PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Latest & greatest methods to get BIAB Midi Melody to sound real.

John. It was explained way back in this thread, the problem is how you input the melody into Biab's melody track.

You referred to AnthemScore. That is a so-called audio to midi converter and so far all of those suck pretty bad. There have been threads about audio to midi converters here for years. People test them out and they're not very good. I looked it up and watched a vid of it. The demo song was very basic guitar and for that it picked up the notes pretty good. There is no mention in what I read or heard that it picks up any articulations, modulations etc. If the part is simple enough I can this saves you the time involved in entering the notes and that's ok but it doesn't help with make a solo line sound real. It's giving you just the notes. To make midi sound real you need all the articulations and other things I'll describe below.

I'll give you an example of the problem with midi in Biab. Someone enters in or, in this case imports a track created by AnthemScore onto the melody track and sets up a trumpet to play it. With no articulations etc, what you hear is a straight, solid, unwavering tone that sounds like a trumpet for a split second or two but then sounds incredibly fake because no human plays a trumpet like that. No amount of you tweaking Biab is going to change that and changing synths won't change that either.

Say you picked up $2,500 brass synth that I can't remember the name of now. It sounds incredible but it has been explained at least 10 times in this thread already, that incredible synth is only going to play what Biab feeds it. That synth is capable of playing back all kinds of horn things like falls, doits, lipping techniques, all kinds of stuff. But if that information is not written into the midi file by the use of CC numbers, pitch bends etc, all the synth plays is the basic notes with zero embellishments and it would sound totally fake.

And you would be back here saying I bought this $2,500 synth and it still sounds like crap! Why can't Biab fix this? It's because Biab has nothing whatever to do with that. And it doesn't matter which synth because they're all the same when it comes to this. They all play what Biab gives it, nothing more, nothing less. There is no "automatic" adding of human articulations and realism after the fact.

A midi file is like a computer program, it tells the deaf and dumb synth what to play and that's all it does. It really is no different than you looking at your guitar sitting in it's stand and you ask it "why can't you play me something?"

Bob