PG Music Home Forums User-to-User Post your own Tips and Tricks here Using soloist to create piano "call and answer" riffs during vocal parts

This is probably a little advanced, so unless you're using BiaB MIDI in some other MIDI capable DAW or sequencer, this trick might not be usable for you.

Also, apologies in advance if, being a n00b, I "discovered" something that someone else already posted.

But it is a sweet little trick that I was playing around with today, and I liked the sound for jazz.


1) Use "soloist" to auto-generate a MIDI piano solo in the appropriate style for your song. Make sure you have 1st and 3rd verses turned on, not just the 2nd.

2) Once the soloing sounds good, export your song to MIDI, and turn on the option to send the solo to Channel 5, to avoid exporting to the same track as the normal "comping" piano parts in your song.

3) Import the MIDI file into your DAW, split into multiple tracks, and assign each track to the appropriate virtual instrument/sampler. Do NOT assign the piano solo to an instrument.

4) Arrange at will until you have something you can sing to, or record vocals.

5) Create a new MIDI track. Assign its output to your virtual piano, the same as your comping track. This will be your LIVE soloist track. It starts out as blank, and you build it bit by bit using the following steps.

6) Note where there is space between the vocal lines. Section by section, cut up your soloist midi in sensible places BETWEEN the vocal phrases. A LITTLE note overlap with the vocal is okay sometimes. Drag each little slice, as you create it, directly up (or down) to the LIVE soloist track created in step 5.

7) Audition these sections as you go, so that you can hear how well these little riffs work around the vocals.

8) This is optional, but can greatly improve the realism of the overall piano sound: in your normal comping (rhythm) piano track, edit the midi to remove any "right hand" midi notes, but ONLY whenever there is an active soloist snippet. This makes the playing sound like one pianist, playing both two-handed rhythm AND breaking away with the right hand to play little riffs throughout the piece.


So, what NORMALLY happens when you generate the soloist track is that soloing happens continuously. But by judiciously using ONLY the soloist riffs that occur during natural pauses in the vocal phrases, you can create a "tasteful" melodic piano player that knows NOT to riff over the singer.

Of course, I haven't really delved into editing MIDI directly in BiaB, but I suppose you could apply a similar technique right in BiaB without using a 3rd party DAW. I'm just describing what worked for me.


I hope this is helpful and makes sense.

Added note: I had forgotten about the drag-and-drop support in BiaB 2010, so you could replace steps 2 and 3 with the much more simple drag-and-drop from BiaB directly into your DAW.

Thanks, Mac.

Hi Eightstring,

I see you are really getting into it! Brilliant. Thanks for taking the time to outline your procedure. There's absolutely no substitute for sharing ideas!

Given the above, there are another couple of tricks that might be of use to you too.

ONE
When using the Soloist with MIDI, it's possible to choose a range of bars that you'd like to have the solo in. This is achieved by using the "Custom" button when in the Soloist dialogue box. (I usually select the bars before entering the Soloist and the selection is transferred to the custom procedure.) This process is also additive. For example, you can generate a solo in bars 1 - 4 and then later in bars 14 - 20, then maybe bar 25, etc. Note that this piecewise creation of a fill-in solo is not available with Realtracks.

TWO
Using Realband, it is possible to select a range of bars or even partial bars and generate a solo in just that range by right-clicking on the selection and choosing the appropriate option. This is incredibly powerful and I imagine you'd find a heap of uses for it. The procedure is also additive and works equally well with MIDI and Realtracks.

I'm looking forward to hearing some of your work. It sounds like you are really understanding the program.

All the best,
Noel

Thanks for that. I do know a bit about those features, but for my test, I liked having the soloing "available" throughout the entire song, since I was working with the MIDI directly in my DAW.

The reason this worked for me was that I could perform the vocal very freely, then later easily work around that vocal track's silent spots to cut and past little phrases from the soloist source MIDI into a "live" solo track wherever I wanted. This seemed more flexible for me than trying to turn soloing on and off in certain places in BiaB before the vocal take was actually performed.

However, I can imagine how that selective soloing in BiaB would be very useful for live applications, or when you know more absolutely how the vocal is going to be phrased.


And yeah, I'm getting the hang of it fairly quickly. I've only had the program for a short time, but BiaB seems to work the way I think, for the most part. I don't have to look at the manual much.