Just got my new BB a couples of weeks ago and absolutely love it! Finally a drum machine for guitarist!
I dove right in and started getting acquainted with my new friend Buddy Beats. I never do things the easy way and since I could not find an existing groove that suited the rhythm for the song I chose to work on, I figured it could not be that hard to create a new drum song with the groove I was looking for. I was able to create some parts but struggled a bit on the fills ( I am not a drummer) I even tried importing a few fills from other songs to leverage what was already there. Not so fast! That created its own set of issues.
I soon found out that Buddy Manager has its limitations. I ended up exporting all the parts to my new song and working on them into Reaper. After many hours, I was able to piece together a fairly decent drum track. Whew! But as you can imagine, it is just a static backing track that I can play to with a fixed arrangement.
But I really want to take advantage of the live aspects that BB has to offer and I am looking for recommendations on how best to approach finding the right grooves–quickly–and maybe making some minor edits using BB Manager if necessary. I was also like to be able to import other grooves from other sources into the BB as well.
Just Groovin’
Adrian
I’ve bought most of the premium content library of beats and drum sets. I’m starting to go through my song collection and find the right beats. I always start by checking the downloaded beats where I think it should be based on genre. When I find something close, I export the song to a directory I’ve set up for that, then import the song into BB and rename it. If it’s close enough to use as-is, I don’t do anything. Some songs have extra parts that I don’t need, so I delete those. If I have to make changes to a part, I export the part to MIDI in a directory I’ve set up for that, then I replace the part with the part I exported and make changes to it there. That way I don’t overwrite the original part.
For many songs, I’ve used the BeatBuddy song matching tool on their site as a starting point.
You could import MIDI files into the BBManager. As long as they are mapped to the standard drum map, there shouldn’t be any issue with this. You can create a new song template by clicking on ‘New Song’ and then click on the various tracks to import MIDI files. There are also several MIDI files and songs available in our resources section.
Another option you have if you want to conserve the whole song as a whole in its original form, is to export the song itself rather than individual tracks so you have a copy of the SNG file on your computer outside of the BBManager. I don’t know if this is what you meant that you are doing, but for everyone’s general reference, check out this short tutorial that shows how to export songs as part of the process of copying them:
Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback. I really appreciate the suggestions. I also found a very cool feature in EZDrummer2 called Tap 2 Find. It will probe your midi files looking for drum beats that match what you tap into it. It pulls up a list of possible drum grooves for you to peruse through. This could be a tremendous time-saver.
