Hi Bob-

I agree that scat singing would sure be cool, but also agree that that would probably not be done well by an RT. (Technology will never completely replicate human musicians, and we should be glad for that!)

However, I was just thinking of long held (half and whole notes mostly) oohs or aahs (not random, you choose which one, and which gender, or both. To me it seems like that would work, for many varied pop and jazz styles, but of course I could be wrong.


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I'm with you Maiki but I also think it would be extremely difficult to do because of the lack of smooth transitions from one chord to another especially with ballads which is where strings would most likely be used. Listen to some ballad RT piano tracks. Notice how choppy they are? It's because a very important piano technique is the use of the pedal for sustain. On ballads a pianist is using the pedal all the time for arpeggios to transistion between chords and phrases. Since Miles Black doesn't know what chords you're going to use all those ballad piano RT's just chop all the chords and they sound mediocre at best. Up tempo piano RT's sound great because for latin or rock styles not so much pedal is used. I think RT strings and vocals would have the same problem. If they're not blending over the changes with a beautiful wash of sound they would sound bad imho.

I just bought a new Kurzweil PC3 and it has those killer Take 6 vocals in it. For ballads I have to use the pedal a lot to work them into the chord changes. When I do it right which is a bit tricky because they're velocity layered, they do sound really nice. Yeah, I just realized as I'm writing this, if you're talking jazz scat RT's it would be even more difficult because part of the beauty of that is all the different elements, do, daa, dat, dot, ooooh's, all that stuff. If those things were all in the same RT, every time you put in different chord changes those do's and dat's and stuff would just be jammed into random places and probably wouldn't sound nice at all.

I can think of a good test though. Now that we have looping, I can record some of those Take 6 vocals from my Kurz and create loops with them but would that be any better than me just playing them live? Hmmmm...I could create some loops and at least post them and you guys might find them useful. I wonder if that's legal if I used Kurz sounds for that? As a guess, maybe not.

Bob