Virtual Band is an intelligent automatic accompaniment plugin for your sequencing software. If you're looking for a professional backing band to support your performance, the Virtual Band plugin has everything you could ask for. Load native Virtual Band Styles, import many different style and loop formats or build your own styles.

For a complete arrangement only 4 steps have to be performed:

  1. Patch Virtual Band into a track of the sequencing software
  2. Load a style
  3. Enter all chord changes, style changes, variation (e.g. intro, fill, ending) changes
  4. Play

Demos

We prepared a couple of demo songs that will show the potential of Virtual Band. Each song consists of one melody track (played by a real musician) and one track with Virtual Band plugged into. The styles used for the demos make extensive use of the special guitar mode.

Each song comes in two versions: a "low quality version" simply played as-it-is through Cakewalk's TTS-1 GM soft synth, a "high quality version" that was mixed individually and played through different outboard sound modules.


Download midi files of demo songs: Grandma on the Dancefloor, In the Elevator, Good Spirit

Key Features of Virtual Band

Style Architecture. Virtual Band has an enormous flexible style architecture. This includes:

  • Up to 256 Intro patterns
  • Up to 256 Variation patterns
  • Up to 256 Fill-in patterns
  • Up to 256 Ending patterns
  • Special Guitar mode.
  • Virtual Band knows 47 chord types
  • Note On Tolerance. This is a unique feature of Virtual Band. In a lot of situations a real musician would play notes matching a chord that has not appeared yet. The example below illustrates this: A new chord in measure 2 will already influence the note played on 4+ in measure one. Note On Tolerance defines how far Virtual Band is allowed to look into the future of the arrangement to find a new chord. For the example below, setting this parameter to 0 would result in the notes shown in the middle. With a parameter of 1/8th the accompaniment on the right is generated.
  • Plus dozens of other features

Supported Style and Pattern Format. Virtual Band supports in addition to its own style format the loading of a wide variety of third party format:

  • Midi files. Prepare styles as midi files and import them
  • Yamaha styles. The compatibility with the Yamaha style format allows for using thousands of styles available for free on the Web.
  • Pattern Brush, Session Drummer 1/2 and Groove Clips. Virtual Band is able to use these drum pattern formats.
  • Musiclab's RealGuitar.

Multiple Parallel Arrangements. A very unique feature of Virtual Band is the ability to have 32 arrangements (16 local, 16 shared, see below) available in parallel in one plugin. Imagine you want to test several different chord progressions for your melody line. Then it is very helpful if you are able to simply switch between the different chord progressions.

  • Local Arrangements. These are arrangements that are only valid within the current instance of Virtual Band. Edit them the way it was explained above and use them for a normal operation. There is nothing special expect that you can choose and switch between 16 different local arrangements.
  • Shared Arrangements. This type of arrangements is a lit bit difficult to explain, so let us start with a short example. Imaging you have a style that only consists of drum patterns. Then you have another one with bass patterns and a third one with guitar patterns. Each of these styles shall be played by a separate instance of Virtual Band. So you set up three tracks in SONAR, plug one Virtual Band into each of the tracks and let each of them play one of the styles. Of course all three arrangements will show the same chords - bass and guitar should match. If you use local arrangements you have to enter the chords into each arrangement. If you now want to change the chords you have to do that in each local arrangement.
    Shared arrangements now offer a solution to that problem: All shared arrangements within all loaded instances of Virtual Band show the same events. Which event types shall be shared can be separately defined. Each event type that is checked will be shared within all shared arrangements of a specific number; all other event types will be local (just like a local arrangement).

Style Editor. Virtual Band has a complete style editor built in.

Arpeggiator. In addition to the regular styles, Virtual Band offers a very flexible arpeggio system with fully programmable arpeggio styles and patterns.

Phrases. Within the arrangements phrases can be used to play a number of short pre-recorded rhythmic and melodic sequences that follow the songs chords. This feature is very similar to the Multi Pads known from the Yamaha arranger keyboards.

Live Input. Virtual Band can now be controlled from what you play on your external midi keyboard. This includes the live input of chords into the arrangement and (depending on the abilities of the host sequencer) the ability to play styles and arpeggios in realtime.

Free Styles

Apart from the included Virtual Band demo styles there are a lot of free styles available on the web:

Yamaha Style Format: Style compatible with the Yamaha style format can be found at these places.

User Styles: The following styles are provided by Virtual Band users.

User
Styles
Alan Smith Soulman.sty