Create your own songs for Dummies (with Bass)

BeatBuddy General
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This is a continuation of the thread Create your own songs for Dummies in which we learned to create a song using midi editing. I will now show you how to add bass using the example song of Neil Young - Rockin in the Free World which we made the beat for in the previous thread.

For importing and running songs with bass in beatbuddy please refer to this thread
Beatbuddy with Bass Lines is Here

So for a start we need to work out what the bass is playing using either a Tab, Listen and Learn by ear, follow a youtube demo or you might already know it.
If I’m honest I have picked a song that doesn’t have much going on with the bass so it should be easy.

I have decided to use this youtube demo.

Now open up your Song we previously created in MuLabs.
We want to add another track below the drum track with a bass instrument. For this I am going to use one of the instruments included with the program. Click on the instrument tab in the top right corner, Under “Factory Presets”, “Instruments”, "Bass I am going to select Real Bass.
Then I want to create the first bass loop in the verse. I will move the “loop Start/Stop” the the first two bars of the verse which is how long the bass loop is.


When you open up the midi editor for the new bass section, On the piano roll with this Instrument the E3 will be the low E and we have two octaves of bass notes above that to use.
I will first enter the bass notes with the grid on with how I interperate the bass line.
Then I will disable the grid and extend the notes out to how they will sound in beatbuddy.


Now we have a bass track with low E at E3 we need to transpose the bass track up an octave to E4 as E4 is the low E on the “with bass” drumsets in the beat buddy. Just left click and drag cursor across all the notes to select then drag them up an octave. I will also drop the velocity of the bass notes as I like it a bit quieter compared to the drums.

Now we need to enlarge the bass loop out to match the full verse beat and consolidate the new part and then relocate these parts to the start of the track to export


Exporting with Bass is a little different to just drums. We have to combine the bass and drum into one track. We can do this and then return the bass part to the bass track quite easily. Select the bass track and then drag it up so it sits on top of the drum track. We then have to select both parts which is by on a blank spot outside the part and dragging across the part.
Now we can select export to midi and our midi file will be ready for beatbuddy.
To seperate the two parts again click on a blank spot to deselect the parts, then click on the combined parts and drag and it will seperate them.



Create a new song in beatbuddy and open midi file in Main Loop. You will have to select a “drumset with bass” in the drumset tab. See Beatbuddy with Bass Lines thread about inserting rock with bass kit.

Now we need to add bass to the chorus and outro. Just follow the same procedure.

Outro with Bass

Chorus with Bass

Chorus Loop

Post Chorus Loop
Edit: There is a fault in this Loop. The last bar of bass should be in A not E



Thats it good to go
Song Here

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I’ll quickly do a brief demonstration of cutting up an existing midi file for use with the beatbuddy.

Free midi files that contain whole songs with all instruments for the song can be found on google. Freemidi.org is one site that has thousands of songs on it. Quality of the songs can vary from good to unusable. I checked out Rockin in the Free World but it was unusable.

I picked Gary Moore - Still Got the Blues for a quick demonstration. The midi can be downloaded here.

Now open up a new file in MuLabs that has nothing in it.
Download the Still got the Blues midi and then we need to get this file into MuLabs. I do this by opening the folder where the downloaded midi is and dragging it into MuLabs.
The File opens up and you will see 8 tracks in there for the different instruments used in the song. Next we need to locate the bass and drum tracks.


Next we can Delete all tracks except bass and drums. In this one they are labeled. Sometimes you might have to work out what tracks they are.
Then we need to add an instrument to the track so we can here the bass and drums. I had a bit of trouble working this out so the easiest way was to create a new track like we had previously with the instrument in it and drag the midi file into it.



If you try to play the track now it will sound terrible. We have to now transpose the bass track up to Low E4 so up three octaves in this example. Left click and drag to select all notes to move at once.


Now it’s time to cut the track up into loops. I’m not very familiar with this song but I think the main loop is from bar 4 to bar 22. For both bass and drums we need to spit the track at these points so we can create a loop. Right click on the track where you want to insert a split. Then consolidate it so we don’t have any problems.



Then you want to check to make sure the kick, snare, crash, toms etc line up with the right spots on the piano roll so they will work properly in beatbuddy. This one does. I normally do some editing here like we did in the Neil Young song to make sure the beats and bass are correct but you might just want to take this loop and export it to midi and make a song in beatbuddy if you are happy with the beat. I think there is a loop for the solo and maybe some different loops towards the end but these are things you will have to figure out and decide what to do

Cheers

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thanks Stu .

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Thank you, very helpful !

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