PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums RealBand A few quewstions about Realband?

Hi Folks,

Jazzmammal posted a verly helpful reply in the biab forum hope he doesn't mind me copying it here,

"Oh yeah, RB is very cool. First 48 tracks. Second the regen of individual bars but most important you can create several different versions of any part by using different styles. Think about that one, you're using one style in Biab and it gives you all the instruments. Lets say you're curious what a different guitar part might sound like. In RB you simply arm a blank track and generate a different part based on a different style just for that one track without changing the original generated track. That means you can go back and forth while the song is playing between two different guitar parts or 3 or 10 for that matter. Some can be RT's some can be midi parts. Can't do that in Biab.

I do this a lot with drums. One track could be the basic beat, a second track could be percussion and the third might be a third style for just the C section or whatever. Using the track mute buttons you can audition these different parts while the song is playing. Don't forget you have the substyle variations to work with too and that brings up another "trick".

For each track in RB you can change the chord grid. Think about that one too. You've generated your basic song using the chord grid with substyle part markers. Those markers will force drum fills in addition to varying the style. Change the chord grid for a new drum track keeping in mind you still have the original one, that won't change. That forces a fill in different places without altering the substyle for the other instruments. You can also change the chords and substyles for any single instrument so you might have the guitar playing somewhat different chords and substyles from the piano.

Almost forgot, this works as long as you do NOT have the checkbox "Regenerate whole song" checked!

This can get quite complex but it gives you a lot of flexibility. The key thing to remember is RB is a audio/midi recorder and sequencer. Each track stands on it's own just like any other recorder you may own or used to own. You can experiment all you want with certain tracks without changing what you don't want to change.

When you mix this you can use the volume nodes to mute and activate different parts of all those tracks and wind up with a good mix.

Some of this you can do in Biab but it's clunkier and you only have 7 tracks so you can't experiment like that. Biab is great for basic song creation, pick a style, load in the chords and hit play. Simple, and that's good enough for lots of folks but when you really get into it and you want to add this or that or think gee, what would that nice guitar part I hear in another song sound like in this one then it's time to move it to RB.

Bob"

A few things there I was totally ignorant of for example, how do you change the chord grid for a particular track?
And how do you add for example a different midi style for a particular track or selection of a track?

Thanks a lot for any help.
Musiclover

Hi musiclover.

Re changing the chord grid ...

The only time RB generates an entire song is when an sgu/mgu file is first loaded. After that, future song generations or track generations are user initiated. Because of this, and once that first generation is performed, it's possible to change the chord chart and regenerate individual tracks with different chords.

I often do this so that only one instrument (e.g. Piano) will play chord extensions and I have the other instruments playing major or minor chords only. Since extensions usually involve dissonant tones, I follow the classical principle and prefer not to double the dissonance over too many instruments.

As far as I'm aware, it's not possible to save individual chord charts for each track.

Regards,
Noel

Ah thanks very much Noel I think I get it now, once the biab song is loaded in Realband, one can enter different extensions of chords and by selecting individual tracks from the big generate icon, a variation on the main song chords can be played.

But only one chord grid is visible in realband at any time.

Hope I am right in understanding your reply and thanks very much again Noel.

Musiclover

Yep, musiclover. That's exactly how I understand it. I'm sure that if I've got it wrong, someone will jump in to correct me

Regards,
Noel

That's how I understand it too, and how I use it.

You can generate whatever you want without affecting the other tracks. Brilliant.

About changing the styles, it's pretty much the same thing, select a new style then regenerate whichever midi or instrument tracks you want to, one at a time.

I've found a pretty good way to figure out RealTracks that will sound pretty good together is to look at how PG Music has grouped RealTracks together into sets. The sets also have styles so you can find similar styles.

musiclover,

Jumping on-board Jim's comment ...

As Jim says, simply select a midi style (using Stylepicker) that has an instrument sound you like, right-click on the track you want to put the instrument on, and then select the below from the pop-up menu.



Regards,
Noel

P.S. I haven't played around too much with this feature yet. It's very useful, though. Especially for pad sounds like strings. Midi strings are great because it's easy to change notes (if needed) so that chords link together smoothly.