Hi,

before I will finally go the arranger keyboard route as a composing help I tried out the usual software suspects (latest version demos) in combination with my midiguitar. That means: yammie styles played by live styler (live use), omb and biab (step composing with chords and patterns). The soundmodule is hypersonic 2, which is great for that.

My findings are, the graphical user interface of biab and omb is simply terrible and windows 3.0-like. Much like software looked about 15 years ago. I believe graphics make a difference if you like to use your laptop or not for composing music. The UI especially in biab is a nightmare and way too cluttered - though a tons of features is included - in a very confusing way. But then again: These two are the only ones I found for step sequencing with chords and yammie styles.

I may be wrong, but it seems biab can use yammie styles but not to their full extend: There are only two variations and fills possible when you want to change your style part. Or does it offer four variations and fills + break somewhere else in the menus? I did not get to grips with it. Can you input style variations like you do with chords?
This is possible in OMB but strangely enough the styles sounded stiff and wrong and composing a few bars resulted in patterns that went quickly out of groove when looping. My laptop holds an intel 4 (2.8 GHZ) under its hood - that should be fairly enough.

What experiences did you have with those proggies. I am not far from going the arranger keyboard route (pa1x that is) - even if there are loads more possibilities and flexibility with the formentioned software. But it seems way more timeconsuming (biab) then I expected to build a song that sounds decent. Still I would fork out the money for the proggies if I knew that biab offers more than two variations (A + B) and would be on par in that sense to uptodate arrangers. And if I coud be assured they are more or less bugfree which I doubt with livestyler.

Any suggestions?

Best regards

Heinrich