PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows BIAB 2016: Do the new styles support MIDI?

I mostly use BIAB to generate rhythm section material that I plug into music notation programs or DAWs as MIDI. As impressive as the RealDrums and RealStyles are, I just don't use them much. It isn't clear to me if any of the new styles can actually be saved out as MIDI. Does anybody know about this?

Hi Pumps2

Welcome to the neighborhood

You can save some real tracks as MIDI but the results may not be an exact replica of the real tracks sound.

Check this thread out here

Trev

Realtracks across the top toolbar that are underlined contain midi data. It's intended to be used with real charts.

Trev that is exactly why we want RTs and RT styles available in MIDI. We want a different sound or feel and we can make them play what we want to play when we want them to play it. That is something RTs can not do.

No hate mail please. I have stated many times that I have used RTs but not necessarily in my songs.

Thanks. I never noticed the underlines. That explains why some of them never worked.

Any idea if any of the new RealStyles can be saves as MIDI? If not, it looks like I would be paying $50 per style for the 3 new MIDI styles.

Exactly. I often drag piano, drum, and bass tracks into Finale in the process of building big band arrangements. I don't print that stuff. I just show those parts as slash notation, but I want the groove there for the playback in Finale. But because of PGMusic's concentration on styles that can't use MIDI, I often have trouble finding a groove that is ideal. It always seems as if the grooves that would be best cannot be saved into MIDI.

So I take the best I can find and then go into Finale and adjust the notes as necessary, mostly deleting clutter.

Plenty of new MIDI styles at http://www.nortonmusic.com

mp3 demos available too.

Thanks I had forgotten about that. This seems like just what I need. Are all of these styles MIDI? In other words, can I drag the instruments onto that "MIDI" icon to pull that track out in MIDI form, the same as the PGMusic MIDI styles?

I have put #26, #8, #11, and #16 on my Santa list. Those sets definitely include styles that I could have used on projects this year.

Anything that you can do with a PG Music MIDI style, you can do with a Norton Music MIDI style.

I make them in the PG Music StyleMaker app.

Insights and incites by Notes

Lets see if I got this right. If I load any style RT or MIDI I can replace any track with a different RT or MIDI file. right. So if I want a RT style but want to use my ez drummer I would load a midi drum track and channel it to the ezdrummer. I can't play the real drum track as a midi file but I can replace any track with a MIDI track. Right?

The Drums track can be MIDI Drums, yes.


I'm not so sure about doing it that way. I think it will use BiaB's internal MIDI drums. Others will know.

Yes, that is forcing Biab to use it's own midi drum parts, it has nothing to do with somehow converting a Real Drum track to midi. And, most of the Biab midi drum parts were recorded live on an electronic midi drum kit.

Here's the problem as I see it. People constantly get fooled when they listen to a Real Track/Drums. It sounds so good but of course it's just not quite what you want but still, what a great sound. So you ask if that track is available as midi.

You have to step back, take a minute and analyze why you like the RT so much. It's because it's a real player, playing real instruments or drum kit in a real studio just like what you hear on a favorite commercial recording. These recordings are not made for single note samplers they're recordings of phrases with all the nuance of both the instrument itself and what the player is doing.

You CANNOT duplicate that in midi. If you are a midi wizard, a great player, have tons of experience and you're using thousands of dollars worth of the best midi libraries AND CONTROLLERS then yes you can do pretty well with midi. But for anybody else? Forget it. The implied point in these threads is somebody wants to take a midi part that is taken from an RT/RD, paste it into Biab and simply hit Play. That ain't gonna cut it and it will sound like all the other lifeless and dry midi tracks floating around.

Instead of spending thousands and spending who knows how many hours to learn midi inside and out I think it's more cost effective to pay the $400 for Melodyne and use that to edit the RT/RD's audio. Cheaper, easier and faster.

Bob

But remember, if you force drums to MIDI, it is going to use the MIDI drum patterns for the underlying style that was used to create the RealStyle, which won't sound anything like the RealDrums that were used and may or may not even go with the song you are working on.

Right. It is only the drums where you can do a substitution to get a MIDI-capable track of the original track doesn't do MIDI. And I have had very poor results trying to force MIDI tracks into a style. I never seem to get the right groove. What I have had to do in most cases is copy the whole BIAB file and apply a different style to the song that has a MIDI drum part that will work. Then I extract that drum part and combine it with the others in my DAW notation program.

I think I've bought every BIAB upgrade for the last 10 years, including the ".5" upgrades. But I just don't need any more RealTracks or RealDrums. What I need is better MIDI content.

PGMusic has taken pride in being a pioneer in the field of musical styles, and what they have done over the years is impressive. But they need to understand many people simply don't want closed-end systems when there are so many tools that are open and interoperable. We want the ability to move the content easily among programs and use out own VSTis when we choose.

It is ironic that several DAW makers have introduced "Drum Replacer" technology that can analyze an audio file of a human drummer and convert that to MIDI, which can in turn be run into the best drum VSTIs. If PG music insists on producing their own proprietary sounds, the least they could do is also develop the "drum replacer" technology so that we can easily get that content as MIDI.

