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Is there anyone using a midi-enabled 'organ' - i.e. 2 manuals in a single device - as a midi input with Biab ?

And if so, does the set-up allow you to assign different patches to the respective manuals ?

Or alternatively, is there a way of linking two separate midi keyboards to Biab simultaneously ?

Ian G.


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I use a mixer. Set the thru on one to the Ketron SD2, and use the actual keyboard (Roland Rogers) on another slider on the mixer. If I want to change I just pull or push a slider so I get two organ sounds with one keyboard.

If you embed at the point you want to switch using f5 you can just change sounds at a certain bar.

The only thing I can't do is play 2 manuals at once getting both sounds, although if I want on the keyboard I can split the keyboard wherever I want and play one organ sound for bass and another for the higher register.


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BIAB currently can handle only one MIDI instrument on the one Thru channel.

You could do like John suggests, though, have one keyboard on the BIAB Thru channel and another just being amplified "by itself" to play along with BIAB.

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Right - what I suspected. but it was worth checking.

My wish would be to play both simultaneously, mainly from the point of view of recording but being able to have two sounds - e.g. an acoustic bass and lead tone over.

I already 'have the technology' to split a keyboard and assign various combinations of voices either side, but it is often difficult to find a split-point that suits both parts (although I realise even having two 'manuals' doesn't absolutely solve that, unless they are both full range.)

I guess it's back to record and sequence, as far as Biab is concerned....

Thanks, John and Mac.

Ian G.


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Well, you could do it, but not in realtime, at the same time.

You could record one manual to the Melody track and the other to the Soloist track, one at a time. At playback, nobody but you would know.

Or--

You could do it rather easily in RealBand, with one manual on one channel and the second manual on another MIDI channel.

Maybe start in BIAB to get the song sketched out, then export and open in RealBand to add the two keyboard parts.


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It's been a very long time since I've played an organ. However, most are multi-timbral. You'd have to look up in your manual exactly how it works, but I suspect that for the input, the top manual would be channel 1, the second manual, channel 2, and the pedal board channel 3. As to how you'd do the outputs, you'll have to set them up in the BIAB Prefs, but you should be able to do it.

You may end up with a Type 0 midi file, or .seq file, which will have to be split out.

However, since BIAB is already providing much of the instruments parts, you'll probably want to use Real Band instead.

Gary


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It should be possible to record up to 16 channels to the melody track simultaneously. Thus, if the split organ can be configured to send each manual's data on different channels, it should easily be possible to have them recorded 'in realtime'.


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How would you assign the BIAB Thru to respond to two channels at once?

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Never done that myself to date - just inferred from BB demo files with midi guitar styles. Midi guitar is recorded assigning each string to a different channel. If that shouldn't be possible from within BB, PG Music must have used a different program such as a sequencer to record those midi bits and bytes. While that's possible, somehow it apears that BB would be lacking s.th. if it couldn't be done with BB means alone.

That's from the help file:

    Use Thru Channel: Band-in-a-Box uses the Thru channel as a part, just like the Bass/Drums/Piano, etc. The Thru Channel is re-channeled to the Thru channel as assigned in the MIDI settings dialog. If you would prefer to set the Thru channel yourself from your MIDI controller, set this to "No."

Sounds like unchecking this checkbox should enable the melody track to receive multi channel data sans rechanneling those data to some channel assigned in the Pref./Channels dialog.


Martin
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