PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows MIDI stylistic control - I Don't Mean Styles..

Curiouscat, if I'm understanding you correctly what you're asking about is known as midi control. The problem is there is no one standard for that except for General Midi (GM). GM is very basic midi control, it does not allow for the type of things you're talking about. Biab is a GM based program therefore does not have any way to interface with a third party vendors totally different method of midi control.

What I mean by that is different mfr's will come up with their own proprietary ways of accomplishing these things but that means you have to buy into the complete package. It's not only the VST's themselves it's the physical controllers that are required as well. Garritan has their own way of allowing a user to put expression into the different horn patches but their method is completely different from Kontakt's Session Horns. Session Horns also has their way of controlling the horns that's completely different from others methods.

This is part of their sales and marketing. Listen to the results of how our genius programmers did it compared to the crappy ways our competitors idiots decided to do it.

Bottom line here is many folks who are new to midi make the incorrect assumption that midi is midi therefore everybody's implementation works the same. Outside of the very limited GM standard, that's not true at all.

All of this is implemented from within the plugin itself, not the host program and you have to also buy a physical controller that's best suited for that particular plugin. Then what you've done is create what is essentially a whole new instrument that you have to learn before you can make it sound the way you think it should.

Here's an example, you like Trillian for bass. You can put T on the bass track as a plugin easily. But, Biab will only send it basic midi commands like volume, expression, modulation. None of those will take advantage of T's full capabilities. For that you have to be manipulating a midi controller live in real time while the bass part is playing to make T sound like you want. The only way Biab could do that is if it had internal midi programming that was specifically tailored to Trillian. That would also mean specific song styles for T because it's the styles that control everything Biab does.

Now, when you think about that you can see just how complex this could get. People use and like all kinds of different plugins. For Biab to take full advantage of them they would have to have that programming and song styles for every big name VSTi out there. You think we have too many styles now? Think of all the duplicate styles that would be specific to all these different VSTi's.

The only way to take full advantage of something like Trillian would be to take the basic Biab generated bass track to a separate DAW, set up T with your controller and record the midi commands onto the existing track. Then you would get a finished product and this is exactly one reason why so many people will tell you they use Biab to create the basic song but then they import the tracks into a DAW for final finishing.

Bob