd expect to hear from an intermediate player who had just learned his pentatonic scales a couple of weeks ago.
This is just my opinion. Obviously you must have liked it or you wouldn't have posted it.
> This is just my opinion. Obviously you must have liked it or you wouldn't have posted it.
Yes, I do like it. It was requested and intended to be a simple melodic solo following the chord progression, and it does that very well. The style was a Praise and Worship soloist, which plays very melodic solos, consistent with that genre.
I understand your point that it sounds “simple”. So we can just choose a different Realtracks soloist, that’s going to play using all 12 notes. For example, here is "4188:Guitar, Electric, Soloist CountryBalladSlowJohnny Ev16 065". You'll hear lots of chromatics, bends slides etc. This sounds more like something Mark Knopfler might play with Dire Straits.
Solo, take 2, more chromatics/bends/rhythmic variation etc. playing the same chord progression requested above. This was just as generated the first time with BiaB, no editing.
My take on this is yes it is possible to get a good sounding solo. Like anything it takes some work. If you play a live solo you don’t always nail it the first time. Sometimes I generate a solo and it does actually suck, it misses notes in spots, other times it sounds great. Midi based solos are work as well.
BiaB in general is a creative tool, and requires some effort to create. If you work at it you can get some remarkable results.
HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96
>With creativity and some effort one can produce some fantastic music with BiaB.
Yes. But to be clear, the two solo examples above were just what you get without “creativity and some effort”. I just pressed play.
And there are about 7 tracks in those demos (drums/bass/rhythm/pads etc), not just the guitar solo track. And I didn’t put any effort into any of them, just pressed play once for the whole thing.
I mention that because many people assume we work hard to make our demos. When in reality all we do is type in a chord progression (takes 1-2 minutes), and then press play. The proof of that is that the demo files aren’t frozen, so that when you play them you’ll get a different version than us anyway.
But yes, if you want solos that sound better (or more customized) than my two examples above, you can use “creativity and some effort”. In particular, 1. highlight the region that you want to have a different performance for, and press Ctrl-F8. This will generate a different performance with different notes, and you can keep doing that and get different parts until you get the one you're looking for. This applies to any RealTracks part. 2. If you need to further customize it with specific phrases, you can add playable RealTracks which will use samples to play any phrase you enter.
Biab is wonderful what it can do with audio, that's why I bought it in 2009, that's why I'm still here. The musical programing is great it just needs that greatness in other areas also that are lacking for frustration free creativity, as these are equally important. If you could do the same in Biab/RealBand/Plugin as I can do in Reaper with the track sections it will further improve Biab to allow for more creativity control.
It a shame things take so long to get there that's all.
Hey Peter, yes, Take #2 sounds much better than Take #1. In Take #1, Dave Cleveland's style is just slow scale stacking, while in take #2, Johnny Hiland was going medium speed with slide, vibrato, legato, hammer on and pull off to add more taste.
However, even in Take #2, it's still very obvious a scale stacking piece with no musical arrangement or motif design. I'm not trying to be picky here, but I don't think I would ever put a 2-minutes-generated solo into any of my songs. Those easy fast generated guitar solos will never stand a chance in the fierce competitions on Bilibili or other platforms.
To give you an idea of what a "designed solo" is, I used exactly the same style "CALM3" of which you chose, with the same tempo, key, feel, and chord progression, to create a 16 bar solo in a Virtual Guitar.
You can tell there are long and short notes combined and repeated in the same pattern to form a motif. By no means this solo is perfect, it needs more work, and the creation process is time consuming. But if a solo can attract viewer's attentions on Bilibili, then it's worth the time.
I'm also trying to use BiaB to do some partial regen (Alt+F8), but haven't got any decent result yet to share.
Peter, it would be kind of you, if you could tell us the BiaB users, how to open and read a .bt0 and .bt1 file. Why? Because these files are RealTrack chord mapping files. If we can read it, we will know which chord is recorded to which bar of the .wma source file in the RealTracks folder, then we can directly open, chop, and comp the wma source files according to chord, works much faster than partial regen twenty times for one bar.
A Canadian music producer, singer songwriter, composer, and professional guitarist.
Given that all the BiaB instruments are based on established relationships, methods and motifs, the soloists sound very credible to me. And some of the individual licks are very, VERY cool. Not groundbreaking and certainly not breathtaking, especially in longer passages as others have noted. But if you want something like that...introduce the human element. The whole basis of BiaB (I think) was to provide an aggravation-free backing band for soloists. (Queue the drummer joke)
Last edited by DC Ron; 08/18/2301:41 PM.
DC Ron BiaB Audiophile Presonus Studio One ASUS I9-12900K DAW, 32 GB RAM Presonus Faderport 16 Too many guitars (is that a thing?)
