Someone mentioned Chordpulse and Akoff music. I think this is not the way to go.
Jjazzlab is way beyond what these softs can do.in terms of arrangement, introducing shots and holds and accents in different parts of the song, the wealth of tweaks you can introduce in songs and styles.
Jjazzlab has
more harmonic possibilities than any of these and certainly much more than Band in a box, but also more than Roland or Yamaha. This is really important for playing from Realbooks.
Jjazzlab has real potential for the real jazzplayer
in terms of styles too, the possibilities are huge with potentially loads of variations.
what stops me in making the transition to Jjazzlab is (I’m still on Biab right now)
*lack of
time to invest in learning all the great features of Jjazzlab
*lack of
lead sheet (in which you could work and rework a tune) and serves as the basis of your tunes. If you want to learn lots of tunes following them on the screen is great.
*no easy way to
make styles, though Jerome has already given a lot of intresting tips on how to make styles. I like ECM jazz, Joshua Redman, Jacky Terrason and other modern jazzstyles, which you would never find in Yamaha, Roland or Biab. I put lots of effort in creating styles for biab (jazzstylezz.com), so I know there is no easy way, but still.
maybe the whole arrangement window should be replaced by a menu:
you have the song, songparts and optional shots, holds and bass pedal elements.
on the other hand you have 4 intros, different main style parts, fills and outros.
with the push of a (large for touchscreens)
button you can select any of those to
arrange while you are playing along. Same as with a Yamaha keyboard. But without having to play left hand recognizable chords.
the same menu items could be
controlled by midi pedals (McMillen’s have a bad rep, because the learning curve is high, but are absolutely awesome once you put some time and effort into them). As a musician you could let your inspiration guide the arrangement: little heavier, softer, pause, fill…
you could easily
skip the bridge or push a button or footswitch to go back to the top or to the outro…
As far as sound goes, someone suggested Halion Sonic. That must be great. Kontakt libraries are certainly worth checking out. These are really nice. I believe they are even superior to Halion.
For one, the work Jerome is doing is superb and holds real promise for Jazz musicians and lovers. If only he had the money, time and crew to build on what is already quite astounding, he‘d blow Yamaha, Ketron and Biab away.