Quote:

Hi all,
If this has been covered I could not find it in the search engine. I use midi and biab to back me and my wife's jazz duo. I use some midi files I find on the internet. Some of the files seem to play louder than others. It's kind of a hassle having to manually adjust the volume for each song on the sequencer on the fly with a guitar in one hand. Is there a trick to make all the files play at the same volume. I've messed with it for hours and can't seem to find the key. I can adjust the volume in midi as it's playing and when I try to save and then use again it goes back to the original level. Can you tell me if this is a midi thing and how to fix it or does biab have a quick fix for it. Thanks for any help and info you can provide.

G-man



There's several different issues going on here and I've been there and done that. Using biab live and using midi files live are two different things. I finally gave up trying to play a midi file live using Power Tracks because messing with the mouse on a gig is just not practical plus as you found out not all midi files were created equal. It's a complete pia trying to remix several hundred Real Book files track by track. Burning the tunes to MP3 also is not practical to me because of the mixing problem. Notes is absolutely correct but he's a long time and full time pro at this and I'm not. After years of experience you can tell even if you're at home if the mix is correct or not but for me, I get on the gig and if the drums are way too loud even though they sounded great at home, then that song is useless because it's a finished stereo mix and you can't simply pull the drums back.
What I wound up doing is using Biab only, no midi's. I use a standard mono PA and I pan the bass and drums right and everything else left and use a stereo out plug that I split to two channels on my mixer. Then I have some control by adjusting one of those mixer channels. Between the gain itself and just turning up or down the bass control I get good enough control over the bass and drums.
Yes, you lose some of the nice individual song specific parts in a well done midi file but it's just not worth it for me to mix all those for the 10 or 12 times a year I might do a Biab gig. The Conductor feature works great live, btw.
If I needed to put together a real professional show like I used to do years ago, then yeah I would put in the time just like Notes does.

Another issue you mentioned involved changing a midi file live and saving it but then later when you play it again, nothing's changed. That's because there are imbedded midi volume changes in the file that you have to strip out before your changes will stick. There can be other control changes in that file too that can bite you that need to be removed. You didn't mention what sequencer you're using but it will have a midi edit window and you have to go in there and remove those cc's. That's more work for you to do before you can use that midi file consistently on a gig and another reason why I gave up on using midi's live. For jazz especially, Biab alone is good enough.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.