regarding a strong preference for MIDI over the audio real tracks:

I get that the ability to rearrange notes in MIDI makes it more useful than audio in a traditional sense... but it's worth noting that distinction has been blurred for quite some time, and now with Elastique 3 it is blurred even more.

In Real Band, the ability to expand the horizontal resolution of a track makes it easy to find and isolate single notes... which can then be individually pitch-shifted and/or time stretched. For small tweaks my experience with this technique has been positive.