Hi Kevin,

I feel your pain; I started using this program about 6 months ago and had a lot of trouble initially getting RB to work satisfactorily, but with the generous help of several people at this forum I gradually worked through the issues one by one and have found that it was well worth the patience.

Ryszard is right; once you get the Roland VSC working as your software midi synth, your midi sounds will improve greatly over the stock sounds you are getting now from your computer. Once you have installed it, open RB and you can click on the "Midi DRV" icon near the top of RB, unselect any of the midi Output Drivers that might currently be selected by clicking on the white space, then check the box for "Re-Route MIDI playback to default Dxi/VSTi Synth" and select the "VSC Dxi" choice from the dropdown box as the Default DXi/VSTi Synth". Then click the "OK" box. A pop-up box will open up saying "No Output drivers are selected - Continue Anyway?" Click "Yes", and your midi will now be re-routed to the Roland VSC synth.

Your sounds will get even more realistic once you start to master the concept of using the "Realtracks" generation feature. Realtracks are not played back by midi, but are sections of sampled performances by real musicians and involve real audio rather than midi. It will take some study of the manual to make this most useful to you, but you will likely find it to be very worthwhile. The program will automatically generate these tracks for you, after you choose the parameters you want to use, such as time signature, tempo, chord changes, and maybe most importantly - style.

Do a lot of reading, ask questions, and tackle the problems one-by-one, and I am sure that with the help of others here you will find this program to be a unique tool in your music-making efforts.

Terry

BIAB/RB 2018 PlusPak. Dell Inspiron23 running Win10, 12GB RAM, 2.5GHz i7, Presonus AudioBox USB interface.