I'm rather torn between the two. I mean, there are so many awesome styles, the option to make minor adjustments (add or remove a note, move a note because you didn't play the intended one or because the timing is slightly off in an otherwise perfect take), to have such control to craft the song to make it sound like it does in my head when I came up with it makes the MIDI data very desirable to me as does building up a richer sound with several instruments in multiple tracks. But at the same time, the styles bring with them a certain rigidity. Changing the tempo during a performance, changing timing within a song (for example, blending back and forth between a 4 / 4 and 3 / 4 within a song... these are things that are easy just playing and doing an audio recording as a solo piano piece but are somewhat problematic (especially when dropped into GarageBand which expects a consistent timing). Is there even a way to create a style that has variations with such different timings? Are there any existing styles out there that pull this off? With so many styles to choose from, there is also sometimes a difficulty in picking one (or even finding the one that most closely matches what I'm hearing in my head). There are so many times I'm saying... yeah, a beat like that song I heard in Melodifestivalen a couple of years ago... or that arpeggio similar to that song by this Swedish artist I like and... there are no direct styles linked to that particular song around. And then you have to go digging and listening to various styles until you find something at random and say... oh, that's it!... this style is what I'm looking for... what a weird name... never would have guessed it would be called this... or even mix and match between a few different styles... or even create or add your own parts to a style. It is definitely a LOT more involved.
