Hello!
I want to share a small trick with BB. If you wanted to use BB, in recording process, as the great source of nice beats and drumkits, but tweaking transpose those things to different mapping of Addictive drums, Ez drummer etc., in DAW, this is for you. Maybe it was allready discussed somewhere, but I figured it out today. So, problem was, that I wanted to record a song and use BB for drumtrack, had to transpose mapping to other formats, if I need BB’s stuff. It was hard work and often unsuccessful. But now it’s solved. In short: 1. You are recording with DAW. 2. You need a good drumtrack and want to use BB. 3. You found a beat for your song(In BB’s own library or in great Groove Monkee’s BB library). 4. You want to use one of BB’s drumkit, especially in particular odd things, as Mallets, Flamenco, World etc. 5. You can record directly, record “crutch-guitar” and you can use BB in real time during recording, but in this case the drumtrack will be audio, not midi and later you’ll have problems with editing and you have to record precisely, with all fills and transitions. But what, if you need midi tracks separately for post editing, but with BB stuff. 6. Connect your soundcard midi out with BB midi in(BB is slave now). 7. Open BB manager and open needed beat. 8. Export beats parts(main, fills, transitions) to folder. 9. Import those to DAW and select as you need those in the song. 10. Sorry, first connect output of BB to input of soundcard and assign it to one audiotrack in project. 11. Now, import midifiles to another miditrack and select them for song parts with fills, trans etc.12. If once you imported a midifile to miditrack and press the play and the connected audiotrack, which is armed for recording or monitoring, you will hear the beat with BBs own sound and drumkit. You can record it, later editing as midi and you will be in time with BPM and change better fills and put those to right place and allways with full control and with BBs own sound. The pedal during this, just stays without any pressing, but with loaded drumkit. That’s all, hope you got it.
Sounds good doing it that way. Maybe I am lazy, but a year ago I just wanted to record a quick demo on DAW and just tried a way of doing it that was easy. I just did not wanted to mess around with midi files and I did not know then how to get the BB drumkit sound until now that I read this post, thanks @Gabor.
So…a different way to do it, but I have to warn you that it can take time, but the pros is you don´t need to do the midi import/export thing, will be this:
- Select in BB a drumkit of your preference. This is important since you will not be allowed to change it later.
- Connect BB to your Soundcard. It can be made through the headphone output jack, or via two cables on the stereo output of BB. This is the one I reccomend. I just found it more natural than using the headphone output, even when it should be stereo too.
- Using your DAW, select the number of tracks according to the number of BB outputs selected before.
- Set the same BPM (tempo/beats per minute) on DAW and BB.
- Start recording and start BB trying to make it as synced as you can.
- Play/record along with another instrument, just to keep the structure of the song.
- Finish recording with BB and when every sound decays, do the same with DAW.
- There are high chances that there will be differences in synchronization between the DAW track/metronome and what was recorded with BB. But you can edit (cut/paste) to make both be synced. When you zoom a track, there can be still soft differences in sync, so probably you will need to give it a few tries to step #5 and step #7 until you get one BB track in sync with DAW metronome.
- Once you have a DAW track/metronome synced with what was recorded on the BB track, you can edit whatever was missed. For example, according to the song structure, you may need to add/erase some fills, transitions, etc. One way to do this can be just copy/paste/cut other measures/fills/transitions of the track. Another way to do this is to mute the original BB track on DAW, and record a new track just to get those fills and transitions, so then you can cut/paste to the original BB drum track on DAW.
Rock on.
Vicente
from Santiago, Chile
Hi Vicente!
Very interesting approach! And that is in time, as I plan to start recording my new songs. And yes, sometimes it’s really boring messing with different midifiles. Although I din’t figure out completely your method, as I read it just now and seems, instead of tweaking midi pieces we have to messing with some audiofiles, but we win BB’s own sound. So, it’s promising. In the next days I’ll try this and dig in your method. In case of success, will report.
Thanks for sharing!
Cheers
Gabor
from Hungary
Hi Gabor, sorry I just read your post. I explained my method in a better way in this post:
Cheers,
Vicente
Hi Vicente!
Although I haven’t dealt with the issue lately, I will soon, as I plan to record some of my new songs. At the moment it’s not clear, but I’m shure, then I will understand when I will actively use it.
Thanks for remembering me and for nice advices.
Cheers
Gabor