PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Beginners Forum Realtrack offset position / regeneration

I try describe the offset problem better. It has nothing to do with how you put the chord changes, it has everything to do with the BIAB song generation engine:

Think realtrack as a loop. In most simple state it probably is simply a set of wav-loops, which are mixed together between bar's & chord changes. When you press "generate" it seems to randombly pick one position from that loop. I don't know the details, but it seems to me like the original loop was recorded for certain length, say 8 or 16 bars. Generating seems to start the loop either from 1, 4, 8, 12 or 16. Depending on how original player decided to play it, there might be very different rhythm or backbeat at different offset position.

If original wav was structured ("stylized", not speaking of actual song structure):
[A,A,A,A,B,B,C,C,A,A,A,A]

Generating may start the track as:
[B,B,C,C,A,A,A,A,A,A,A,A]

...but if you chose to play this instrument solo (such as strumming guitar for song writing) it sounds very weird, as the song begins by guitar playing alternative Em from high position of neck, which after it changes to backbeat picking, finally coming back to original solid strumming.

Now what I would like to do is to tell BIAB is that I want to use the original WAV playing order / offset, so that at bar 8, when my intro finishes, it always starts A,A,A,A,B,B,C,C... and the same thing for chorus. It would make much more sense.

It doesn't really matter if RT is really a loop or if all those variations are separate WAV files within style. The most important thing is that I need to be able to have some control how they trigger, in order to make any sense on rendered outcome. I cannot randomly try generating 8 minute long solo strumming by clicking "generate" 100 times and hope that one might work so that I could freeze it, because I simply don't have enough energy to listen 8 minutes 100 times.

As my backing track is a whoppin 8 minutes long, it has *lots of* crazy sounding backbeat rhythms for guitar at wrong positions. I'm 100% unable to tell what the actual rhythm of the song is, because it sounds like rhythm guitarist is on drugs or something. A few minutes ago I regenerated the guitar and it started with "hit" -like held note for two bars, which after it started playing strumming. Regenerate again and it starts with strumming, but quickly changes again to Em with high neck position.

Only way to make any sense is to add drums & seconds guitar, so that song blends better and those "minor" errors sound more like "cool alteration on playing", but for simply solo it's a mess.

I haven't checked RealBand yet, but my real alternative might be write each song section with separating bars, export guitar to wav, and by copy & paste build the song from "good blocks" in DAW (leave bad blocks away and replace 'em with good blocks). It just looks like a lot of work, so I'd like to know is there a better way to control what is being generated in BIAB (= "give tips for BIAB how to start playing at certain bars").

Edit:
IF I'm not too much off with the idea of how BB Realtracks work (I have quickly checked "making of" tutorials, but don't remember the exact details), I wonder why leave track generation to random? Wouldn't it be better to have option to let user tell "generate with +1 / +2 / +3 / +4 bars offset"? Randomizing is great for getting unique feeling as a band, but letting user to handpick would be beneficial feature... Additionally, I think this shouldn't be made as configuration for whole song, but as a bar-specific configuration ("restart realtrack at position: ___"), as many songs have different lengths for different parts and song generating probably can't figure out every possible change.