Beat Buddy and related backing work performance videos

BeatBuddy General
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Acoustic Drive adopted Beat Buddy around 2015 and still uses the stock beats for many songs. A few things changed over the years as I worked with REAPER to develop my own tracks and folks on the forum made ingenious non-percussive enhancements.

All backing work – whether Beat Buddy or .wav output comes into the mixer in stereo – through a volume pedal for Beat Buddy. I record the parallel mixer monitor output going to the PA as an .mp3 to be enhanced later in REAPER. The GoPro audio is replaced in iMovie with the improved audio. GoPro audio is really only good to visually sync audio and video. The room noise, etc into a single point makes it poor quality.

Videos are posted on our Youtube channel at – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIYsw4L9w2mCDju2THeN0RA

Willin’ - The ‘breakthrough’ started with this @Phil_Flood posting. I meticulously learned his bass part before removing it from the track. The piano and the Bosendorfer Jazz trio kit in general sounds great.

Comfortably Numb – was always a goal thanks to having a gifted lead guitarist. It didn’t come together until @Phil posted a version with the signature arpeggiation. Uses his NP P-Bass and centered strings kit.

Some Kind of Wonderful – another straight from Beat Buddy using the bencajon kit.

My original Good Night Mr Blues we have played for years using a stock beat. I simple lifted MIDI parts from Beat Buddy and compiled them with fills into a OP (one press) .wav audio version using REAPER. Allowed me to do the song as we always have and to concentrate on vocal without kicking the pedal and buttons.

I relented on Crazy Train which we did for years using the stock beat (Rock 8- Beat 22 – Var 11) and made it a full .wav audio backing track using a MIDI download. I always use a clip of Ozzy to start so it made sense to segue the backing part and intro clip on REAPER. One of us plays bass on this so I wanted to bring in certain parts only enough to support not dominate (the piano for instance in unison with my guitar on single note parts) and cleanup overly complicated drum parts.

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I enjoyed them all but particularly, Good Night Mr. Blues.

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Brilliant to see and hear the Beat-buddy in live action. Great songs, thanks for creating and sharing. Love it.

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Thanks. Couldn’t have done any of this without your unstinting help over the years. Mr. Blues began as a snarky response to a song a quite talented friend wrote that seemed just a little too happy for my taste.

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Thank you Carl. These represent to me a point in the process. What started out years ago as a possible adjunct in our trio to practice with became a mainstay. In that process I had to consider where the line is drawn maintaining a spontaneous live quality without the cost and burden of involving too many people. A simple concept arrived at through some mis-steps: backing tracks should always be an adjunct adding signature lines that otherwise would be missing and never have more parts than what is being done live.