Hi! I’m new to Audacity and I’m learning how to make backing tracks for flute. My teacher helps me with piano accompaniments or auto-generated rhythms with his electronic keyboard, however it doesn’t have a way to add separate drums, especially tribal ones.
Firstly I was wondering if I could create a very simple rhythm track (like a click track) but with a deep, tribal-sounding drum instead of the metronome click sound. Or to add a click track, and have a drum sound every 2 clicks or so. I know almost nothing about audio editing so I don’t know what to search for.
Another thing I would like to learn is how to add drums (or bass) to an already recorded backing track and how to synchronize those drums with the tempo of the backing track. If anyone could recommend a tutorial where the author addresses this problem of “how to synchronize the beats to the tempo you played the piano in”, it would be great.
Thank you!
I know almost nothing about audio editing so I don’t know what to search for.
I don’t know that there are hits for this. The intention is for you to make the backing (rhythm) track and play that into your headphones while you play everything else one instrument at a time. There’s no provision I know of to set all that up and then go back to automatic instruments.
So set up your overdub session and play drums—or get someone else to play drums.
Audacity has Generate > Rhythm Track, and within that are separate drum "things, " Cow Bells, Ping, Drip, etc. There’s Generate > Risset Drum.
I think I may be one of the instigators of having Rhythm Track and Metronome. In an early version of Audacity, I wanted a metronome and I couldn’t do it. There was one, but it was buried in options and syncopation and tonal variations. Metronome has two controls. Speed and On/Off. That’s it. You are creating rhythm or drum generation. That’s where you pile drum tension, tonal colorations, etc.
I suspect if you did want to add tympani to an existing song, it would be like writing a book by carefully hand-crafting each letter of each word by hand. Not musical.
In Generate, you can set speed, start and stop points. I don’t know of a way to customize the presentation as you want, other than several individual drum tracks and Audacity will try to play them all at once unless you stop it. I can see that working like marching cats. Any mistake and the drums may drift off beat.
Someone else may post.
Koz
Yes, one option would be to find someone who plays drums. I myself don’t own a drum and my flute teacher has a keyboard which has many sounds (bass, piano, guitar, etc.) but no drums, that he knows of.
Is there a way to play drums manually in Audacity by using the keyboard? For example, can I find a sound of a deep shamanic drum and simply press a key every time i want that drum to sound, and then I can play the drum every measure change, or something like that?
As for my second question? Assuming I learn how to generate a drum pattern, how do I match that exactly to the tempo in which my teacher played the piano, for example?
I know that different programs have slightly different tempos. In other words, if I set a tempo of 60 bpm on my phone and someone plays the piano for me, and them I go in Audacity and generate a drum loop at 60 bpm as well, the two tempos will not match perfecly and eventually they will become so dis-synchronized that it will be noticeable, right? Or is this not true?