PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Beginners Forum Midi song + real tracks in BIAB question.

Misha -

I loaded your file and discovered several interesting things. Mine loaded using the MIDI style ZZBOPBAL - I hope that's the one you selected, otherwise there are more problems.

First of all, if you haven't, you need to look at the melody track using the BIAB Sequencer feature. There you will see all the tracks from your MIDI file. That also includes a MIDI drum track. If you mute all the other BIAB tracks, you will then just hear your MIDI rendition, as you did when you had the track disabled.

When I loaded your file, I noticed that the RealDrum selected is an Even feel drum style; however, the the MIDI drum part in your song is in Swing feel. When you add the RealDrums, you get both playing together and that doesn't sound good.

And for the RealTracks guitar, I think that even though it is swing, it is a different swing feel than your MIDI arrangement (I think your imported MIDI file is more of a 16th note swing, but the RealTracks guitar is more of an 8th note swing). So those just aren't going to work well together.

One troubling thing is that I had to keep reloading the file, because the melody track kept disappearing (BIAB told me there was nothing there, when clearly a moment ago it played). Don't know if this is an issue with v2019 - I'll have to look further.

Another thing to keep in mind is that by enabling the style, you enable all the instruments of the style, you run the potential for channel conflicts. Your default MIDI device only supports 16 channels (mine is playing through the TTS-1 synth). With imported MIDI files, it is easy to get channel conflicts with the channels used for the style tracks. You can end up with notes from both a style track and your imported MIDI track playing on the same channel, but using whichever instrument patch was loaded last. So for example, if a piano track (on channel 3) was set for electric piano, but an imported MIDI file had an organ on channel 3, you would get both parts playing together using whichever instrument was sent last to the synth (either piano or organ).

In your file, I see the following:

Channel 5 - Finger Electric Bass
Channel 6 - Electric Piano
Channel 7 - Brass
Channel 8 - Muted Electric Guitar
Channel 9 - Trumpet
Channel 10 - Room Kit
Channel 11 - Alto Sax
Channel 12 - Slow Strings

BIAB tracks use the following channels by default (using their legacy names, but any instrument can be assigned to them):

Channel 2 - Bass
Channel 3 - Piano
Channel 4 - Melody
Channel 5 - Thru
Channel 6 - Guitar
Channel 7 - Strings
Channel 8 - Soloist
Channel 10 - Drums

You've got RealDrums enabled, so that overrides the drums track, but had you not you could have had a conflict on channel 10.

With the style enabled, you have two different basses playing on channel 2 (from the style) and channel 5 (your MIDI file). You have strings on the BIAB strings track (channel 7) and your brass on channel 7 from your MIDI file (although you wouldn't hear it because the strings only come in on "B" part markers, which you don't have in your file).

Also, the ZZPOPBAL style is an Even 16th style, which would not be a suitable choice for your MIDI file.

So, at least on my machine (other than the weird intermittent disappearance of the melody track), everything plays as it is supposed to, it's just that the mixing of channels and tracks and style feel (even versus swing versus 8th note versus 16th note) and MIDI channel conflict needs work.

To my mind, this is something that would be better handled in RealBand (or another DAW where you could also use the new VST plugin to generate your additional RealTracks. That way, you can reassign MIDI channels and avoid any conflicts there. Be sure to set other tracks to the same feel and note resolution as your MIDI file (unless you are explicitly going for a different kind of sound).

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.