I'm a long time user of Biab- my first copy shipped on 5.25" diskettes.

Anyway the early versions were all midi and honestly I did not use it all that much.
The midi stuff from way back when sounded all like computer music.
I used it for practicing tunes, but only in the basement.

The introduction of Real Tracks has made the creation of compelling backing tracks quite easy.
Its not perfect but its real good.
I use them now for practice and performance.

I'm a guitar player. I do have a guitar synth(godin). I don't have a Midi Tone module for it. I have no other midi gear save some cables and PC/Mac/Ipad. I've tried guitar synth in the past but never felt the tracking was good enough. It just seemed gadgety to me. I got my guitar synth for a real good price. I rarely play it.

I don't play keyboard or ewi.

My recording is all .wav tracks and microphones. I honestly don't do a lot of DAW work

A few questions have kept me wondering over the years.

Am I missing something important by really not exploring the midi side of B&B?

What kind of $ investment (tone module, keyboard, etc) would I need to make a credible start on midi?

What kind of time investment am I looking at? The learning curve seems formidable.

As I said, using real tracks/real drums within BIAB allows me to chart out some pretty decent backing tracks. Good enough both for practice and performing. The advances every year by PGmusic continue to prove the quality of what has become my backing band.

Should I just leave well enough alone?

Thanks for your comments

My two cents:

I think the Real Tracks are great but there are a couple of problems with them that midi can help with, particularly on bass parts.

One is that sometimes keyboard and bass parts clash. Or the combination can be muddy. Changing the bass part is the easiest solution but you can't edit RT's. If I can get a good bass sound on midi, I can fix that.

The other thing is that you are going to run into some RT's that don't play pushes well. It doesn't matter how you set your preferences and song settings, or how picky you are about which RT's you use. When that happens, being able to get the bass dead on for the push gives you a reference point to get everything else right. You can do that with midi.

2b

With a good MIDI sound source and some good MIDI techniques you can get tracks that rival RTs IMHO. RTs are great, I do use them, but MIDI is a lot more flexible. You can change notes, timing, sounds, etc with MIDI that you can't with RTs. I'm sure you already know this.

But there are a couple of catches. One is that good MIDI sound sources cost money. Generally the more money the better the control and sound. Another catch is there is a learning curve. Taking a BiaB MIDI track and playing in on an expensive MIDI sound source can sound terrible. You need to know the nuances of the instrument you are trying to emulate and how to achieve it via MIDI controls.

A plus is that MIDI sound sources can generate sounds that no acoustic instrument can produce. Pads used in smooth jazz or ambient music are a good example.

What I would do in your situation would be to get the free stuff first. There are free or very inexpensive sound sources like Kontakt Player, Sampletank 3 Player, Synthmaster player, KVR synths etc. Most all of these do allow MIDI CC changes so you can experiment and learn about MIDI controls. These do have excellent sounds included. I know that you can purchase other sounds for the Kontakt Player and the Synthmaster Player.

I hope this helps and good luck.

PS - self promotion - You might want to listen to some of my songs. They are almost exclusively MIDI with some organic guitar and bass parts added to some.

Unless you want to slice and dice audio and then pitch shift the audio (which can introduce artifacts) - doable, but a lot of work - then MIDI is needed if you want to play specific notes of specific duration.

As Mario said, there are a number of free options available to you (not the least of which is a bunch of free SFZ libraries that you can play using the Sforzando Player that comes with BIAB). In addition to the free ones, there are moderately priced to expensive libraries that come pretty close to sounding like the original acoustic instruments. It will never be perfect, but unless you've got a talented trumpet player or flute player or symphony orchestra available to you on a whim, you can come pretty darn close with high quality libraries and a little bit of tweaking of the MIDI sound. Many of the high quality libraries have full articulations available, so you can do (for example for brass instruments) slurs, doinks, shakes, falls, etc. Guitars can do hammer on and hammer off, as well as fret noise and string bends, etc. You won't get that with just entering the notes and selecting the MIDI library, but many of those things can be done with the use of keyswitches (you just have to add the key switch notes to the MIDI stream to trigger them), and mod wheel usage.