Peter, it would be kind of you, if you could tell us the BiaB users, how to open and read a .bt0 and .bt1 file. Why? Because these files are RealTrack chord mapping files. If we can read it, we will know which chord is recorded to which bar of the .wma source file in the RealTracks folder, then we can directly open, chop, and comp the wma source files according to chord, works much faster than partial regen twenty times for one bar.
I thought they were just beat files and all the info is in ST2 XT2. If you want all that info just use the track injector.
I might have an easier way to do it all soon rather that having to use the Track Injector. If you use wav files you can also write the info in as cue points that you can see if your DAW will display them like Reaper. All the sections below you can edit to tweak or get the solo you want and be able to change the track to DI <> FX:
Solos are great for the genres BIAB represents. It's ridiculous to expect a software not aimed specifically for guitar to do Van Halen chops. My honest opinion is that while some soloists are far from perfect, they are absolutely usable for sketches, demos, backing tracks, place holders and more advanced music with some editing. A track I am tinkering with now, I have a fantastic soloist RT my Mike Durham (3441).
If I can't find something in BIAB, I go to other sources, not because something is "bad", but because I want something different.
But wait, there is more... There are User Tracks. But that is another discussion.
These are the original solo sections from a Biab track. Any section I can extend or shorten the original playing. If you watch the video where you have the gaps you can manually merge so there's no stop, you can't do that with a consolidated wav or in Biab now how it is: Reaper-RT-Solo-Extend.mp4
These are the original solo sections from a Biab track.
Musocity, I watched your video, and I'm very confused.
How did you get the chord information above the waveform track in your video?
Were these chords extracted from BiaB's source wma material, or simple detected by Reaper?
A DAW's ability of detecting chords on an audio file, is usually inaccurate, especially on non-rhythm RTs, such as a lead guitar RealTrack.
Below picture shows what's in a RealTrack folder: a wma audio and a bt1 mapping file.
I tried to open this bt1 file with Notepad++ to see what's inside, but only get mess codes. I assume you need some special software to view the bt1 file.
Imagine if PG Music allow users to view this bt1 file, that would be a game changer.
If a user knows what original chords were assigned to each bar of the source wma file, he can simple drag the audio to his DAW, cut the bars and put together a Slash like guitar solo in less than a minute.
How cool is that?
A Canadian music producer, singer songwriter, composer, and professional guitarist.
I posted more info back a few posts, see below. The ST2 XT2 file for the RealTracks are in the Soloist folder. The regions are just the chord sheet imported from the Biab SGU.
Originally Posted By: musocity
Quote:
Peter, it would be kind of you, if you could tell us the BiaB users, how to open and read a .bt0 and .bt1 file. Why? Because these files are RealTrack chord mapping files. If we can read it, we will know which chord is recorded to which bar of the .wma source file in the RealTracks folder, then we can directly open, chop, and comp the wma source files according to chord, works much faster than partial regen twenty times for one bar.
I thought they were just beat files and all the info is in ST2 XT2. If you want all that info just use the track injector.
I might have an easier way to do it all soon rather that having to use the Track Injector. If you use wav files you can also write the info in as cue points that you can see if your DAW will display them like Reaper. All the sections below you can edit to tweak or get the solo you want and be able to change the track to DI <> FX:
This is wav file cue points written into the wav to show chord changes:
I have sold music to a library in England for TV and Movies, using only BIAB generated parts with very minor editing or none at all in many cases. I would also say, you will never please everyone, ever. It just doesn't work that way. There is a guy here in my town that plays this place regularly, and has for years, and I don't like pretty much anything he plays or sings. But some people must, as does the owner of the place that pays him to play there weekly. That is just how it works.
My wife asked if I had seen the dog bowl. I told her I didn't even know he could.
> MusicVillain: To give you an idea of what a "designed solo" is, I used exactly the same style "CALM3" of which you chose, with the same tempo, key, feel, and chord progression, to create a 16 bar solo in a Virtual Guitar. You can tell there are long and short notes combined and repeated in the same pattern to form a motif. By no means this solo is perfect, it needs more work, and the creation process is time consuming. But if a solo can attract viewer's attentions on Bilibili, then it's worth the time. =====
Your solo sounds great and thanks for posting it. Yes, hand-crafting a solo to fit your song is well worth the time, and allows things like motif/composition development. BiaB’s role isn’t to replace that, but to save you time on your other tracks that don’t require this custom treatment.
>MusoCity: If you could do the same in Biab/RealBand/Plugin as I can do in Reaper with the track sections it will further improve Biab to allow for more creativity control
Agreed, and this is something planned for BB2024 (and BiaB plug-in w/DAWS like Reaper that support these track sections). This will open up lots of additional options when customizing solos and other tracks.
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