And again let me dig my grouchy old man heels in and again say that I am not installing Spleeter, Schweeter, Splatter, Neener, Nanner or anything else. I have PG Music BIAB/RB which costs a lot of money (to me) and I am tired of having to chain 17 other programs to it in order to make it do things it should already do. For a guy who just likes to play with toys I don't want a musical Erector Set (How's THAT for dating myself?) just to make a song. This "load that then route this and splice from the VST and then file, spin, collate and dickle" is a science project I do not care to take on. The drums in Real Band are, and have always been, really limp and have no spirit, but I am also not skilled enough, and I can't stress this enough, nor do I want to, sit and tap hi hats and drum fills in on a MIDI controller or drag little tick marks around a grid. There isn't enough quantizing in the world to pull what I would assemble into time.

I just want to be able to say "Take that weak snare out and use this one", and rharv seems to have come up with the simplest and most logical solution. Start with MIDI drums. Then I can put in John Bonham's kick and Phil Collins snare and Omar Hakim's incredible hit hat work. Somewhere I have the Steven Slate drums plugin and the amount of sound in there alone will keep me tweaking the drum sounds for weeks.

Back to topic, how about some more recent and relevant guitar and piano players in the Real Tracks?

I am using the new 1040XTRAEZ form this year. It has just 2 lines.

1. How much did you make in 2023?
2. Send it to us.