Originally Posted By: JohnJohnJohn
THANK YOU SO MUCH PAT!!!!!! (but of course, I have loads of questions!!!)


1) pick a MIDI style in the style picker and make it the active style

How do I know what style to pick? What effect does this choice have on my final track? It seems to not matter what I pick as ultimately the track will be using the VSTi instrument sound anyway?


It helps if you are familiar with the styles, because there's no way to demo the sound before you apply it to your song. (Wishlist item!) You can change the sound of the track with one of the GPO patches, but each of the midi styles generates its own distinct patterns. In other words, in a country style the generated notes will be different than in a track generated from a rock style or jazz style.

If you go to BIAB and apply a bunch of different styles to the same chords, you'll see what I mean. In fact, BIAB may be the best way to demo the styles to see which ones you want to add to your project

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____c) assign a specific VSTi/Dxi soft synth for the track

This makes sense...now I am picking something from GPO

at that step, you will be picking from a list of soft synths, and in this case you'd pick the ARIA player because that's what drives the GPO sounds

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____d) use the patch select dialog to pick the patch

But what does this do? I already picked my sound so what am I doing here and what effect will it have on my final track?

good point. If you had picked a general MIDI soft synth such as coyote forte, you could pick the patch used in the current track as described here. But ARIA has its own way of assigning patches to a track... so in your case you wouldn't need to use the right click menu to pick the patch

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3) right click in the RIGHT pane of the track (where the music WAV appears in an audio track) and scroll down the pop-up menu until you find an option that says GENERATE MIDI

I do not see that option...I see Generate MIDI Track with options to choose the Bass, Drums, Piano, etc.

that's the right menu item...

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and when I select that it says "Can't generate on top of an existing BB MIDI track"


scroll down until the tracks change color and pick one of those tracks. The first few tracks are BB tracks and you can't generate MIDI on a track that has data or is reserved for BB

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I tried Generate MIDI Solo and that worked but again I am puzzled as to why I am once again needing to choose from a list of 360 styles and it does not seem to matter what I choose for the final track sound!

OK, start by asking yourself what genre your song will be in. If you're writing a country song and you need to add a piano track, then pick a country style and generate a midi track from the piano part

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I did get some tracks to generate but still do not understand why I need to pick all of those various styles when I have a specific VSTi instrument in mind.


OK, lets say you want to add some of those excellent GPO strings to your song. Look thru the style picker for a style that would probably contain a string section. Classical and ballad styles typically have strings. Pick one of those styles and when you "generate midi track" pick STRINGS. RB will generate a track that will probably sound good with a GPO strings patch applied.

There is no rule for picking the right style to get the sound you want... you have to experiment and listen to a lot of the midi styles. You may want to write down the name of styles that have parts you like

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ey71h8ep047758h/AAC12jNM0Hz9Q8zsh5iDeqNHa?dl=0