Pumps,

Something you might like to play around with is saving Realcharts as midi. This is found under "Prefs | Realtracks".



I haven't played with this before. After activating it, I loaded a song file that had a number of Realcharts associated with the various tracks, generated the song and saved it as a midi. The generated tracks that had Realcharts saved in the midi.

The below pdf lists all the Realtracks. I've sorted it by Set # so that you can see the latest sets. (Because the file is 18 megabytes, it might pay to right-click on it and save it to your hard drive - rather than left-click to open it.)

2016 Realtrack list showing Realcharts (18 MB)

Version 2016 introduced Sets 228 - 253. I've highlighted these yellow. If you look down the "Charts" column (highlighted pink), any RT that has Gt or N has Realcharts associated it. It seems to me that there are a large number of new tracks that have Reaclcharts.

With the above "Save Realcharts to midi" option on, it looks like 2016 could be useful for you.

Hope this helps,
Noel

Noel, thanks for that idea. I have not used RealCharts, and frankly find all this PGMusic terminology confusing. I surmise that "RealCharts" are simply the notation view of the RealTracks tracks that are generated for a song, correct?

What is confusing to me is that some, but not all, RealTracks (and maybe some RealDrums -- not sure about that) can actually save out to MIDI. I don't understand why some would and others would not. I also assume that if a particular track can be shown as a RealChart, then it also could be saved out as MIDI directly, regardless of the Realcharts setting. I may be completely wrong about this concept, and would be happy to be corrected.

I am also confused by the style picker. It does provide a selection to show MIDI-only styles. But it seems to me there are SOME RealTracks styles that can save to MIDI, but they aren't "MIDI styles" per se. WhatI'm getting at is that I would like to be see any style where all the tracks can be saved to MIDI (including RealTracks/RealDrums styles that can save to MIDI). I am not usually interested in using any styles that cannot save to MIDI, unless I am just doing a "quick and dirty" job for somebody. Is there a way for the Style Picker to do this?

Yes, the RealCharts are notation for the RealTracks.

I can't account for every instrument, but the piano, for example, was recorded direct to MIDI as well as being audio, according to a post by a PG Music staffer. Another instrument like a sax might have to be transcribed to create the MIDI, plus things like scoops and bends don't translate well into MIDI.

Hi Pumps,

To appreciate BIAB's limitations with midi-to-audio, it's necessary to understand the differences between the two. (Please forgive me if you know this. I just thought that it's probably better to start at the beginning and then you can select the bits that are relevant.)

MIDI: These are a set of instructions, usually in text, that tell a synthesiser (software or hardware) to play a particular pitch note. The instructions also give information on sysnthesiser sound to use, note-length, volume, how the note begins, what happens to the sound as it's played, how the note ends. These instructions are created when a midi track is generated in BIAB.

The bottom line is that midi is not a sound; just instructions to make a sound with a proper interface.

AUDIO: is a sound file. One of the most common ways of obtaining a music audio is to record someone playing an instrument. This is what Realtracks are. When you look at a Realtrack Guitar that is accredited to Brent Mason (for example), this means that Brent has sat in a studio and played his guitar while PG Music recorded his playing. PGM technology then uses electronics to take this audio, adjust its tempo, change its pitch and ultimately patch it together into a coherent musical track (this is what happens when the sound is generated). At all times though, the audio file stays as an audio file.

Midi can easily be converted to audio because all it requires is to record the midi track as it plays a synthesiser.

To convert audio to midi, though, it's more complicated and it's necessary to have software that can interpret pitch correctly and then create a set of midi instructions.

Realcharts are an attempt to notate what a musician played when s/he created a Realtrack. These are mostly done after the playing has happened and often by a person who wasn't involved with the playing or recording. These Realcharts are stored in BIAB as midi notation. Sometimes the Realcharts are highly accurate and sometimes they are an excellent approximation of a performance. Realtracks and Realcharts are two different things. They work in partnership. When RTs are generated, parallel RCs are also generated.

Hope this helps,
Noel

Right. I get that. But it seems to me that some RealTracks can actually save as MIDI. I have not figured out any pattern, and it wastes a whole lot of time trying styles that might work, only to find out that they can't save to MIDI. I presume that these RealStyles are not actually audio recordings but are MIDI captures, but maybe I am wrong about that.

My advice to PGMusic is to not continue on their current path of building a walled garden. They should fully commit to play well with other music technology products, and that means MIDI at a minimum, and possibly other things like Rewire. it also means a more seamless solution to the large body of VSTis out there, many of which as 64-bit by default.

As I mentioned above, products like Sonar have "drum replacer" technology that can convert an audio drum track to MIDI instructions. And there is Melodyne that can convert other instruments from audio to MIDI. SO this is not a far-fetched request. I would think PGMusic would look at that as a fundamental requirement if they expect to remain relevant in the fast-changing music technology field.

Yes, as I just mentioned, some like piano are MIDI captured directly at the time of the audio recording.

Some are transcribed after the fact. I did some of the early ones myself.

I'm not sure you will get a better answer than what is already here, because the process PG Music uses to produce RealTracks is proprietary.