Getting good MIDI still takes some work, but slicing and dicing existing audio is a lot more, in my opinion.

Take a look at Kontakt instruments or IK-Multimedia instruments (I find Kontakt generally better for acoustic instruments and IK for electronic instruments), but also take a look at the offerings from Indiginus or Realitone, or Sonivox or Sonokinetic.

Check out the sample audio. You might like what you hear.

Another approach is to use a hardware MIDI synth. I use ones from Roland. They are easy to set and almost forget. The drawback is that you can’t render a song easily; you must record the output of your mix in real time.

MIDI is thousands of times more editable. With a good sound module, your synth sounds will be almost as good as a digitally recorded instrument (as in real tracks) but you can do so much more with MIDI.

Excerpted from Keyboard magazine, March 2014 by Craig Anderton:

…Today you can easily record 100 tracks of digital audio on a basic laptop, so MIDI may seem irrelevant in the studio. Yet MIDI remains not only viable, but valuable, because it lets you exploit today's studio in ways that digital audio still can't.
…
Deep editing. Digital audio allows for broad edits, like changing levels or moving sections around, and editing tools such as Melodyne are doing ever more fine-grained audio surgery. But MIDI is more fine grained still: You can edit every characteristic of every performance gesture: dynamics, volume, timing, the length and pitch of every note, pitch-bend, and even which sound is being played. MIDI data can tell a piano sound what to play, or if you change your mind, a Clavinet patch. With digital audio, changing the instrument that plays a given part requires re-recording the track….but MIDI can do much more…


The following are just some of the things that are easy to do in MIDI and either difficult or impossible with prerecorded Audio tracks

• The endings on BiaB styles are limited to 2 bars. Some of the endings in styles are pretty lame. You can fix time by exporting to MIDI
• Some songs need "song specific" licks, often on a guitar or the bass. BiaB style by their nature are more generic and they should be. A style with a song-specific lick would generally be good for only one song. (I know, in my early days, I wrote an Elvis "Don't Be Cruel" style and with that "signature" guitar riff. That style really isn't good for much other than "Don't Be Cruel".)
• Some songs have rhythmic kicks (I was jamming with some Salsa guys and they called them "breaks") -- a section of music where the entire band plays a passage consisting a number of what PG calls Shots and rests in a very definite, rhythmic pattern.
• Some songs could use volume manipulation on individual drum instruments (bring up the snare, take down the cymbals), this is easy to do in MIDI, next to impossible to do in Audio Loops
• Sometimes you may want to change a drum sound, for example, on a Latin/Rock tune, change the ride cymbal to a cowbell, easy in MIDI, darn near impossible in Audio.
• I've often changed instruments on some of the BiaB output parts. (That piano part might sound better on a Rhodes for a particular song, or a nylon string guitar, or a Clavinet and that Clean Guitar might sound good as an Acoustic Guitar on another song.) Again, easy with MIDI, impossible with Audio
• Expressive devices that are lacking in BiaB, easy to do in MIDI, extremely difficult or impossible with Audio Loops -- crescendo (A directive to a performer to smoothly increase the volume of a particular phrase or passage) -- diminuendo (A directive to a performer to smoothly decrease the volume of the specific passage of a composition) -- accelerando (Gradually accelerating or getting faster) -- ritardando (Gradually getting slower) -- fermata (notation marking directing the performer or ensemble to sustain the note of a composition affecting all parts and lasting as long as the artistic interpretation of the conductor or performer allows)
• Composing - you cannot get audio loops to do what you want, but you can change or add anything you want in MIDI format very easily.
• Sometimes when changing from an A substyle to a B substyle you might not want a roll. In MIDI it's a simply copy and paste operation.
• You might want to rearrange the drum rolls in a piece or change the roll from a snare to a tom. Again in MIDI it's just copy and paste or a simple transpose command.
• And so much more

Yes, it does take some time to learn how to get the best out of MIDI, but then it takes some time to play any musical instrument. In the end, it's worth it.

