PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Beginners Forum Trying to understand the relationship between Styles and RealTracks

Hi,

I'm a brand new user and I'm starting to learn my way around BB...

What I currently can't quite get my head wrapped around is how (and if) the style has an influence how music is generated from the RealTracks that I might choose later on.

As an example, assume I have created a pretty standard blues progression with _BLSHUFF.STY and then I change the bass track to use a different RealTrack, for example "2610: Bass, Electric, SoulFunkSwingAlex Sw 120", and also swap Guitar 2 to "1585: Guitar, Electric, Rhythm TexasBluesRockShuffleSol Sw 130"

Does the style that I initially use have any influence on how music based on the RealTracks will be generated? For styles using RealTracks, does the style do anything else beyond selecting the tracks to be used?

Hope this makes sense...

Cheers!
Lars

You can do it, it's even the whole interest of BIAB. Each instrument has its own personality but if you're more or less in the tempo, the feel, it's bound to stick and amaze you. Creativity highly recommended in BIAB. The styles are an assembly prepared by the musicians of PG, but nothing is fixed, you can test again and again, and be pleasantly surprised by what you hear.

The Style also loads the feel, time signature, and tempo into the song. So generally, it is best that after you select a Style you are also selecting additional RealTracks that have these settings that are close to the Style. If you try to load a RealTrack thats tempo is very different or was recorded in a different time signature, then it might not sound the best. Other than these parameters, the Style does not affect how an individual RealTrack generates.

Zack.

as a long time pg user i would advise the following…

1..for first time users to go thru' every style in the stylepicker , and every RT, and RD in their respective pickers. and note down your favorites you might use in songs.
AND each year if you get the new upgrade go thru the same for that years rt's//rd's and styles. yes it takes a loong time .. But…well worth it imho and you wont miss anything superb. this is what i do yearly on getting the upgrade.

2..i encourage you to 'cross pollenate'. ie…experiment with rt's from another style in the song. i've done many biab songs where bb told me 'naughty boy wrong genre etc etc' lol..and, in the process had lots of happy accidents by experimenting. i'm always searching for what i call 'interesting sound pictures'.
eg i might use a jazz bass in another genre if it sounds good.

frankly the possibilities are endless. (see my sig for examples of crazy biab songs ive done if your interested.). in summary i 'cross pollenate' often.
rules are made to be broken imho.

as to how biab works etc internally..obviously thats something maybe you might ask pg support.
i cant give you a definitive answer.

hth/happiness.

om

In the case of MIDI only, Styles were critical to the performance (what is played and how). However, once RTs came along "Styles" - if we can use that word, have essentially become presets for instrument, key, tempo and feel (i.e., time signature, Ev/Swing, 8/16 note). But, all those parameters can be overridden.

It's a good question.

Thank you all... this is very helpful.

@MusicStudent - this is what I suspected: styles were much more important in case of MIDI based material. It seems like the pattern stuff in StyleMaker for instance does not have any relevance when working only with RealTracks. Is that right?

For long-time users, this is probably a much more natural thing as it happened gradually over time but for a first-time user it's a bit odd in the beginning.

@justanoldmuso - the advice to try and mix styles is very good I am realizing. When the feel is off (swing vs. even), things are (obviously) much more likely to go awry, but other than that lots of happy accidents seem to be waiting :-)

ZackPlonk, welcome to the forum. You immediately zeroed in on something many do not understand. This topic reappears periodically.

I think the long-time users are some who may not understand the relationship between RTs and Styles precisely because we learned it differently for MIDI, yes, but it was never clearly explained how RTs made styles different. Over the years I’ve given advice that people can substitute RTs and even save the result as a new style. It was just explained here that the supplied styles are well-matched. PG Music develops new combinations each year. But I often experiment with mixing genres and come up with some amazing sounds.

Your first post here is highly perceptive. As a former programming prof. I always value the observations of new users. Keep your questions coming.

There has always been confusion between the term "Styles" and "RealTracks", as I've found lots of folks here call RT's "styles" (as in, "I selected a different style on the bass track"). So the quick primer is:

BIAB has tracks, which (for the most part) represent the riffs that follow the chord progression played by a single instrument. Tracks can be either MIDI, SuperMIDI, or "Real" (RealTracks and RealDrums). How the track is generated is determined by its type.

Originally, there were X tracks defined, with the names:

GENERATED BY STYLES
* Bass
* Drums
* Piano
* Guitar
* Strings

FOR USE BY THE USER TO RECORD MELODIES OR SOLOS OR IMPORT FROM A MIDI FILE
* Melody
* Soloist

Styles, however, are a packaging of "auto-generated/auto-generating" tracks that follow the chord progression across multiple instruments and give you a full band playing the song.

Originally BIAB styles used only the Bass, Drums, Piano, Guitar, and Strings MIDI tracks and riffs to generate arrangements. The names were generally what instruments were used on those tracks, but other than Drums, the actual instrument could be any instrument (nothing keeps you from putting a trumpet on the guitar track). Today, you can have any instrument on any track and it is named accordingly, but there are still places where the legacy names can trip you up (such as for holds, shots, and rests), but I won't go there in this post.

Original MIDI styles used a weighted pattern editor to generate unique riff phrases that follow the chord progression. So depending upon the weight assigned to a phrase, it would play often or not. Also, it allowed for specific conditions that determine what is played (for example, play this riff right before a part marker). We as users have full use of the Style Editor to create our own patterns and MIDI styles.

SuperMIDI tracks are generated similarly to the original MIDI styles; however, it uses a different engine and we as users do not have access to that underlying technology to create our own.

With RealTracks (and RealDrums), they are all pre-recorded phrases from one to eight bars long. The RealTracks engine does not generate the riffs, but intelligently selects which phrases to include based on a number of factors such as: how long before the next chord change; is there a phrase recorded for a specific chord or will another phrase have to be transposed; etc.) and slices and dices to put it together. It's amazing how smooth this often works, but occasionally you'll hear something that sounds a little choppy. Also, BIAB lets you create your own "realtracks", which are called UserTracks.

Styles then just package a mix of MIDI and Real into a style file that can then be used to generate a number of tracks into a song with multiple instruments all playing the correct chord progression. While MIDI patterns are included in the actual style file, for RealTracks it is strictly "by reference". The Style file knows to use the RealTrack, but it passes that need on to the RT engine for processing.

With the addition of utility tracks utility tracks, it gets a little more convoluted, but hopefully the basics above made some sense.