HALP!!
I’ve expored this thing and am enjoying playing. However I’ve no clue how to pick the proper drum beat for a song. Other than looking up a tunes tempo I’ve no idea what I’m doing.
How do you pick the most effective drum beat for a song?
I know how to look up songs on the SongList. But I don’t want to have to rely on that list.
For example, lets say I want to play “Sweet Home Alabama”
How do I pick the right drum pattern? Again I’m not a drummer and have no idea where to start.
Everything can’t be Rock-1. LOL
What I do, because I’m also not a drummer, first I look for the beats per minute (BPM). There are sites that can help you with that. L\just google song bpm and you’ll get some sites. Like https://songbpm.com/
I use Riffstation, that’s a discontinued programm, but give a pretty good acurate BPM. If you have the bpm you have to listen to what the bass drum is doing and the bass guitar. Like, is it just sounding once or twice or in a certain pattern, lets take a song as an example Bellamy Brothers, If I said you have a beautifull body, the BPM in the version I take as example is 117 BPM. I go to youtube and searchs for the song and listen. Don’t take the start of a song as reference but listen to the overall beat, not the fills . The bass drum and bass are playing "kick, rim, kickkick, rim ". (rim is a hit with the drumstick on the snaredrum ring). So that’s the pattern to look for. Keep in mind some times you’ll have to devide the BPM by 2, if the beats sounds too fast for what you’re looking for. Sometimes you’ll have to multiply by two if the beat sounds too slow. You’ll have to browse the drum patterns in the BB to familiarize yourself with the patterns you’ll have to listen and train yourself to recougnize patterns. You’ll find multiple BB songs (drum patterns) that will fit our pattern “kick, rim kickkick, rim”
Listen too the first pattern in BB ballads, ballad 2, kick, rim, kick rim. Not the right pattern, but it does sound ok with our song. Go to the second BB song Ballad 3, the pattern is kick, rim, kickkick, rim. Hoera that’s what we want. Sometimes it sounds a bit different, but it does not have to be exactly the same, as long as it fits it’s ok, that my motto. Most of the BB songs in each category, like ballad, rock etc, have a build up in bass drum pattern. The first beat in general has a simple bass beat, the second the bass is a little bit more active the third even more and so the pattern gets more complicated. Hope this helps.
I’m not a drummer either, and part of the reason why I purchased the BeatBuddy was to learn more about rhythm.
The suggestion to look up a song’s Bpm (beats per minute) is a good one. However, this was something I did later in my BB journey. What I did first was to sit down with the pedal, plug in my headphones, and just listen to the songs on it. As I was listening, I would write down what song the beat reminded me of.
Once I had an inkling that a beat might work for a song, I would then listen to that actual song and adjust the BB tempo (using the tap tempo function) to follow along and test to see if that beat would work. It would become quickly apparent if I needed to keep looking for a different beat. Maybe this beat had a straight kick, snare, kick-kick snare but the song was more “shuffle-y” feeling.
Then I would do the opposite and look at my solo acoustic set lists for songs that could really use drums…partially to keep me on rhythm, and partially to just shake up the solo-ness of my sets. I would listen to the actual song and then go to the BB to search for an appropriate beat. This is where the song matching tool comes in handy, or searching this forum for other people’s requests for songs.
If I couldn’t find the right beat, I would jump into the BB Manager, export a beat that was close, import it back into BBM, and add or remove beats to get it closer. (I relied heavily on the help from others in this forum, as well as YouTube videos.)
This was all time consuming, but I learned so much about rhythm, and I absolutely love the flexibility of the BB!