I think the Real Tracks are a bit of genius, and I do use them when they fit perfectly with the song I'm making, but if there needs to be any editing at all, I go to MIDI.

Insights and incites by Notes

As a guitar player, unless you can also play a keyboard to one degree or another, midi is more of a chore. BUT......

The cool thing is, it's really not that difficult to understand and with a great DAW, it is fairly straightforward and simple to use.

As guitar player myself and with a little bit of keyboard experience, I use it to play piano parts and bass lines mostly when there's something particular I want that the Real Tracks are not capable of delivering.

I can set up a synth, assign a sample, and play the parts in on my 61 key keyboard. Playback is all internal and the only hardware you need is some sort of midi controller such as a cheap Casio keyboard. Everything else is in the box.

I cannot add much to all the great advice here, except for saying that RealTracks are good...really good, but midi is still the king if you want to control the output of your creative efforts.

Will

Agreeing with all the above posts, I can only add that beginners to midi can begin fairly easily. I'm not all that technologically proficient, but (once I got sound) I was able to edit midi tracks generated by BIAB into leads/melodies, or tweak the performance in other ways, without a controller--simply by editing the notes/commands in piano roll or a similar midi editing method.

I've known guys who could compose entire pieces and all the parts in midi without a controller--just a mouse.

Somewhere between those two is most likely where you lie. It's like every technology. Once you learn the basics, you can at least do something useful, and your results can be nearly immediately evaluated.

I am also a guitar player and not all that proficient at keyboards. I have found that using a keyboard helps with the timing however. Most if not all recent keyboards let you set the key. If playing in D for example set the keyboard up a couple of semitones this takes some of the complication out. Then record the part if you hit a bum note no worries lift it or drop it in the Editor. I find typing in notes and trying to adjust the timing far more difficult. If I am typing in notes I tend to use a score editor.

Midi keyboards are not expensive and extremely handy IMHO.

Tony

Don't forget Band-in-a-Box lets you use some keys of the computer keyboard to enter midi notes so between that and your Godin guitar controller you already have two midi entry methods. But I'm going to suggest you consider a third, a midi keyboard.

The Christmas shopping season generally has midi keyboards available at great prices. You will most likely be able to find a great sounding Korg, Yamaha, Casio or Roland midi keyboard for a few hundred dollars. You may also be able to pick up a used keyboard from a yard sale, thrift shop, pawn shop or Craigslist at a reasonable price. But, it doesn't matter if it's new or used, you will need to do some serious homework to have an idea what is a reasonable price for what your looking at. A keyboard gives you a third way to enter midi plus it gives you access to a GM/GM2/GS or XG compatible external sound module.

No matter how you enter the midi data you'll likely find a keyboard a worthwhile investment. Most midi software instruments such as Kontakt are designed with the keyboard split into sections for articulations, chords, notes and modifiers. Using some other entry tool such as a guitar controller will not allow you to take full advantage of the instrument capabilities.

Another tool you'll find very useful with midi is the step sequencer. You can build increasingly complicated midi scores one step at a time.

Others have mentioned several good sources for midi driven sound instruments. You truly can perform an internet search for sound instruments and come up with just about any instrument sound you can desire.

What hasn't been asked is, "What would you like for midi to do for you?" What would you expect to accomplish by using midi? What do you want midi to provide that BiaB doesn't provide? To me, the answers to those questions should be important to you because the answers help determine the best answer to your question.

For those not proficient with a keyboard, it's still could be a good idea.

