Let's start with a BIAB style file. It is the basis upon which every BIAB song is created.

Styles started out originally as strictly MIDI (until version 2008 there were no RealDrums or RealTracks). So styles were built using the StyleMaker (which you yourself can use to create your own MIDI styles). StyleMaker defined five instruments in your band, one of which was required to be drums, since that corresponded to channel 10 in the MIDI spec. StyleMaker lets you, among other things, define which MIDI instrument to use on a track, various riffs to play for both the "A" part and the "B" part, fills, rules as to when to play the various riffs, how often one riff should be played over another riff (based on a weighting), etc). Then the "engine" would intelligently select the riffs to play based on all that information. And with that you had a bass track, a drum track, a piano track, a guitar track, and a strings track (although except for drums, any instrument could be used for any of the tracks - there was no reason your style couldn't have two guitars and one of them just used the piano track). And for drums, the MIDI spec allows for different drum "sets", so you actually could have different types of drums on the drum tracks, but you couldn't put a piano part on it, as channel 10 was reserved for percussion sounds.

Then along came RealDrums. Each RealDrum plays various drum riffs, including fills, shots, and endings, and can be applied to an underlying (MIDI) style. Basically, the selected RealDrum overlays the MIDI drums in the style and replaces them. You can then save the style with that RealDrum definition and the next time you open that style, it will play that RealDrum instead of the MIDI drum. The sound you get from the RealDrum has no relation to the sound of the underlying MIDI drum style. Note that style files (from PGMusic) that start with a hyphen (-) are styles that have RealDrums, but the rest of the instruments are MIDI. When you select one of these, all but the drum tracks are processed by the MIDI style processor, and the drums are processed by the RealDrums processor, which picks out riffs independently of the MIDI style processor.

Then RealTracks. Each individual RealTrack plays a certain specific instrument and is processed by the RealTracks engine to play phrases according to your chord progression. It is capable to both time and pitch stretching to make it work. Like RealDrums, RealTracks must also overlay existing MIDI tracks in a style. So there is always an underlying style upon which RealTracks are substituted, and like RealDrums, the sound of the RealTracks has no relation at all to the sound you get from the underlying MIDI track. A style can contain either a mix of MIDI and RealTracks (and those style file names begin with an equals sign) or ALL RealTracks (with file names starting with an underscore).

But there is nothing to prevent you from opening a MIDI file and substituting any or all of the tracks yourself with whichever RealDrums and RealTracks you wish. However, doing it this way won't change the underlying style, it will just save your substitutions in the your SGU or MGU song file. The next time you select that underlying style, it's still going to the same original instruments. There is a command to save your current song configuration, however, as a user style.

A style with ALL RealTracks is called a RealStyle.

There are now also SuperMIDI tracks, which also overlay/substitute a track on the underlying MIDI style file, but are processed by a different engine than the standard style engine. I don't have the details, but my understanding is that they are recorded similarly to RealTracks and processed similarly, but instead of slicing/dicing audio files, they are doing that to MIDI phrases.

So your exported list of styles contains all the "style" (.sty) files you have, where each style file defines the instruments/riffs/sounds played on each of five tracks (bass, drums, piano, guitar, and strings), but again, it isn't limited to the name of the track. You could most definitely have a saxophone playing on a strings track.

NOTE: Track naming has been an ongoing discussion topic in the wish list forum, but I digress.

Then your RealTracks exported list is just the list of available RealTracks you can use to substitute on the various tracks. Likewise for the RealDrums list to subtitute on the Drum track of the overall style.

RealStyles just provide a way of easily selecting a "band" configuration that works together well, without having to do it yourself, although, you can just as easily (well, not so easily) do it yourself.

By the way, you can also substitute any MIDI track with a track from a different style file. And as I said, you can easily save your current configuration as your own style file, which you can then select for future songs.

Clear as mud?

John

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