PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows RealTracks - realistic expectations?

Hi all Band-In-A-Box users!

I first heard about the concept of RealTracks in BIAB a week ago,
so the last days I've been trying to figure out what's realistic
to expect from this new feature.

Here's a few questions that hopefully some of you can help me with:


a) It seems like you can enter more or less any chord you like!?
Do they all sound equally good? I quess they haven't recorded
every single possible chord (at least for guitars), so there must
be some pitch-shifting going on in the background. Is this noticeable?


b) How much can you alter the tempo before it becomes too much?
My experience with loops is that it´s easier to speed things up
than slow down...


c) Do some instruments sound almost the same, even though they are
in different styles? In my book that's a good thing because it
makes it easier to create more variation. The actual sound can
usually be shaped with effects afterwards.


d) The styles are roughly 2-8 measures long and have 2 variations, right?
Do you sometimes wish for more variation when you´re making a complete song?


e) Which improvements would you like to see for realtracks in the future,
besides more styles?


Ok, I should better stop now before you all fall a sleep

Personally I think the demos on the web sound great, but it´s of course
interesting to hear what you users have to say!

Hi obladi_oblada,

I've been using BIAB for a few years, now. In my opinion, RealTracks are nothing short of brilliant - especially when one couples assembling the tracks and parts of tracks into an arrangement using RealBand. Below are my thoughts regarding your questions/concerns.

a) I have used a vast repertoire of chords through multiple keys and have always got good results. Sometimes, sound artifacts appear in a track generation. When this happens, I use RealBand to regenerate the region where the artifact(s) occurs. Generally, though, once the whole band is playing nothing unusual usually stands out.

b) From my experience, around 10 to 15 bpm below recommended tempo and 20 to 30 bpm above recommended tempo sounds ok.

c) There are many styles that incorporate common instruments. You can also choose to add any RealTrack instrument to any style.

d) In BIAB there are sometimes 4-variations and it is possible to build styles so that have 4 variations. At this stage, RealBand only accommodates 2 variations. Personally, 2 variations suits me fine. I augment variations by shaping instrumental volumes - bringing different instruments into the foreground, etc. This is another reason that RealBand is important to me. Using RealBand, it is also possible to add a heap of other tracks (RealTracks and MIDI). This gives one the potential to make a huge number of style variations. In this regard, the 2 variations simply become the foundation for an arrangement.

e) I cannot imagine what changes the future will bring. I have learned, though, that PGMusic have the ability to surprise and amaze! At this point in time, RealTracks suits me perfectly.

Regards,
Noel

Hi Noel,

Great songs thanks for sharing, I really like the vocals on 'Dreaming 'bout Dancing' Would be awesome if you would let us know a few of the song titles that include tracks from BIAB and include in short form how you used BIAB along with your live instruments and singers to create these songs. Giving general examples of how the process works using BIAB may help ignite the creative process for musicians and show how BIAB can be incorporated into their song writing skills. Sometimes I use BIAB to generate the drum and bass tracks and add rhythm guitar, guitar solos and vocals later using another multitrack recording DAW.

On another note kind of off subject: Loop oriented music making software is great, but there is somethings BIAB offers that is not really found in these softwares.

BAIB helps you realize melody, and if you have problems coming up with one for your chord progressions BIAB can make one for you helping you to better understand how melodies are played over chords. BIAB helps guitarist like my self break out of three chord song writing.

BIAB helps you develop an ear for what other instruments are doing in the song by building drum beats, bass lines, fills, chorus etc. BIAB is not simply a drum machine that you program a simple 4 bar beat and let it go, it will do intro's, endings and everything in between.

BIAB is customizable, you can make your own music styles and apply them to your songs even multiple styles in the same song and never miss a beat.

There are books with just about every chord played by man, for guitar, piano and everything in between, but sitting down with one of these books strumming each chord on the guitar once or twice and trying to fit the chords together might not be of great a benefit if you never heard how they are played in a complete song. BIAB fits the bill because it can generate a complete song in any key you pick no sweat and show you how chords fit together and sound played in a professionally scored song and If you would like to hear how your song sounds in a different style, go from Country to Bossa Nova to Rock and everything in between BIAB can do that too, change keys? Print out sheet music for the band? its a breeze. And if you want to learn the guitar chords or the cool bass line BIAB came up with, no problem with the Guitar Window. BIAB also prints out tablature for guitar and bass along with guitar chords, staffs, lyric sheets etc.

BIAB helps you get your songs into printed sheet music that can be passed down for generations to come. I really like this feature!

BIAB is a great investment and a great ear training and music teaching program and many of the Guy's and Gal's on this form are top grade professional musicians that know their stuff and are very helpful to BIAB newbies.


Warren

What he said. Very good synopsis, Noel. Since you covered most of the good stuff, here's some bad or not so bad depending. The biggest one is the endings. Biab or RB will both implement holding a chord or note just fine when it's midi but the Real Tracks are audio files. It's impossible to take a quick strum or piano chord and make it extend out 3 or 6 beats like an ending. There's a lot of complaints about this but right now there's nothing that can be done except to do that last chord in midi using a good sounding synth and hope it blends well enough with the sound of the Real Track. Other than that, there are programmed endings for the styles, they just may not be what you're looking for.
The other thing is trying to create a real arrangement with breaks, definite bass lines, drum fills stuff like that. You're limited with what you can do just using the RT's or RD's again because they are prerecorded tracks. A question that comes up over and over is why can't I use the Sax or Guitar soloist RT to play my own solo or melody part? The program can take an RT soloist and chop it up and put it back together in interesting ways using your chord changes but it's not going to play your own part back note for note. You have to do that with midi.
Those demo's are real, no funny stuff going on. As you noted, a lot of them really sound fantastic. You can load most of these demo songs into Real Band and play with them yourself.
In spite of these limitations, these tracks are awesome and I wouldn't be without them.

Bob

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Yeah, very good vocals on 'Dreaming 'bout Dancing', definitely
not generated by BIAB

It´s reassuring to hear that you like the sound of the chords.
Steinberg used to have (still have?) a product called virtual guitarist,
which sounded good but sometimes lacked certain chords. That could cause
an unwanted "hole" in your song that was difficult to fill...

I read a thread that gave me the impression that the RealTracks consists
of recordings of progressions in three different scales. That suggests they
only have to pitch stretch up and down 1-2 semi-tones, which seems acceptable
to me.

I must admit I'm a bit worried about the hold issue though. If there
are short chords in fast style I guess that could be a problem.

Sometimes it´s possible to create longer notes by time stretching
or looping in a sampler like Native Intstruments Kontakt, but for
some material it's not easy...like distorted guitar chords. I would
probably try this after exporting the tracks from BIAB.

At the moment I´m not sure what to do, maybe wait and see how RealTracks
develops or put an order right now?

My two cents worth -
Order it now and get to know it, and I suspect that it won't be long before something is done concerning the holds issue. It is a pain sometimes, but when you have a song that doesn't need them, wow, the real tracks are great. Not perfect, but great. I won't ever go back to the days without them, and when I have to have a hold, the old midi still works pretty well.
Good luck.