Aiming at the multi-antenna communication systems, a downlink transmit scheme combining adaptive beamforming (ABF) with space-time block coding (STBC) is first presented, which utilizes the maximization of the output mean signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the minimization of the symbol error rate (SER) upper bound of the three widely used modulations as the design criteria. Then, based on the moment generating function (MGF) and the Gauss-Chebyshev integration, a simple and accurate numerical method is presented to analyze the SER performance of the system with the new transmit scheme under the three commonly used modulations. Finally, computer simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategy. Aiming at the multi-antenna communication systems, a downlink transmit scheme combining adaptive beamforming (ABF) with space-time block coding (STBC) is first presented, which utilizes the maximization of the output mean signal-to-noise ratio based on the moment generating function (MGF) and the Gauss-Chebyshev integration, a simple and accurate numerical method is presented to analyze the SER performance of the system with the new transmit scheme under the three commonly used modulations. Finally, computer simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategy.