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

Is there some way to tell Realtracks to start at "certain offset position" at specific bar?

My problem is that I'm trying to create backing track with acoustic guitar for a long (~5min) song. Style should be just simple waltz strumming.

When I generate the track it always has strange rhythmic changes at some bar, either right at the beginning of the song or X bars later. When I happen to generate version which starts like it should, I'd like too keep that "beat" all the time, which means that I'd like to loop that ~4 bar section over and over again without any variation.

I already tried "force track to simple arrangement", but that made it "too simple" by taking off the rhythm and changing guitar to picking slow style, while I'd like to have just a solid strumming. Is this possible?

Additionally sometimes guitar chords get played from higher position. Is there a way to force playing to lower neck positions, so that the sound doesn't become "too thin"?

If it were me ..
Realband (comes with BiaB for free) allows this type of editing in a much more intuitive way.
In RB you could easily copy/paste the desired section wherever you want

I'm not sure if I completely follow. A few things come to mind.

Re: Is there some way to tell Realtracks to start at "certain offset position" at specific bar?

You can mute any one of the RealTracks and also un-mute at any bar. This is done by clicking on the bar and pressing F5 function key. The dialog is self explanatory. That will allow your RealTrack to start at any bar.

As for starting at an offset at a specific bar, you can insert a rest by entering the chord followed by a single period. E.g. if you wanted the RealTracks to start on beat 3 of the bar, enter as |C. C |

if you want the track to start playing at beat 2, enter as |C.,C |

If you generate and get the correct 'feel' you can freeze the track so that it won't regenerate next time you start the song. Freeze by clicking the small asterisk on the mixer, alongside the mute and solo button.

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.

BIAB is and always has been mainly designed to play with different variations to create backing tracks that don't sound stiff.

As has been stated, you probably need to do what you are suggesting in a DAW, where you can slice and dice the sounds however you want.

While BIAB may one day support what you are suggesting (you should go to the wishlist and request it), it has never had that granual control over what gets generated. Even with MIDI styles, you are going to get variations in what is played.

That's just the way it is and the way it has always worked.

I'd suggest using RealBand or your favorite DAW.

Sounds like BIAB is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Give you the various strums/bars you would need to make the song the way you want it to be in a DAW or RealBand.

But, have you tried typing in a new/same chord at the beginning of each bar? Sometimes this has worked to make the same initial pattern play for each bar the chord is placed on.
If you have 8 bars and only have a chord at the beginning of that 8 bar section it's more likely to wander into the other random patterns.

Tobias makes a good point. RealTracks individual phrases may be from 1 bar long to 8 bars long. You can vary the pattern by repeating the entry of a chord within that length, or let BIAB decide longer phrasing.

Unfortunately this method hasn't worked for me. As I stated previously, when soloing (for an example 12-string strumming guitar), it could start with backbeat strumming from high neck position, or even worse, start with long holding notes for two bars. It's completely random, there is no control over it, except regenerating track, which most likely moves to the problem to another position.

I resolved the problem by creating 4 WAV export variations of generated tracks, which I then load to DAW and crossfade between the tracks when the problems raise. Another possible fix is using the cut/paste method, but it's very cumbersome as you there is quite a lot of crossfading required between the slices.

Additionally I stumbled into a problem of BB seemingly having max bar-length of somewhere around 150-250. After trying to insert more bars it simply crashes. I couldn't figure out better way to structure the song, as it doesn't follow closely to usual ABAB -variations, but has lots of differing sections. I had to make the song with two different song files and glue 'em in DAW.

If you had RealBand on your Mac you would be able to create the track how you like with MultiRiffs.
When the ReWire is implemented Biab might have the MultiRiff function added.
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