PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Is this possible

I am using Band in the Box 2013 and I really like this sax sound that is part of a style. But I would like to play my own midi notes and then engage that sax sound so that my midi notes are triggerign the sax sound, into a wav file. Or, i'd like to import a midi file, and assign that sax sound to it, so that it can made into a wav.

Is that at all possible?

Thank-you

The likely answer is no.

However, that assumes the "sax sound" is a Real Track. Which is a good assumption since it "sounds good". Remember RT's are audio files and cannot be minipulated as you are suggesting.

On the other hand all that triggering of the sax sound via midi is of course possible if midi is what you have in your style and the sound is actually coming from a synth.

But I doubt it ....

Cal_d, if you are asking if a RealTrack sax can be used to play the MIDI melody, the answer at this time is no. This has been a common request on the Wishlist, and there are some good discussions about it recently posted there.

I am making the assumption you are referring to a RealStyle containing a RealTrack of a sax. If that's incorrect, please clarify.

You can get either hardware or software MIDI synths that will sound OK on a sax part; not great, but often acceptable. MIDI itself is just commands with no sound of its own, so what you hear is entirely dependent on what you use to play MIDI back. What do you have now to play MIDI? Look in your MIDI Devices, Output and tell us what is selected. Also tell us whether you checked the Use DXi checkbox.

EDIT: jazzmandan said the same thing before me

What you are trying to achieve could be done with SoundFonts, assuming you want to sample your own sax specifically, because you sound like Getz, Desmond or Coltrane. As I do not meet any of those criteria, I use a Ketron SD4 which has pretty nice sax sounds.

With SoundFonts, you can sample any number of acoustic sounds and bundle them into a font. In general saxophones are among the hardest because of the variances in attack, decay, vibrato etc.

If you are looking for the ultimate sax samples, I would look here: (and buy a woodwind controller)

http://www.ewiusb.com/review_SaxBrothers

Thank-you for your replies and advice. I had anticipated that answer, but wanted to be sure. Yes, i was referring to a midi triggering a Real Track. I've got some decent plug ins to use for the sax, but I really liked the real track sound of the sax. Oh well, wishful thinking I guess.

Thanks again. I appreciate the time you all took to respond, and I will check out the link to the sounds.

Yeah, unfortunately, I've not found a way to do that either..... I certainly would love to be able to do that but that seems to be one of the limitations of BB/RB.

I have tried all sorts of things to get this done but nothing worked.

Having said that...this is still, hands down, the best program for music on the market because what it DOES do, it excels at.

This subject comes up with regularity around here.

There is a reason that our "wishful thinking" won't work, though.

If you sample a real instrument in a studio, for example, the saxophone, and sample every note and store that note in a file that is coded such that each note that is sampled is assigned the correct MIDI Note Number, all you would have is what you've already got -- a MIDI synth/sampler.

It would sound no more realistic than whatever the abilities of the current MIDI samplers, hardware or software, are capable of doing.

The RealTracks are not done "one note at a time" but selected by the entire musical phrase from the raw RealTrack recorded file.

By selecting and playing back the entire musical phrase, instead of the single notes forced into succession of the standard MIDI method, the artificial performance can include the many subtle events that the MIDI playback cannot do, simply because the MIDI standard has no provision to do them and the MIDI sample does not contain the required information either.

In the case of a Sax, the tonguing, slurring, different Attacks on different notes as a phrase is played, dynamics that are "automatic" in nature because a good horn player brings that and more to the situation, Tone (Timbre) whereas the player can play the exact same note at different times in a phrase and have it sound much differently depending upon what the player wants to "say" at the time, all this and more cannot be done by storing only one note with one attack and having it play back according to a data assignment of Note Number, Duration, Velocity.

So, for the time being, we have what we have. And that's not a bad thing, actually, since the RealTrack concept does indeed add so much more to the game in the way of realistic sounds.

For the time when you absolutely must have the musical hook, the musical phrase that is important to the song, or perhaps the Melody that you wrote or an existing Melody, we can take good advantage of a phenomenon that many of us immediately noticed and commented on back when PGMusic first introduced the first RealTracks to go along with the RealDrums.

And that is the phenomenon that happens when we mix MIDI tracks with RealInstruments.

For some reason, likely a psychoacoustic thing, the use of a MIDI track with a good quality MIDI synth/sampler solution, along with a few well selected RealInstruments for accompaniment, yields a whole that sounds bigger than the sum of the parts.

So it is possible to have those Melodies, Hooks, etc. in a BiaB project song if required, if we choose to work with what we have at present.


--Mac