Because the keyboard transmits better timing and velocity (volume of each individual not) than either mouse or step entering, you can play your keyboard without worrying about wrong notes, just do the best you can, and then fix the wrong notes in the program.

I showed a guitar player friend this many years ago, and he's been doing it so long, little by little, without really working at it, he has developed a decent right hand on keyboards.

--------

One of the most useful and very simple things I like about MIDI is instrument selection. I have a sound module with over a dozen different clean guitars. So I can choose one that sounds like a strat or a tele, or a 335 or a LP or something else.

If you are using a real track and decide you like the part but the guitar sound is not right, you can't change it. In MIDI it's a couple of clicks away.

Or if you want an Rhodes instead of an acoustic piano? Click it's done.

And using hardware MIDI, they will work forever. The Yamaha TX81z that I bought in the late 1980s still works today and still has one of the best Rhodes pianos ever on it (plus a few other great FM sounds). FM does great with melodic percussion instruments like e-pianos, marimbas, vibes, and so on.

Plus since most hardware sound modules have the same latency ±1ms you can use more than one with no timing problems. So if the best guitar for a particular song is on one sound module, the best piano is on another, and the best bass for the same song is no another synth, no problem.

RealTracks sound nice, but tone is only a part of music expression. Singers like Stevie Nicks and Dr. John don't have great voices, but they sell zillions of records because they express themselves well.

With MIDI you can make the expression of a song your own, not whoever recorded the track for you. And with a good sound module or soft-synth you can get great tone too.

Insights and incites by Notes

This is actually a really good topic for discussion! Most of what I would say already has been mentioned. Really, how flexible MIDI is is what keeps me using it. It is so customizable, sometimes I need it. I would never use MIDI to emulate a guitar - but for bass and drums - I use it all the time. With some fancy footwork, you can make it so you can't even tell. Plus, sometimes I actually go out of my way to have something sound synthetic. As Mario said above, with some genres of music, pads and synths can really lend merit to the tune. It won't sound like a real life instrument, but it isn't supposed to. And when executed well, it doesn't even cross the listener's mind.

I pretty much stopped using midi once realtracks came out. But the new midi supertracks really kicks midi up a few notches in my opinion, I've used the midi supertrack pianos on a few of my songs and they sound great.

I like them because unlike realtrack pianos I can choose the piano I want, acoustic, electric, etc. (I have a few decent piano VSTi's here).

It's great too because the person I work with also plays piano, so if she sends me a midi piano part, a solo perhaps, or a specific part to play during the bridge, etc., I can match that up with a midi supertrack, play them both through the same VSTi and it is seamless.

The midi supertracks are a great addition IMHO, and I hope PGMusic continues to add to the collection.

I'll take these quotes from you in order. I added the numbers.

1. The reason it sounded like "computer music" is because it was computer music. A very basic fact, Biab has no midi sounds of it's own. None. It only uses the sounds you provide it. You provided it with the basic Windows software synth that is normally used for the quirky Windows notification sounds and basic gaming. For real music it sounds like crap. The new Win10 Wavetable synth is way, way better than it was 20 years ago but still not close to a good software synth. Somewhere along the line PG made a deal with Roland and provided users with the Roland VSC synth. Better than the Windows synth but far from good quality and when Win10 came out as 64 bit it killed the VSC because it only runs on 32 bit systems.

Others have already mentioned a bunch of software/hardware alternatives you can buy and use. The calculation is very simple, the more you spend the better your midi tracks will sound. You can spend from $40 for the Forte Dxi that PG sells to $125 for the new Roland SC8820 software synth to several hundred on up to thousands.

The big deal and problem for some folks is the convenience factor. Biab is GM and only a few software synths are native GM. By that I mean you install the synth and Biab automatically plays the correct instrument parts by assigning your Biab tracks to the correct instrument in the synth. That's the beauty of GM but GM is also very limited and most GM synths only have so-so sound quality. The better high end synths are not GM. That's not a deal breaker but it means before you hit Play you have to go in and manually set what instrument you want to play the different Biab tracks. It only takes a few minutes but it's not instant like simply hitting Play with a GM synth.

