PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows are RTs killing midi?

I suppose it depends on the song, the person, and what he/she is going to do with it.

As most of you know, I play music for a living. I don't have, nor do I want, a day job. Mrs. Notes (then the future Mrs. Notes) and I quit a 5-piece band in 1985 to form a duo. I make my own backing tracks. Until COVID, we were never out of work, and 2 years after COVID we are back doing up to 20 gigs per month in season, and 15 in the off-season.

Around here, if you want to play music for a living, you have to both be a chameleon playing many musical styles, and play cover songs.

Most people don't go out to hear original music, they go out to hear memories, songs they know by heart. Even when you go to a big artist's concert, that artist plays mostly the songs the audience knows, and later in the show, introduces a few new ones.

There are a lot of songs that you can use a generic backing track of the same style and add your own solos and fill-in licks over the track.

There are plenty of songs you can reinterpret, play as Reggae, Latin American, slow them up, speed them up, or whatever.

But, especially in pop music, often the musical figure, the breaks, rhythmic kicks, and other song-specific parts are essential to the song.

These are the kinds of songs you cannot do with Real Tracks, but you can do with MIDI. How can you do the licks from “I Shot The Sheriff” with a Real Style? Or “Sunshine Of Your Love”? “Beat It”? “Jerusalema”? “Uptown Funk”?

If you have good MIDI voices, whether they are from hardware or software synths, you can get almost as good tone as you can from the real instrument. And what is good tone anyway? Which artist, on which instrument?

So for me, as amazing as the RTs are, on the gig, they don't work for me.

We play music from the 1920s to the 2020s. What we choose depends on the audience of the day and what they react to. We play songs they know by heart, and perhaps half of them are pretty direct covers of a favorite record.

There is a lot of competition around here. In order to keep working, we have to please our audience better than the others. MIDI works for me. The mortgage is paid off, we take a vacation every year, either close or as far as China and Australia, and we have no debt.

That doesn't mean our way is the only right way to do this, it's just the right way for us.

Whatever you do, if it's working for you, it's a good way.

Whether RTs ever eclipse MIDI in BiaB, I can't say, but I don't think MIDI is going away in professional music any time soon.

Insights and incites by Notes