Nic,
I have a great deal of respect for what my friend here says. Let's break this down a little bit further and really see IF you do need an external midi sound module or not.

I will preface this discussion with the comment that I am a hardware man, and I believe, for the most part, that you get better sounds from hardware, unless you're willing to go to great lengths to program your soft synths.

Secondly, I'll say that I injured myself last weekend, and have been in a considerable amount of pain, and I didn't properly read your original answer to my post. I was under the impression that you wanted your audience to come up and do karaoke with you, not that you were just going to read the lyrics.

Let's look at a couple of things.

1. I always recommend to anyone who has never used Band In A Box before to consider exactly what they want to do with it, and also, to make sure that they have a VERY firm grasp on what they're doing with it. If you are not 100% comfortable with Band In A Box, software synths, and you audio setup, you could be in for a huge crash on stage, at the worst possible moment, because Windows decides to blue screen, or you go to change a song in BIAB, and you get some exception error.

A man that I admire and respect a whole lot is Bob 'Notes' Norton, owner of Norton Music. He's been making aftermarket BIAB styles for a very long time. He is also half of the duo, the Sophisticats. They live and play in the Florida area of the U.S. Bob's styles are great, and are very musical, and he uses them, and BIAB, as a STARTING point for his backing sequences.

Once he gets near to what he wants by using BIAB, he will then transfer the MIDI files, and probably now even the Real Tracks files, to a sequencer. If the MIDI tracks need to be tweaked, he'll do it in the sequencer. Once he gets the perfect backing track, he then renders everything to audio. From there, the audio is stored on his laptop, which goes on stage with him. It's the laptop, and his .mp3 files, that get plugged into the PA system, not Band In A Box.

You can listen to the S-Cats here: http://www.nortonmusic.com/cats/audio.html

Okay, so why all the rain and gloom? I'm an electronics technician by trade, it's what I do for a living. I see computers lock up, crash and do all sorts of weird things at the most inopportune times. How would you like to be on stage, in the middle of a performance, and you've forgotten to turn off your WiFi, and something like Avast Anti Virus pops up and says 'Your database has been updated!' Worse, and more applicable, Band In A Box has been around forever, or so it seems, but if I do something weird, I'll get a crash, or an Exception Error. Then you've got that Windows 'ding' as you're trying to clear the error. Or, even if everything works properly, it still takes 15-20 seconds for BIAB to generate the backing tracks if you're using RealDrums and RealTracks.

If you go into a gig, with your PA and your laptop with a few hundred .mp3 files of music that you've already created, tweaked and optimized, both for sound and quality of sound, you're going to be a lot happier at the end of the evening.

Okay, now that I've gotten that mostly off of my chest, here's the rest of it.

Software or hardware? It depends on you.

If you follow my suggestion above, it doesn't really matter, because all of your tracks are going to be pre-recorded in your studio before heading out to the gig. If BIAB provides a totally killer bass track with exactly the right sound for your song, use it. If not, then create a MIDI bass track, export it, tweak it, and assign it a sound. For that, you can use multiple free VSTi plug in synths, and there are some pretty awesome libraries, as well. Maybe you want a perfect DX-7 sound, and your buddy down the street just happens to have an old DX-7 laying around. Plug it in, and go. Record the audio. Record your own guitar playing as a backing track.

The options are almost limitless in what you can do.

But, if you want to drag your laptop out on stage, pull up a BIAB song, and hit 'Play', my feeling is you don't have to worry about pre-loading software synths for each part, with the Roland, there are over 1,000 sounds, and you can save your song with those sounds so they're automatically recalled. It's just easier.

But, truly, if you're going to perform as a single player, with backing, do yourself and your audience a huge favor of making sure that your backing tracks are polished before you hit the stage, and even the street,looking for work

My two cents, for what it's worth.

Gary

I'm blessed watching God do what He does best. I've had a few rough years, and I'm still not back to where I want to be, but I'm on the way and things are looking far better now than what they were!