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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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This is something that has regularly baffled me, and has brought me to a full stop now...

I know Realtrack instruments show as green, and midi normally as yellow.

I'm using a real tracks style, which has no real track selected for 'Piano'. It shows as white. I want to add a midi strings section.

If I right-click the white 'Piano' instrument, the realtracks setting has "Song doesn't override real tracks" selected. I have tried picking both "synth strings 3" and "synth strings", from the midi selector, but there is no sound from the strings section.

Midi instruments play fine on other midi songs.

Is there a setting I need to change in the style to get the midi and real tracks to co-exist and play together? Or where am I going wrong?

Thanks


Lyrics rule OK! Fighting for folk and folk-rock...
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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If I understand your question correctly, the white 'Piano' indicates that there are no midi patterns defined for that instrument in the selected style. So no matter what midi instrument you assign for that Piano slot, no notes are there to be played by the midi patch.

Hope that helps,
Ed

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Quote:

I'm using a real tracks style, which has no real track selected for 'Piano'. It shows as white. I want to add a midi strings section.




You're using an all Real Tracks style so there's no midi in it. Pick a midi style and then add the same Real Tracks to that. Here's the cool but confusing part: The RT's are not influenced by the style at all because they're audio files. You can (and some have) put a bluegrass fiddle RT in a bebop latin jazz midi style or a counrty waltz RT in a heavy metal rock midi style or anything else you can think of. Realize the time sig doesn't matter either with RT's. You can pick a 5/4 midi style if you want but a waltz RT is audio so guess what? It's still in 3 because it was recorded in 3. You would be surprised how good some of these weird hybrids can sound.
As long as I'm giving you some ideas, try this in Real Band. There you have 48 tracks to work with. How about trying out 5 different drum tracks, 3 Real Drums and 2 midi drums with all 5 based on different styles? No problem in RB and you can do the same with all the different instruments. That means you may pick one original style to base the tune on but maybe you only use that style for guitar and bass. Everything else could be using all different styles. You can create some pretty cool sounding songs that way. Maybe you have a good midi file but half the parts suck while the other half are pretty good. In RB you can keep the good tracks and use the Biab and/or RT's function to create the rest. For me at least, Biab is the quick down and dirty program. Just enter the chords, pick a style and voila, instant song. RB is much more flexible and powerful which is why it's my favorite program because it's so much fun just messing around with all this.

Bob


Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.
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1+ and a big Ditto to Bob's suggestions.


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