At the risk of sounding snooty, I'm often puzzled, and sometimes even a little astonished, when I see certain styles requested in the Wishlist forum.

While I use BiaB for instructional purposes pretty much exclusively, I love messing around with various settings, tracks, styles, and functions, and have found myself blown away time and again at the sheer genius of this program and its algorithms.

The thing is, if you just pick a style type in a few simple tri-tone chords and some sevenths thrown in, then, IMO, you're gonna get anything that sounds more than lukewarm backing track unless you really work with the pushes, shots, holds, and refrain from having all the instruments playing for the entire song's duration.

I think one of the reasons for this is that the styles almost sound TOO good--in that you can't really hear what each individual track is capable of…with its shots, pushes, holds and different phrase selections (which are selected by the program based on how long each a phrase is to play), which notes you gave it to work with, whether you have a melodist or soloist Realtrack generated using information from a MIDI track, and so many more parameters having such an astonishing wealth of possibilities I could go on about it forever.

Just to demonstrate the adaptability of styles once you work with them, I have uploaded a medley of soloists jamming over MIDI data extracted from a melodist generated track based on Hotel California. You have new age piano, Celtic mandolins and fiddles, jazz guitar and trumpet, and a resonator slide guitar track. There's also an accordion track and MIDI synth vibes and bass and guitar. This was just something I did on a lark a while ago, and I didn't even do a shred of tweaking in Realband that would have taken this even further.

Link: https://soundcloud.com/user-423212678/biab-jamming-hotel-california-inspired-solo/s-oehaA

Anyway, I guess the point of this rant is to encourage everyone to read as much of the manual as possible, and above all experiment! There is so much you can do with tempos swaps, multi-drums, hybrid styles and all that good stuff this program has to offer.

P.S. I am well aware that I have but a shred of the expertise that a lot of the veterans here have, so please forgive me if I came off as condescending. This post was originally conceived out of my surprise that there were so many requests for styles that are more than adequately represented in the current BiaB catalogue (at the same time conceding that many styles are almost entirely lacking…flamenco, marches, and Middle Eastern spring to mind…and no, loops don’t count as styles even though I love what you can do with ACID-ized loops in BiaB and it's one of my favorite features).

Last edited by DeaconBlues09; 03/28/18 02:14 AM. Reason: Correction: resonator with slide; not pedal steel

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