PG Music Home Forums User-to-User Post your own Tips and Tricks here Understanding BIAB Styles

I posted this on the BIAB forum and someone mentioned it should be made more permanent, so I am posting this here. I hope this helps in better understanding the differences between BIAB styles, tracks, instruments, RealDrums, RealTracks, and RealStyles.


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BIAB generates music based on styles. A style can contain up to five different tracks (labeled as Bass, Drums, Piano, Guitar, and Strings). The label, however, can be misleading, because each track can actually play any instrument you assign it, and should be viewed as a guide to creating a "band" sound.

Each track in the style has a MIDI instrument associated with it, historically a MIDI instrument, as well as rules and riffs for how to generate that particular MIDI part. When you (re-generate) the song, BIAB will change the part based on the different riffs, contained in the style definition, the tempo, exceptions to the rules (determined by weights and style masks), feel (straight or swing), instrument note boundaries, etc. The style understands part markers for fills, as well as how to handle shots, holds, and rests.

This is how BIAB worked for many, many years. Although you could have a recorded audio track (you singing, for example) along with your BIAB arrangement, it was all MIDI.

Then PGMusic came out with RealDrums. RealDrums are "real" in the sense that they are actual audio recordings of a drummer playing a real drum set (not a MIDI set). In order to use RealDrums, you replace the MIDI drum track with whatever selected RealDrum you choose. When you do that, for BIAB to generate the drum part, instead of using the MIDI engine to figure it out, it uses it's RealDrum engine (for lack of a better term) to slice and dice the drum parts based on rules established for that drum part. However, RealDrums don't know if the song is swing or straight, fast or slow, or anything like that. It just knows where the measure borders are, the time signature, and obeys part markers for fills, as well as obeying shots, holds, and rests.

So, essentially, the RealDrum part overlays the MIDI style drum part, but doesn't obey all the rules that the MIDI style drum would use. So if you took a swing RealDrum and applied it to a straight-feel style, you will get all the other instruments playing straight, but the drums playing swing. That's why you have to know what the other parts are playing before making a RealDrum selection (unless of course, you intend for one to be swing and the other to be straight).

The other cool part about BIAB styles and RealDrums is that you can create your own. Bob Norton (who posts often on this forum) has made a business for himself by selling 3rd party styles. There are now user-create RealDrums being offered for sale, as well.

Which brings us to RealTracks. Like RealDrums, RealTracks are pre-recorded audio (by noted session musicians) that are also sliced and diced to fit the song, but must also honor chord changes (drums don't have to do that). That's the reason RealTracks take up so much more space than RealDrums. Using the proprietary ZPlane Elastique time and pitch stretching engine, the RealTracks can respond to tempo and pitch changes.

Within RealTracks, there are both rhythm instruments and soloist instruments. Rhythm instruments tend to be chordal (where appropriate) and soloists tend to be more single line melodious. PGMusic has also transcribed many (but not all) of the RealTracks so that the part can be represented by MIDI notes, but it is not a true MIDI version of the performance. It lets you study the part, but if you played the associated MIDI transcription, you would not get the nuances of a live player, only the printed notes representing that performance.

Just like RealDrums, to be used in BIAB, a RealTrack must be overlaid on one of the existing MIDI tracks (Bass, Piano, Guitar, Strings). The RealTrack does not have to have any relation to the underlying MIDI part, so again (as with RealDrums), you need to select an appropriate RealTrack that goes along with the overall feel of the "band and song".

When you overlay a RealTrack on a MIDI instrument, that MIDI instrument does NOT play any longer; you hear the RealTrack instead. You can save this configuration for future use and it is called a hybrid style (containing both MIDI parts and RealTracks parts). In the BIAB StylePicker, the convention is to start the name of Hybrid Style files with the equals (=) sign.

You can also create a style that overlays all the instruments with RealTracks and RealDrums. This is what PGMusic calls a RealStyle. The ones that PGMusic ships are RealTracks that they have determined work well together for a certain sound. Yes, once loaded into BIAB, you can remove a RealTrack and there will probably be an underlying MIDI track (or maybe it's just blank), but it will have no relevance to the style, because PGMusic has to start with some style. Some people have complained that they did that and the song sounded awful. That's because, just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD do something. BTW, RealStyles files by convention start with an underscore (_).

With RealTracks, there are no weights and masks as with MIDI styles. So, for example, in a MIDI style, you can say that if the next bar is up a fourth, then the bass should walk up to it. You can't do that with a RealTrack. It obeys its own rules based on the chord structure and tempo.

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FYI -

• There are 187 RealTracks sets consisting of a total of 2133 RealTracks
• Many RealTracks that sound good together are combined into RealStyles, which is a special style consisting of only RealTracks/RealDrums.
• There are 29 RealDrums sets consisting of a total of hundreds of available RealDrums.
• There are 77 MIDI styles sets consisting of thousands of available styles.
• There are many hybrid styles, consisting of a mix of MIDI and Real intruments.
• Add to that the new MIDI Supertrack (which uses a different engine than standard MIDI tracks, and adds a whole new live feel to the part), and you have lots of options available.

I hope that made sense. Please be careful to use the word "style" in proper context.

John:

I've copied and pasted this posting to my ever expanding "BIAB & RealBand Notes" document.

Thanks for taking the time to post. I was not aware of the naming conventions. Useful information for those that want to develop custom styles.

Thanks John. I'm also copying it into my BIAB reference folder. We really appreciate it!!

Stan

Always glad to help.