Hi all,

First off, thanks again to all those who've responded and offered up your opinions, tips and other thoughts. I think I've got a pretty good understanding.

My salesman this morning gave me links to check out some of what's coming in the mail on Monday. The Real Tracks have the sound I'm wanting. I did a basic I-IV-V 12-bar with a few copy & pastes in a Real Band chord Window. I selected one of the new styles that has the Real Tracks set I downloaded, adjusted the bpm and generated the song. It sounded great. This validated in my mind that I do indeed like the Real Tracks sound.

The other part, which I didn't know about until jazzmammal and others mentioned and my Salesman re-affirmed was that my stock MIDI device is pretty poor. He suggested one that he had on his site. I'll need to look it up again as I closed the browser on that PC, but it was called something like "coyote"? It costs $40. current set up below.

(My PC's current device is the Microsoft GS Wavetable stock. currently running windows 7 on a fairly new Asus machine, intel proc, 4gb ram, a massive hard drive, stock realtek sound card, but pretty good PC speakers w/sub. also have Reaper running against the ASIO4ALL driver and it all gets along fine with my Boss GT-10 Guitar Processor and blue Yeti USB mic)