If they were "Jazz Acoustic Bass RealTracks" then surely this is not midi sound. The sound will therefore depend on the quality of your soundcard and speakers.

If it really is midi sound you are talking about then it is the same things plus the soundfonts used. With some soundcards you can change individual fonts or a whole soundfont bank.

However, I suspect you are complaining about the style of base playing used in the bass RealTracks - in other words the lines the bass player laid down. Here I might agree that the input chosen by the programmers seems to be quite limited. But is suppose it really is a question of individual preferences about how the bass player should play the lines.

I also have problems with the bass lines. I often wonder if they have been correctly programmed, because I cannot determine where '1' is by listening to the first note in the bar. In addition, there are too many grace notes and fills. I much prefer a straight four-in-the-bar walking bass but it is almost impossible to get this at slow tempos. I just like a more obvious bass player, which is what I find most real bass players do these days.

I will concede that there have been changes over the history of jazz playing and it took a long time for them to create quarter-note walking bass lines with a real swing feel. For a couple of decades after the advent of bebop, bass playing went off the rails and there are still some bass players who do not often start a bar with the root note of the chord.

Many frontline players, like me, listen to the bass player to 'hear' the chords and that is why I need that chord root note at the start of a bar. This is probably why I prefer Jodi Proznick to Neil Swainson. But I do wonder about that programming. Sometimes it seems to me that the lines slip a whole beat and that is why the first note is not obvious. Or perhaps the lines played for the recordings of RealTracks do not handle more complex chords. I really don't know what is the problem but sometimes I have to revert to old midi styles because I just can't tell where I am in a chord progression.

What I do like about Band-in-a-Box is that you can make the bass player strike the notes a few microseconds early. That is another essential element for swinging bass playing.

Grah Jive Talk
"Don't worry baby, they'll swing their arses off."