This is why lots of us here don't bother setting Biab up with an expensive software synth, we just use a basic GM synth that sounds good enough to put the song together, audition some styles and after that export it to Real Band or another DAW. It's the DAW that uses all the expensive plugin synths and effects because it's much better set up to use them than Biab is.

2. This is a harder question to answer. Everybody loves the RT's especially older folks who don't understand midi and are intimidated by it. You could fall in that camp but since you're asking, it shows you have some interest in it.

Ultimately I'll say yes, you're missing a lot but the real question is is it important enough for you to spend time learning about it? That's for you to decide. I'm guessing you're retired as am I. I look at this as a hobby and since you're not working at a real job any more, what's the harm in learning something new? That's what hobbies are all about, right? Dig in, figure it out, keep your mind working and all that happy stuff. Who cares if you ultimately need midi or not?

3. I touched on this in the first answer. It's easier and cheaper to go software. The cost is $40 on up to infinity but if you catch the Xmas sales which are coming up you can probably get SampleTank 3 for a couple hundred bucks. It requires you to have a 64 bit OS though. If you're running Win 10 you're good. ST3 is not the best but it doesn't cost thousands either and it's way better than all the cheapies.

4. Time. I can't answer that but say a couple of weeks off and on with you trying things, having problems and posting questions here. It's really not hard to at least get things set up and running. Midi can get really complex if you're doing serious editing but that's for later anyway. You already have Real Band and it's a pretty good midi editor. To just get started and hearing some good sounds from your Biab tracks, it could just be a couple of hours.

5. Absolutely not, dig in and do this. You will find a use for it. You may decide it's not worth the trouble, the RT's are fine but so what? Now you know.

One last thing. Depending on when's the last time you listened to Biab midi tracks, they have gotten a whole lot better in the last 5 years or so. Midi style parts are being done live by studio players using midi instruments just as if they're recording RT's. They sound very much like regular studio audio recordings if you're using a good quality softsynth. You will be surprised.

That's it for now. If you want to proceed let is know and we'll start getting specific.

Bob

For MIDI tracks and getting better results with it i bought Ntonix a few years ago; sometimes it takes a midi track quite at a higher level of musical performance.

RTs are a great option; sounding good, and if you can use what's there the results are usually far better. But quite often i move parts around in a DAW and generate more variations to choose from. Sometimes too much work get it right.

All IMO. Indeed i usually replace the drum and bass with midi tracks, but that's usually for better control over what's 'played', especially where. Breaks especially. Due enthusiasm from posters here i bought also RapidComposer. Never got any useful stuff out of it; guess one must dig computer music to like the output ... - F

Everything said in earlier posts is spot on. Each application for midi has its challenges, but great rewards also. I use an original version (1) Yamaha Motif keyboard synth, as well as a Yamaha ES Rack synth (primarily for use with my Carvin NS1 synth acoustic/electric classical (guitar being my main instrument). As my transcribing skills are limited (i.e., transcribing my own creations to sheet music), I use the midi thru from my synth to capture what I play in midi form (that provides the input for any decent notation software), and simultaneously capture the acoustic output from the guitar, and any audio sounds from the synth connected to my guitar. Very versatile.

The better the hardware (or software synth), the better the sounds generated (and of course, more expensive).

For a great example of what can be done with this setup, have a look a Steve Oliver playing these types of guitars with synth/audio capability.

Richard

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=498642#Post498642

That's my audio reply to this thread. If it doesn't work, look in the showcase for Bittersweet 16. All midi, with an edited midi "Melodist" track...and a couple of Real Drums added.

It's been a while, but the "edit" probably took me no more than 45 minutes to an hour. With practice, I am sure I could cut that in half.

