This subject comes up with regularity around here.

There is a reason that our "wishful thinking" won't work, though.

If you sample a real instrument in a studio, for example, the saxophone, and sample every note and store that note in a file that is coded such that each note that is sampled is assigned the correct MIDI Note Number, all you would have is what you've already got -- a MIDI synth/sampler.

It would sound no more realistic than whatever the abilities of the current MIDI samplers, hardware or software, are capable of doing.

The RealTracks are not done "one note at a time" but selected by the entire musical phrase from the raw RealTrack recorded file.

By selecting and playing back the entire musical phrase, instead of the single notes forced into succession of the standard MIDI method, the artificial performance can include the many subtle events that the MIDI playback cannot do, simply because the MIDI standard has no provision to do them and the MIDI sample does not contain the required information either.

In the case of a Sax, the tonguing, slurring, different Attacks on different notes as a phrase is played, dynamics that are "automatic" in nature because a good horn player brings that and more to the situation, Tone (Timbre) whereas the player can play the exact same note at different times in a phrase and have it sound much differently depending upon what the player wants to "say" at the time, all this and more cannot be done by storing only one note with one attack and having it play back according to a data assignment of Note Number, Duration, Velocity.

So, for the time being, we have what we have. And that's not a bad thing, actually, since the RealTrack concept does indeed add so much more to the game in the way of realistic sounds.

For the time when you absolutely must have the musical hook, the musical phrase that is important to the song, or perhaps the Melody that you wrote or an existing Melody, we can take good advantage of a phenomenon that many of us immediately noticed and commented on back when PGMusic first introduced the first RealTracks to go along with the RealDrums.

And that is the phenomenon that happens when we mix MIDI tracks with RealInstruments.

For some reason, likely a psychoacoustic thing, the use of a MIDI track with a good quality MIDI synth/sampler solution, along with a few well selected RealInstruments for accompaniment, yields a whole that sounds bigger than the sum of the parts.

So it is possible to have those Melodies, Hooks, etc. in a BiaB project song if required, if we choose to work with what we have at present.


--Mac

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