Don't take it persnally - it appears in all posts. It is there so that someone who finds you incredibly annoying can choose to not see your posts.

Back to the subject.

If you can play guitar, bass shouldn't be too much of a stretch. Drums are a bit trickier (too tricky for me).

You have Band-In-A-Box - that should be able to sort out some bass'n'drums for you. Otherwise you'll just have to learn either how to enter stuff into midi, or multitrack audio, or Acid, or whatever.

The dude who suggested that learning the tech stuff would nullify your musical skill was probably just using that comment as a cop-out to explain why he hasn't .....

You can weigh up the value of your time/effort against the $6-$8 per track alternative. Vocal elim software can be extremely effective on tracks with low reverb and a solid centre vocal track. Anything 'away' from that gets diminishing returns ...

geoff

Thanks Geoff,
Guess there's really no preferred method, other than to roll up your sleves and use what you got to make it work. That said, I think I will try to get better at using my drum machine and input it's output in midi into Sonar. I think once I get started and start saving my own libraries, it will get easier and easier especially if I list my drum tracks by type of song and by band. Doing another song by the same band might get easier the next go around.

Do you know of any software that can sample a regular song and pull out the drum beats and put it in midi as starting point ?

Paul

I use the little Yamaha's QY-70 sequencer (with a simple keyboard controller, the built-in keyboard is too small) and I found the results quite good. They now have a "new" QY-100 which seems to be even better...

Good luck
JTelles

This might be completely obvious, but I’ll post it anyway: experience has taught me that you can forget all about ADDING drums to any pre-recorded material that doesn’t meet the following criteria:

A) Song is “clicked” (recorded with musicians listening to a metronome), or
B) Song is sequenced MIDI (therefore rock-solid timing), AND
C) YOU know the exact time signature and beats per minute.

If all of the above is true, then you can *program* drums using a drum machine or MIDI sequencing software along with existing audio as you can get things to sync-up. Otherwise you’ll be doomed to performing and recording your drums manually, which probably you won't be able to do effectively anyway as non-clicked material inevitably speeds-up and slows down. If you are using MIDI tracks from other sources (assuming they are audio files), you still should know the initial BPM they were programmed/recorded with to save a lot of trial-and-error trying to find it. Evidently some loop-based editors can determine this for you (Acid?), but I've no experience with these...

When I record my original material in Vegas, I always set time signature and BPM before starting the project, and then lay down the foundation tracks listening to the metronome. Since Vegas doesn’t support MIDI, I typically send an audio mix to Cubase and then program my drums there (again, using a session with the same time-sig, BPM). Then I convert the MIDI drums to audio and bring them back into Vegas as individual tracks. As long as the BPM is the same on both sides, everything lines-up perfectly. I know this sounds a little tedious (and it is), but I prefer Vegas’ interface to anything else. This method should work with most any sequencing software that supports audio.

Anyway, the main point was: it’s VERY difficult to ADD drums to anything that was originally recorded without a click, and next to impossible to sync-up new MIDI data to existing audio without knowing the exact original tempo.

I'm surprised nobody has actually recommended Acid. To me, this seems perfect for what you're wanting to do. You can create drum and bass tracks (and much more) very quickly from an extensive library of styles. Download a demo and try it out.

drbam

Thanks All, I'll give Acid a try. I was just curious how all these backing track houses can make such good (some) backing tracks for existing songs in midi or mp3 and sell them so cheap. So I thought, if somebody came into my studio and ask me to make a backing track of say, a Lynard Skynyrd song, how would I approach the bass and drums.

Paul

The easiest way to do this, is getting familiar with your sampler and using that. You can easily go almost anywhere on the internet and find a midi song replication of most popular songs. Download the midi track and load it into your sequencer. From the sequencer you can cut and paste the drum tracks to individual tracks, which will allow you to solo each instrument for recording later. Once you have each midi track seperated out, you need to sample some sounds into your sampler. For this you will need to buy some sample library CD's with recorded hits of Kicks, snares, highhats, toms, crash, and ride cymbals or record your own. Now you can direct the midi tracks to trigger the sounds in your sampler. Once you have that completed you can then sync your sequencer up with Vegas and record the individual sounds being triggered on your sampler. You can also do this for the bassline parts, by triggering a bass guitar sound from a keyboard. There's a lot of things to learn on this proceedure, like how MIDI works, How to Sync sequencers and audio programs using either SMPTE or Midi Time Code, plus getting in debt of learning how to edit using your sequencer. It's not hard once you learn, but can be a little overwhelming at first.