Keeping It Simple - Great Pairings of Popular Songs With "Stock" Drumbeats

BeatBuddy General
1

OK, so I admit I am a noob. Or should I say a Nuge(nt). In any case, I have an idea for a very old-school concept. Can we start, and maintain, a thread that pairs great songs with existing, even, dare I say, “stock” BeatBuddy drum tracks? That’s right; original BB, storebought drum tracks in the factory load from BeatBuddy.

Don’t get me wrong; I am highly impressed by what you all have done; adding bass, piano, etc to these tracks, but to be honest, after two days of total immersion in all of the techniques and technology to get the job done, I am, frankly, exhausted, and at the the same time, basically getting nowhere. I have learned how to do many of the techniques; I’m a former engineer, and I am not easily spooked by all the tech involved. But the problem is, I am a full time musician now, and I play four or more nights a week, and I don’t have time to execute them for each song.

So I am going back to the basics; going to share with you what my idea of the BB was all about in the first place, and, as I have now decided, what I personally am going to shoot for, going forward. A way to augment my existing solo gig song-base with some quick and dirty crowd-pleasers that need no augmentation whatsoever. Just a simple, “cave-man” style link between the 3-chord song they requested and a BeatBuddy canned drumbeat that needs no manipulation, sounds pretty doggone realistic as is, and will most likely leave them speechless, wondering “how the heck I was able to do that?”. When someone in the audience says, "hey, can you play “XXXXXXXXX”, I want to be able to pull a rabbit out of my hat. But as much as I am truly impressed by how far many of you have taken the BB, I don’t want to mess with any extra Downloads, zip files, MIDI manipulation, key transposition, or other sonic alchemy. Just plain drums. And it doesn’t even need to exactly clone the original song. Heck; often, it doesn’t even need bass. Just needs to get the general feel and mood of the song across to the audience, without a lot of extra work (OK, so I admit, I’m basically lazy!). The main thing here is that, as we all know, guests’ song requests successfully answered = $$$. Cha-CHING!!!

So I will lead off with the first entry. Try this combination out, and tell me if this rocks as well as I think it does: I’M GONNA BE (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers, paired with Rock 5 Jungle Toms @ 132BPM. Yes, I realize it’s not an exact fit; it may even be bordering on the Metal side of town, perhaps, but that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. I’m just sayin, with a guitar cranked, singing the chorus with the BB on Part 2, it sure is gonna work for me, especially at around 1AM.

Anyway if you think this is a direction we should go in, please post your ideas for other pairings as well. Thanks!

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I posted this a day or so ago but it makes more sense here in reply to your thinking…many of us think along the same lines. In our case (in addition to the lazy factor) we try to craft a musical entity - not do a version of karaoke - so the OP idea is suspicious but also intriguing. We do use some and even blend in sampled bits to play over and around to keep things different (as opposed to taking requests). The post made me do a simple task I meant to get to. We’ve used the BB for more than 2 years in our trio (25-30 gigs a year in a variety of venues). We do ‘the usual’ classic rock with some surprises and a few of my originals. We very quickly ramped BB into use initially planning to do a few songs we wound up using it on all but a couple of the usual 34 or 35 each night.

Obviously a choice was made initially as we went over each song in a set and over time a few got changed but the early choices have largely remained intact. For instance when Standard Pro came out it was a good fit (more subdued) for 8 songs like Heart of Gold, Feels Like Rain, Wind Cries Mary. Standard 1.1 still carries the bulk of things (18 songs) - Petty, Eagles, The Band. Rock 1.1 gets only 2 -Crazy Train and Crossroads. Plus we have a nice change with ‘one offs’ like a user created Ben Cajon for ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’ and Rock with Bass for ‘Key to the Highway’ and Cow Tam with its cow bell works well on ‘Honky Tonk Women’. We have a number songs in the works which will spread things a bit but this is the heart of the matter.

A specific list that can be edited and searched would have to be crafted for the forum. Anyone willing to do the effort could add their take. For instance there are offerings in ‘Resources’ for Heart of Gold - we use Country 11with a Pop 74 outro and Standard Pro kit. I tend to prefer the immediacy of the separate structures (verse - fills - etc) vs OP for playing live. We need to leave room for leads to extend where warranted.

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Were you aware of this?:

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4

Were you aware of this tool?:

https://singularsound.com/tools/song-matching/

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Oh wow, that’s perfect. That’s pretty much just what I was hoping for. Once again, you came through; thanks!

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Speaking of stock drumbeats, I saw this on FB and thought somebody here might be interested in somehow using it in beat creation. https://mem.thelooplocker.com/get-your-free-90s-legends-drum-loops-download/