I think Real Tracks are great. I have many arrangements where the generated Real Track sounds like the studio musician mastering it knew the melody to the song I'm putting together. Other times it seems like random chance provides the only correlation between the melody and what Real Track generation algorithm provides. I would like to see some more menu driven influence over how Real Tracks are assembled and generated. I suspect the information could be available beginning in Band In A Box.

The Embellish Melody menu item gives a number of parameter driven options for embellishing a melody. How about if that embellished melody could be saved as a starting point for a soloist track. And, if there was a similar generation of a Harmony track (think blues Call and Response, Big Band counter melody, or something like Barbershop Quartet harmony, but get a list of different harmony styles to choose from, and then embellish those and write them out as a separate track. Then if we had an additional option on the Generate track where we could choose to have the dominant influence on how the generation of the Real Track part was assembled (chord pattern, melody, or harmony) we might come up with Real Track generated parts that fit the melody better.

Now, lets take the idea a step further. My preference is Western Swing and Country Music. There was a Band In A Box feature incorporated some time back that had a bucket full of common useful Country guitar riffs. If we could insert break markers in the chord sheet or melody somehow and be able to identify pieces of a Real Track that 'just didn't fit' with the melody, and have a dialog box that allowed us to preview and chose from either a set of riffs contained in the Real Track set or appropriate scales within that Real Track set that fit into the selected space, we could re-generate something that didn't work and replace it with something that does, without throwing out the parts of the track that do fit.

The nature of the piano is that it creates sound by a hammer striking a fixed length string. The force of the strike and the length of decay time are all things that can easily be dealt with in MIDI, and there are good samples available to translate a MIDI piano to audio. Guitars, aside from being a very frequently used instrument in popular music are very unlike the piano. The guitarist has palm mutes, slides, bends, hammer-ons pull-offs, and a tremolo bar. That is not MIDI friendly. Where the Real Track guitar parts are 'right on', the arrangement sounds fantastic, when they are not, the arrangement sounds like "why is that in there?" Having some influence and control of Real Track generation, especially for the guitar soloist Real Track generation would be a nice upgrade.

Thank you for listening.