Hi. I just upgraded to 2019 Pro for Windows from 2012. When I'm playing back a tune, if I choose a RealTrack instrument for the melody it plays a solo, not the melody. If I switch it back to a midi instrument it plays the written melody as I expect. Does anyone know why this would happen?

Yes. BIAB does not use RealTracks to play your melody. This has been requested, but for now, you must use a MIDI instrument.

All RealTracks are either backing tracks - comping over the chord changes, or soloists who play over the chord changes. Either type is pre-recorded playing snippets.

This is the way BIAB has worked since the introduction of RealTracks in, I think, 2009.

Thanks, Matt. Kind of a disappointment, that. I had not tried it before.

And now I can't seem to replace the Real tracks sax with a midi one - and the notation is of the realtracks solo, not the melody I had labored to put in so I could make a leadsheet. Maybe I should have stuck with 2012!

One of the things that I always do is when I get a song to stage I like is that I save it with a slightly altered name... something like MySong1.sgu, MySong2.sgu, etc. Then, if things go awry, while I'm playing around, I can always return to an earlier version instead of having to start from scratch.

BIAB is brilliant software. The Realtracks are amazing.

To add a little more to what Matt has said... The reason that RTs don't play melodies is because they are audio files of accompaniment patterns through the different chords. What BIAB does is to cleverly slice that audio and piece it together as a chord progression that's entered on the chordsheet.

Regards,
Noel

• my latest re-mix using multiband compression : Just A Little After Midnight

Save your song so you don’t lose the work you’ve done.

Then we can help you switch to a MIDI instrument. You are probably having trouble overriding the style’s choice of instrument on that track. Give us as many details as you can but don’t give up. Again, BIAB 2012 worked the same basic way.

And again, as great as RealTracks are, I think PGMusic should make it abundantly clear that RealTracks DO NOT play your imported or notated MIDI melody or solo. We've seen this come up so many times, and always resulting in disappointment. For folks who understand that even if it could, it still wouldn't sound very good, I get that it's a let down when you learn about it.

But for accompaniment tracks, wow, nothing short of a real live player beats it (because, for the most part, it is a real live player).

I never tried any of this stuff in 2012. So first, in my attempt to play the melody with a RealTrack (which I just found I couldn't do) BIAB replaced the melody with a solo. Then when I saved it, thinking I was saving the tune with the new Realband style (silly me), it overwrote my melody with the solo.

Thanks for your help, Matt and Noel. But this seems to me just another example of software "helping me" when I don't want it and creating a problem I then have to work around.

(Sorry. It's not a good week.)

I think a good feature request would be some sort of warning if you try to overlay a RealTrack on a melody or solo track that has existing MIDI data on it.

That does make sense. E. H. I’m sorry you lost work. Study the song naming scheme described above by Noel and follow that or something similar in the future.

Thanks, Matt. That's what I usually do, but I didn't expect to be outsmarted by the software. I'll be extra cautious untill I figure this thing out. 'Probably build some dummy tunes to experiment with.

Thanks again for all the help everybody.

I like that idea of building dummy tunes! That's definitely worth going with