Another vote here for more piano styles. Although there are some great RealTrack pianos, they're a lot more prone to glitching because of pedaling and chord voicing. I'll often be hoping that the drum hit will hide the transition.

That's when I start searching through the MIDI styles for a comparable piano part.

And I'll echo the need to treat MIDI tracks similar to RealTracks, in that you can request a particular instrument, and get a MIDI style that only contains that instrument. Trying to dig through styles to find one that's got the sort of piano or string part that I'm looking for is an exercise in frustration.

What I really want is to be able to select "Piano", and see the MIDI piano styles.


With the suggestion of sections, it seems to me that BIAB MIDI styles should be able to take advantage of harmony styles. That is, let's say that I wanted some "Big Band" sort of riffs. Couldn't a MIDI style be developed that was basically monophonic riffs? This could then be "auto-expanded" by the auto-harmony function into full section arrangements.

So (being the lazy arranger I am), I could pull up a "Big Band Strings" on the Strings channel, and add "Big Band Horn Stabs" on the piano channel. Both would use the auto-harmony function to create the voicing I wanted.

Once I picked "Big Band Horn Stabs", I could have the option of changing the harmony on a bar-by-bar basis. So I might choose "8va" at one point, "3 part close" at another, and "4 part open" when I wanted a really big sound.

BIAB already has this sort of functionality. It just seems that it could be made a bit more transparent and easy to use.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?