I played a guitar patch with MIDI before I started bringing a guitar on the gig, and when playing a back yard party, the guitarist host came out to see who was sitting in on guitar.

I played a trumpet patch in a country club lounge and a trumpet player came out of the dining room to see who was playing trumpet.

Those who say MIDI sounds cheesy are wrong. MIDI has no sound. MIDI instructs a synthesizer as to what sound to play and how to play it. Some synthesizers sound great others sound cheesy.

Excerpt from Electronic Musician (EM) February 2013 by Craig Anderton:

…Thirty years ago, at the 1983 Winter NAMM show, a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600 talked to a Roland JX-3P and MIDI went mainstream. Since then, MIDI has become embedded in the DNA of virtually every pop music production (yes I stole that line from Alan Parsons, but I don't think he'll mind)…

If the big studios in L.A., Nashville, New York, London and other major centers don't think MIDI sounds cheesy, it's probably not.

Probably more important than the actual tone of the MIDI instrument is the expression of the person who is playing it.

Emulating a guitar, trumpet, sax, or whatever is a little like a comedian doing an impression of a famous person. When that comedian does his or her impression of a famous person, their voice isn't exact, sometimes not even close, but you hear the famous person. Why? The patterns and nuances of the famous person's speech are more important than the tone. I'll repeat because it is that essential: The patterns and nuances of the famous person's speech are more important than the tone.

Same with MIDI. You need to recreate the pitch, dynamic, timbre, phrasing, and so on of the instrument you are doing an impression of. There are 128 MIDI continuous controllers that are designed for just that: http://www.nortonmusic.com/midi_cc.html

Learn how to use these, and you can emulate an acoustic or electric instrument. Emulate what you can and use them when appropriate.

Here are a few clips taken in 2004, on the gig, with a very low-fi mic (the one in a pre-iPod Archos Juke box) and ripped at a low bit rate. To put it simply, the tone is a fraction of what it is supposed to be. But you can hear the instrument I am emulating because I have recreated the nuances of that instrument as best as I was able to back then (I've gotten better since).

I used a Yamaha Wind MIDI controller and a Yamaha VL70m synth module.

MIDI Sax emulation 1

MIDI Sax emulation 2

MIDI Guitar emulation 1

MIDI Guitar emulation 2 -- This one was done in my friends home studio. He is a fine guitarist but wanted some MIDI guitar on his self-released CD.

BTW, the backing tracks for all by the last one were also complete MIDI made partially with BiaB, exported to a MIDI sequencer and edited there.

So IMO using MIDI can make your music more personal, more of your expression instead of simply replaying what someone else played, more versatile, more varied, and in many ways better.

Get decent synthesizers whether they are software plug-ins or hardware (I prefer hardware), listen carefully to how different instruments get their 'personality' via the nuances they use, learn how to use the continuous controllers, then go about emulating what you can of the instrument you are 'doing'. There is a learning curve, but your music will be better for it.

Insights and incites by Notes

Great responses all.
Thanks so much.

Jim Fogle really gets to the crux of the biscuit (the apostrophe) in asking what I want it to do.

As I mentioned I use biab to build backing tracks that I play out over. I try to limit my tracks to primarily bass and drums.
I minimize chording instruments (piano,guitar,b3,pedal steel,accordian,etc) to keep focus on the guitar voice.

The arrangements are simple,
usually intro-head-improv solo-head-ending.
I work out melody/harmony and improvisation ideas for each song over the backing tracks.

I realize now I could use midi to finesse my arrangements, probably improving them. Some mention that they use midi particularly for bass and drums, the backbone of my backing tracks.

Truth is I spend more time now on my guitar than ever before in my life. I can see the results in a very positive way.

Real tracks may be adequate for now as I try to build repertoire and work on my improv.

I guess that's my real focus now.

I know in the future I can explore Midi with a lot of folks on this forum to help me on my way.

Thanks again to all who posted. I really appreciate it.