DelMismoRacimo,

Welcome to Band-in-a-Box and the forum!

There are several names to call a MIDI instrument sound including "patch',"instrument patch" or "MIDI patch". That's because in the old days sounds were created from rack mounted hardware, oscillators and filters, that created one sound at a time. The hardware pieces were patched together using short chords that looked like guitar chords.

Loops are short (1 to 8 bar or measure) audio or midi phrases. An audio loop will sometimes have embedded pitch and tempo data so a DAW, or digital audio workstation, can manipulate the audio to make it sound faster or slower or higher or lower in pitch. For percussion instruments you can "tune" the drum notes to match your song or change the cadence. Besides manipulating a loop can be repeated as many times as you desire. So for instance if you need a consistent tamborine sound a loop would likely work for you.

Band-in-a-Box includes more than 2,000 audio loops. They are at X:/bb/RealTracks/Loops where X = your storage drive letter where Band-in-a-Box is installed.

A piccolo snare sound is available for free from freesound.org. It is available +++ here +++

That link has about 240 audio samples available for download. The audio samples are recordings of strikes to a 13" X 3" Pearl piccolo snare drum. Each sample is called a "one shot" because each sample is one hit on the snare head. Each sounds different because of tuning, playing style, strainer on/off setting and velocity or how hard each strike is on the snare head.

Velocity is very important with audio samples because the sound, or timbre, changes depending on how hard each strike is made. Many people confuse velocity with loudness but they are different. You can strike a drum head hard and the sound WILL be louder than a soft strike but the hard hit also sounds different than a soft strike. Thus a change in timbre. In audio production timbre is more difficult to emulate than volume level. I suspect you know this already which is why you want the sound of a piccolo snare instead of a standard kit snare.

MIDI can call up 128 different velocity levels where 0 = no sound or note off up to 127 which is full volume. Each velocity can "playback" a different audio sample so you can emulate the timbre of a patch from off to full volume or anywhere in between. Most patches playback a single sample across all velocities or just a few samples in three or four velocity ranges.

Okay, now you've downloaded the samples you want so, now what? Now you need to mold the samples into a patch. Programs like Plogue Sforzando, Synthfont 64, Kontakt and SampleTank create patches from audio samples.

You could also copy and paste audio samples into a RealBand track.

Last edited by Jim Fogle; 08/09/19 11:41 AM. Reason: Added loop info
Jim Fogle - 2024 BiaB (1111) RB (5) Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk by BandLab (CbB) - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home