I've got a midi file that I would like to edit to sound more human. How can I copy the bass track to another midi track, so that I may mix the Fingered Bass with the Picked Bass, or even mixing some Slap Bass in certain areas? I figured that if I copied and pasted the bass track to another midi track, I'd end up with both basses playing in unison, with characteristics of each track coming through at different times, or maybe I'd need to mix one up over the other at particular times in the tune. The first thing would be to get a copy of one bass part to another track with a different bass sound, right?

Or could I copy only certain notes from the bass part to the new Slap Bass part? Maybe only the high notes of the part could be copied to the Slap Bass track?

Hi,

If your MIDI file opened on individual tracks, simply use the "Edit | Track | Duplicate" option to create a second bass file.

You want to use different sounds on each of the bass tracks, will most likely need to change the MIDI channel for the duplicated track as the bass's original MIDI channel will also be duplicated.

Regards,
Noel

I would be inclined to export the midi from BIAB and pull it into something like Sonar or Reaper or whatever DAW. There I would copy the track a few times then maybe play with Quantize levels to get a bit of shift on each track. Assign whatever bass you wanted to each track.

It would then be very simple to add automation for volume, panning or whatever you like. Using stereo width say on two bases panned in different areas for effect (most times bass would be up the middle).

Once you have it in a halfway reasonable DAW the possibilities are almost endless.

That is what I’d do. Many will disagree however.

Tony

Is this stuff that can be done in RealBand? I'm not into a separate DAW, at least as of yet. I'm trying to minimize the learning curve to get use out of RealBand to start with. Can I play with the quantize settings in RB?

You could do it there also. To me I’m used to having the tools available in Sonar (Cakewalk by BandLab) that really make this task very simple. I’ve not spent much time in RealBand doing this sort of thing (I lost patience with it).

Just my way

Tony

Yes you can play with Quantize and Humanize in Realband if you want.
To be honest, RB (and PT) are very good at MIDI editing.

If you only want to copy a certain note range for the new bass part, check out the Data Filter option.

When you click Copy, in the resulting pop up there is an option to enable the Data Filter and then you can select a certain note range (among other filters).
Same with Cut and other common commands. Let the Data Filter become your friend.
For MIDI it's another nice tool RB has that can save a lot of time/effort ..

Yes you can do all of that in RB