Hi PG Music,

I have not done a count up but I would guess that over 90% of all BIAB Real Tracks and Styles are Country & Western or closely related (I would be interested to know the exact figures).

Is this because 90% of all music in the world is "Country" music or is there another reason?

Please explain.

Thanks & Best Regards

Hi,

I just came across this wonderful animated timeline of music genres from 1910 to 2019.

https://laughingsquid.com/most-popular-music-genres-1910-2019/

Interesting that Country music had a couple of peaks in popularity over the last 110 years - in the 1920's and the late 1940's.

Best Regards
Nigel

We typically divide RealTracks into three broad and often overlapping groups - Jazz, Country, and Pop/Rock. In the RealTracks Picker, if I filter for "country" I get 859, if I filter for jazz I get 899, and if I filter for Pop I get 899. "western" gives me 46. Many of the instruments classified as country are not "traditional" country and could be used in various modern country / pop / rock settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS-zEH8YmiM

To be honest, this numbers game blurs the discussion somewhat. There are no 899 different jazz styles, meaning a different feel, drive, rhythm. Most styles share the same bass or drum lines, piano or guitar chords. There are not even 30 different bass or drum styles in Jazz realtracks. adding a vibraphone doesn’t change the feel, rhythm, drive... The user has a good point, imo.

Essential is that -regardless if you’re a country or jazz or pop lover- the styles cover a lot of variety: modern country, old fashioned stuff, waltzes.... in jazz also: bebop, dixie, gypsy, today’s jazz. And if I speak for jazz, styles mostly cover jazz up to 1955. Modern jazz is not present, Unless you confuse it with fusion or smooth jazz.

So, I think there is a point made here. And the number of styles running in the hundreds....? If we made a difference between basic style (rhythm section, bass and drums) we would have more honest figures: 30 different styles with 20 variations for each, or something like that.

Country yes, but more so.. jazz. Can we please get more indie / alternative / folk and youthful, current / hip and truly popular styles?

It seems to me that there was a time when there were very few country styles in BIAB. A lot of Jazz, Funk and Blues and some random Latin, Country and other styles.

An old thread resurfaced. I think there is some unintended bias in all of us; for me, anything that isn’t jazz just takes up disk space. I’m sure tons of users feel all the jazz is taking up space. 😎

The best thing you can do to get more of what you want is to be specific. Help PG Music by giving them song names, performer names, and links to audio or video. If it’s a drum pattern and you have sheet music, send it.

I’ve done this with success for 30 years. I requested something very specific recently and got it in the next major update. Also, two years ago, I asked for support for cut-time sambas. What helped me also turned out to help the bluegrass players who had the same problem.

I will add that styles are not in stone. Some country styles can work well in a jazz song and visa-versa, at least this is true on the MIDI side of BiaB..

Great point by Mario. He's absolutely right.

One other thought. Styles have been known to be updated and improved, for free just as a matter of course in patches.

Hi Nigel et al,
As Andrew pointed out earlier in the thread, we generally try to equally distribute new RealTracks and other content between the three broad categories, Jazz, Country, and Pop/Rock. That's not to say there aren't other genres, but we generally group them in that. For example, bluegrass would be under the "country" umbrella, smooth jazz would be under the "jazz" umbrella, etc.

With that in mind, I was curious about how the "90%" figure was arrived at, so I did an overview of our whole collection of RealTracks. It's difficult to be precise, because there's so much crossover between different genres, but I think I got a pretty good overview. And, with "country" and "pop/rock", there are a LOT of RealTracks that really could be considered either of those, particularly rhythm/chording guitars. As such, I first determined that about 10% of the RealTracks fall into this category. And so the list below has a 10% spread for the "country" and "pop-rock" categories. So here is what I discovered when I then went through them all:

Blues: 7%
Country: 18-28%
Pop/Rock: 20-30%
Folk/Americana/Bluegrass: 11%
Funk: 2%
Jazz/Latin: 24%
Metal/Hard-Rock: 1%
ModernPop/Electronic: 3%
World: 5%

So, in general this looks like a pretty well-balanced list of genres. That being said, there are certainly genres that could be better represented. There have been several posts requesting more modern "radio" pop styles, and those comments are certainly valid. And Matt made an excellent point above, that we often view these things through a filter of our own favourite kinds of music. We always pay close attention to this styles and RealTracks wishlist forum, and while we can't always fulfill everyone's request, we always make an effort to fulfill as many as we can. Certainly with this recent release a LOT of the new material we released came directly from requests from these forums.

Tobin.

sigh im overloaded with jazz n country n blues styles...
lets take blues...heres why i never do a blues song...even tho i get lots of ideas.
basically there is a loooong history of wonderfull blues songs....and its very very difficult to come up with a new original 'twist' as it were.
its ok for people who want to emulate a popular song with bb backing when they are playing out live..

one i like in rock is mike durham.
as to the punk and metal styles.as one who was once in various rock groups including those two styles i find the rt's too sizzly compared to what we used to do....we were more subtle...the cleaner chugging rt's are ok tho.

in summary more rock please.
also let me say...and im haveing a difficulty right now ....tthere is a paucity
of great sounding rock genre soloists..
many times after going thru soloists i dont find anything that suits the song idea.

merry x

om