Hey Ken,

Your comments make my day and I'm also glad that you brought up Mike and the B3 RealTracks. I have used them successfully, for example, in https://soundcloud.com/aleckrand/close-your-eyes and https://soundcloud.com/aleckrand/sonny. You may want to check these out to hear Mike's comping and soloing. He's the real deal alright.

But when I tried the B3 RealTracks in MOONTRANE the results were - how to describe it - let's say: incoherent, at best. The changes come too quickly and have few of the orthodox transitions.

The moral: BIAB/RealBand is an amazing feat of imagination and computer science prowess. But, at this stage, it isn't Deep Blue or whatever succeeded IBM's chess-playing program. It wouldn't survive the Turing Test, although it might hang on for a while with simple tunes. But MOONTRANE would defeat it. Who knows about the future?

But, in a more important sense, BIAB/RealBand is much better than Deep Blue, which relies only on refrigerator-sized CPUs and brute combinatorial force.

Instead, BIAB/RB is a kind of symbiotic weld of musician to machine. The better you are, the better BIAB does. And the better BIAB does - with voicings and sounds that you might not think of - the better you do. You learn from it. Of course, there are programs in other fields for which the same thing holds. But I can't think of anything else remotely like it in music.

Thanks again for your compliments.

Dean Clark (aka Aleck Rand)