What people say:

Ole Vinther: "Why Yamaha and Roland and others of the 'great' arrangement-keyboard makers do not implement some of the functions from your plugins (Humanize, Virtual Band and others) I do not understand. I am a proud owner of a Yamaha Tyros 2, and it is very well performing. But it would be perfect if one could run your plugins within the keyboard."

Jeffrey R. Smoots: "The Humanize plugin is an essential 'secret-weapon' in my midi sequencing toolkit. Frank's Humanize mfx saves me countless hours of tweaking my midi tracks' events manually. Instead, I simply apply the Humanize plug in. [...] Bring the nuance of human performance to your midi sequence with Humanize mfx." Jeff used the Humanize plug-in on his latest album "Loss for Words" on all the sequenced sounds.

Frank Like: "[...] wanted to say thanks and I spread the word about your great midi plugs and great price every chance I get."

John Fletch: "Virtual Band is an amazing tool for backing tracks. I love to use all my high quality Yamaha styles in Sonar."

Joey Stuckey: "These plug-ins are some of the most useful and time saving plug-ins out there! They do so much and cost so little! [...] These are essential tools for anyone that is a serious MIDI programmer!" (midi-plugins.de is an endorser of Joey)

Tom Parker: "I use Humanize on almost all my MIDI tracks, and would be lost without it. The new Notes plug-in is a dream come true. I use it on MIDI tracks and/or clips to make notes to myself, and can see at a glance whether I have notes. (Along with AnalogX's DXPad or ProXL's VstNotes for audio tracks/clips) I now have a complete solution to notes."

Mark Craney: "Anyway, thanks for clearing up my presets problem and thanks for making such a great bit of programming available so inexpensively.After reading the manual I realised how much of a bargain your plugins really are."

Albert Franner, Austria: "Thank you very much for your great support and for solving my problem with your plugins in combination with Cubase. Some big companies that charge 10 or 15 times the prize of your plugins for their products should take a leaf out of your book."

Ray Lindsley: "...this is one of the most useful add-on tools that I have ever purchased for Cubase and, at $19.95(*) is an incredible value. I have saved myself hours of tedious editing with just the humanize tool, alone. Given the price- it's a no-brainer."

Manuel Dominguez Sarmiento: "I've recently begun to do all my drum tracks strictly with softsynths/sequencers and your Humanize plugin is indispensable. [...] Again, thanks for listening and for the great support."

Alex K.: "I have found your page in Internet with your midi plug-ins! I've tried them and was impressed by their power."

Jeff B., Manchester: "I have dreamed of the Split Poly Plug-In for 10 years now, and it has finally arrived... Also the Double-eliminating plug-in is another that has me excited because of the time saved. I'm going to have to get my Cakewalk customers to check out your site!!!"

Comments from the Cakewalk user forum

"... I use these MIDI plugins tools they work very, very well ..."

"... and my favorite is Virtual Band. It is amazing to be able to import Yamaha styles. When I play them through my external Yamaha keyboard they even sound the same as played directly on the keyboard. Played through TTS-1, for example, it still sounds good ..."

"... this 'parallel multiple arrangement' and the sharing of parts of the arrangements between different Virtual Band instances is a great feature..."

(*) price of the plugins up to version 7

Humanize Details

This plugin allows you to randomize all aspects of notes. Each of them can be switched on or off individually:

• Humanize Note On: Shifts the starting time of note events
• Humanize Note Duration: Changes the length of notes
• Humanize Note Velocity: Randomizes the velocity of note events
• Humanize Note Pitch: Inserts a randomized pitch wheel event for each note

Additionally, the plugin can randomize several kinds of controller data:

• Humanize the starting time of controllers, wheels, RPN and NRPN events
• Humanize the values controllers, wheels, RPN and NRPN events

There are four built-in ways to generate random numbers. That means you can choose between four different curves for random number generation:

• Uniform curve: This is a very simple way to generate random numbers. A very important feature of the uniform curve is that all possible numbers have the same probability.
• Gauss (bell) curve: This offers a method for random number generation that is very similar to the little inaccuracies that are produced by a human player. Generally speaking, small random numbers are much more likely than large ones - just like humans whose playing show a lot of small and only very few large inaccuracies.
• Exponential curve and Reverse Exponential curve: These are two curves for experimental humanization effects.

Additionally, it is possible to define an unlimited number of user random curves.

Overlapping Notes: A common problem that arises when the starting times and durations of notes are randomized is that adjoining notes may overlap afterwards. This is not too critical as long as the notes are different. But if the same notes overlap several severe problem are the consequence: for example, flanging effects may occur and the second note may stop too early. The manual correction of these problems may be very time-consuming and annoying. But the Humanize plugin offers a function that automatically fixes overlaps between the same notes: Fix Note Overlaps.

Relative or Absolute (Display Mode): There are two ways to enter the amount of changes of time for note start, note duration and minimum note distance.

• In Absolute mode Note On and Note Duration settings are shown in ticks, Note Velocity settings in velocity levels (0-127) and Note Pitch settings in wheel levels (-8192 to 8192)
• In Relative mode Note On and Note Duration settings are shown in percent of a quarter note, Note Velocity settings in percent of the maximum velocity value (127) and Note Pitch settings in percent of the maximum wheel value (8192)

Plugin Usage

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

Key Features of Virtual Band

Syle Architetcture. 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.

Plugin Details

There are several options which allow a detailed control of the plug-in behaviour.

