Adding Drum Track To Imported Song In BandLab

[Evris Mitchell]

Hello. I imported a live track into band lab that only has voice and acoustic guitars. I want to add tracks of drum machines, bass, another guitar, etc… The difficulty is to get the drum machine that has fixed beat per minute (bpm) copied in segments of regions and retrofit each segment throughout various parts of the song to cover from beginning to end. Some parts of the imported song performance slightly speeds up and/or slows down. Would I be able to use multiple segmented regions, each having its own bpm, to match the varying bpms throughout the imported song?

[Russell]

In a case like that you might find it far easier to use a keyboard or drum machine and a virtual kit to manually 'play' the drums along with your track and slowly build your own drum track that matches the variance of the original audio track.

I use Session Drummer 3 and a USB Keyboard but you should at least have SI Drums if you haven't purchased any add=on Virtual Drum kits. I do this periodically when I can't find a midi or acid loops that captures the feel of the song I'm writing.

[mark skinner]

  Evris , Have you tried dragging the "live track" into the timeline at the top of the page , letting Cakewalk build a tempo map based on the track ?  Sometimes it works well , sometimes it doesn't . (depends on your source track). I run into this problem every time I do a cover song and try to use the original for reference. I usually just cut it up and move parts to keep somewhat in line with the metronome at a steady beat just to learn the parts. Mike from "Creative Sauce " has a good video in the tutorials section about making Cakewalk play with "you" instead of the other way around. May be an option ..    mark

[msmcleod]

The drag-to-timeline method is the recommended one, but requires Melodyne to be installed.

There is also the (very) old method of using "Fit to Improvisation", which works pretty well.

To do this:

1.  Insert a MIDI track and arm it.
2. Start recording and tap a single note on your MIDI keyboard for each beat.
3. Stop at the end of your song.
4. Select the clip you recorded, then from the main menu:  Process->Fit to Improvisation

This will alter the tempo map to match the "beats" you played.  It'll follow all of your beats as you speed up and slow down, and match that in the tempo map accordingly.