PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows How good can Midi acoustic bass sound

• (1) Tone matters more to the musician and less to the audience member. After all, what you think is perfect tone, is your opinion. Take vocalists, does Doctor John have a good voice? John Lennon? Rod Stewart? Stevie Nicks? Bob Dylan? Most people say "no" but they sell a lot of records. How about guitar? Ask 100 guitarists what perfect tone is, and you will get at least 90 answers. Is it Hendrix? Slash? Walsh? Page? Van Halen? Joe Pass? Eric Gale? Jeff Beck? Clapton? Kenny Burrell? Emily Remler? Nancy Wilson? ______? And on which guitar or which stage of their career?
  
• (2) Expressiveness trumps tone as far as the audience is concerned. That's why people like Doctor John and Stevie Nicks sell so many records
  
• (3) It is possible to get more creative AND more expressive with MIDI tracks with the available continuous controllers (http://www.nortonmusic.com/midi_cc.html), ability to subtly shift note placement, ability to alter dynamics, add notes, change notes, and so on
  
• (4) So I must conclude that MIDI tracks, while with a good synth are only slightly inferior in tone to real tracks, can be made to sound more expressive and more musical. The musician may notice the difference in tone, the audience will relate to the difference in expression and favor a well made MIDI track -- this is why most of the professional musicians I know prefer MIDI over recorded loops

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Again, never say never but...that would mean PG dropping the General Midi Standard.....

That in turn would cause no end of grief for the average user who just wants to put in some chords and hit
As I mentioned earlier the GM standard also only has a few midi controllers available and they are no where near enough to do what we're talking about here. Bob

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<...>There are a couple of inherent problems with uploading a midi GM file. Let’s say you have a perfect sounding trumpet in your GM set and you have set its pitch bend range to +/- one half semitone. This adds life to your sound. You up load that file and someone else downloads it and plays it on their GM set. It can sound terrible because the trumpet sound is not the same and their pitch bend range is set at the normal +/- 2 semitones. That is why most GM midi files are note on and note off only. Controllers can make a mess of everything.<...> MarioD

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Although I'm a huge fan of RealTracks, I'd also like to see the MIDI equivalent of RealTracks. That is, instead of pulling up complete styles, I'd like to be able to select MIDI tracks the same as RealTracks.

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Although I'm a huge fan of RealTracks, I'd also like to see the MIDI equivalent of RealTracks. That is, instead of pulling up complete styles, I'd like to be able to select MIDI tracks the same as RealTracks

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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.

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I plan to continue buying the upgrades but would like to see the midi playing catch up with the feel of RTs.

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I never like to say never but, it's never gonna happen because of the General Midi standard. GM does not allow for all the nuanced control necessary to emulate a real player. This is why Garritan, the now defunct Gigasampler and a bunch of other high end samplers don't use GM. They've developed their own proprietary way of controlling midi in order to try to get where you want to go. In order to make Biab accessible to the masses PG is using General Midi. You can see by reading the forums, a lot of folks barely understand basic midi as it is. Throw Garritan's very technical midi control methodology at them and they will just throw their hands up and move on to something else. That tech is also very expensive. I was looking at a horn library last year that has unbelievable control over every aspect of playing a horn. Dozens of separate attacks in order to capture all the little ways a player blows into their mouthpiece. This is in addition to the sounds themselves. Think about how the sound changes on a sax just by how the player blows it, lips it, sings into it, hums into it, all kinds of stuff to get certain very famous sax sounds. That horn software with a DVD explaining how to control it cost $2,700. No General Midi there. The demo's were amazing though. I've heard some excellent acoustic bass programs too but very expensive. I think one I saw at NAMM a couple years ago was around a thousand bucks or so. Just for bass. Again, special controllers, special software and you need a degree in computer science to use it. This is far beyond spending a few hundred bucks on Biab for the masses.

Bob

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