Split Type specifies the algorithm that will be used for splitting.

• Identical time, downwards and Identical time, upwards split a chord if all of its note start at the same time. They differ only in the direction in which the chord will be split:
  

  

• Overlap, free channel tries to ensure that on each midi channel there will be only one note playing at each possible time. This Split Type always searches for the lowest free and unused midi channel:
  

  

You can further control the non-note handling of all other remaining events (controller, aftertouch, patch changes, pitch wheel, etc. events). For example, if there is a volume change before a chordal passage that has to be split, what should be done with volume change: Leave non-note data unchanged, Duplicate non-note data, Delete non-note data, Set to specific midi channel.

Channel Filter offers an easy way to filter out events on single channels. Each channel that is checked will simply pass thru. Channels that are unchecked will be discarded. In the example on the right, events on channels one to eight will pass thru and events on channels nine to sixteen will be filtered.

Temporary Quantization performs a quantization with the given resolution before the splitting starts. After the splitting, the quantization is undone so that you effectively will never notice any changes in the event’s timing. This option is very helpful if the notes of a chord do not exactly start at the same time, although the notes are supposed to form a chord.

Plugin Details

There are three different modes of operation:

• Doubled events are events that start at the same musical time (e.g. two C5 note events starting at 2:1:060). These events are often results of e.g. pasting one clip into another. Removing these events manually is a quite lengthy process. You can additionally choose which events are to be kept: Keep the note with the shortest or longest duration, the control event with the lowest or highest data, etc.
• Repeated events are events that don't have any effect on the connected midi equipment. For example, sending the same controller event with the same data at the beginning of each bar is only a waste of the very limited bandwidth of the midi connection. But these events can often be found in commercial midi files or in the recordings of e.g. a portable keyboard and its auto accompaniment.
• Un-Octaving deletes notes that appear in different octaves. This doubling is often used to 'thicken' string or brass sounds. You can choose which of the doubled notes are to be kept: the notes in the top or the bottom octave. The principle if shown in the following figure, where the highest notes are kept:
  

  

Another important feature is Temporary Quantization. It performs a quantization with the given resolution before the processing starts. After the processing but before sending the events back to the sequencing software, the quantization is undone so that one will effectively never notice any changes in the events’ timing. This option is useful if one wants to delete events that are some kind of doubled but do not start on exaclty the same time.

Plugin Details

Some of the main features of the plugin are

Trigger Mode. Choose when a pattern restart:

• Continuous: Restart a completed pattern immediately after it has finished
• Measure Aligned: Restarts a completed pattern at the beginning of the next measure.
• Note On: The pattern is restarted each time a new note is played. This options allows for a kind of "controller envelopes" for each note.

Interpolation. Generates a smooth series of controllers between the steps

If one does not want these “big jumps” between the controller values of two adjacent steps, switching Interpolation on will generate a series of controller values.

Please note the dashed line after step 5. If Trigger Mode is set to Continuous or Measure Aligned an interpolation after the last step will generate controller values until the pattern is restarted.

User-Defined Timing. In a lot of situations one wants to use patterns that have an “uneven” timing instead of generating controller events every - let’s say - eighth or sixteenth note. So, enter the time you need between two steps.
The distance between steps 1 and 2 is set to 12 ticks, between steps 2 and 3 to 24 ticks.

Examples

Example 1. Simply listen to this short audio example:

It was generated from the settings shown in the image on the top. First you hear some long, static notes. That's what you play! After that the real-time controller events are added giving your notes the groove your music needs. If you don't like the result just move some sliders in the plugin and get completely different results.

Example 2. Or listen to this example:

You hear a well known melody that changes each of four times being played.

• First time: Meldoy played with a simple saw-sound
• Second time: Played with a pattern that modulates the filter resonance. The pattern is restarted for each note
• Third time: A pattern that modulates the expression controller (Controller 11) is used
• Fourth Time: A combination of 2nd and 3rd. Two instances of Rhythmic Controller were used - one which controls filter resonance and one for expression controller.

Plugin Details

Simply insert one instance of this plugin into each track or each clip where notes shall be taken and type the text into the notes edit field.

The current text can be saved as preset. Recalling a preset will insert this text to the notes edit field. There are three different modes for recalling presets:

• Replace complete text: Delete the current notes and insert the text from the preset.
• Append to text: Appends the text from the preset to the end of the notes.
• Insert at cursor position: Inserts the text from the preset at the current cursor position. Using this option you can setup a number of standard comments and add them to your current notes.

Use alternate font: Use this option to display the text notes using a different, fixed-width font.

Plugin Details

This plugin analyzes your MIDI events and collects a lot of useful information about...

... about Note Events like the total number of notes, their key and velocity ranges and the average velocity.

... about Wheel Events. The total number of wheel events and the overall range of the wheel events. The values of the first and the last wheel event will help you to find wheel events that are not set to "0" at the end and might produce detuned sounds.

... about all occurring patch, controller, RPN and NRPN Events. Have you ever wondered why your song does not sound the way you want? There might be some patch, volume or other controller changes left.

Simply insert Midi Statistics as an insert effect for a track in the console view or in the track view and watch what happens. Midi Statistics does not alter any events.

Plugin Details

The result is a track where the different sounds are split into different midi channels. This plugin is often used in situations where a track represents more than one instrument that is switched via patch changes.

These different midi channels can easily be split into different tracks (for example using the CAL-program "Split Channel to Tracks.cal" which is included with Cakewalk).

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