Hi all!
After a couple of different efforts at finding the way the BB works for me - going from OPBs with electric guitar, to buying some premium beats, and then ending up building a show mostly around standard beats (with some help from GrooveMonkee) and acoustic guitar.
The Song Matching Tool coming on board a few months ago should have really been a game-changer for me, but actually it has been really disappointing.
In general my issues are:
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A lot of the beats provided are terrible. Countless times I’ve used to the tool to find a beat only to find it had no bearing on the tempo or feel of the song. As an example, 7 Nation Army is in with 105BPM, when really the song is at 125BPM. With BB starting at 40BPM that’s 30% out. And as an example of bad match for feel, it suggests the Train Shuffle for La Bamba, which is a song which has a Cuban (?) feel. While not perfect, the Samba beat in Brazilian gives the right feel
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Of the 750 songs there are many duplicates - Jammin’ by Bob Marley is there 3 times with the same beat
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It seems more like an advertisement for Premium Beats than a useful matching tool. At the moment there are 334 Premium Beats versus 475 Default Beats. (It’s also missing a lot of the Premium songs, so it doesn’t even work at that! See: Brown-Eyed Girl)
Honestly, I don’t know if I’m just venting because I’m frustrated, or if I actually have any better suggestions. It seems like the tool is a combination of un-vetted user suggestions and an advertisement for premium content. Rather than helping me so far it feels like it has wasted my time and caused me to become frustrated with the whole product, which fundamentally has no issues. The tool should only be there if it is useful, and somebody is standing over the quality of the content
I think as a start,
- there should be a way to hide Premium content from the list
- songs should be vetted to check that they are at least useable. Without the vetting I think we were better off using the forum to share the settings we use
- Possibly have some sort of up-vote/down-vote feature or ‘suggest edit’ button. If I see 7-Nation Army with a minus score I’ll stay away from it, the same as I would on chord/tab sites
Sorry about the vent!