BPM of short percussion/vox fills

king_picadillo

Any tricks for finding bpm of short percussion loops/fills, like a bar/half bar long? Same for hummed vocals? I downloaded some short free adlibs, fills in both categories (percussion and vox) but there is no bpm info. Percussion stuff I could chop but it defeats the point of having pre made fills. Vocals have changes (rises, falls, stutters,etc.) that don’t fall right unless they match bpm of track you are laying them on.

espiegel123

@king_picadillo said:
Any tricks for finding bpm of short percussion loops/fills, like a bar/half bar long? Same for hummed vocals? I downloaded some short free adlibs, fills in both categories (percussion and vox) but there is no bpm info. Percussion stuff I could chop but it defeats the point of having pre made fills. Vocals have changes (rises, falls, stutters,etc.) that don’t fall right unless they match bpm of track you are laying them on.

I generally just tap along with a loop while running an app that has tap tempo. Auditor will tell you what the tempo if you tell it how many beats long a selection is.

king_picadillo

That’s the thing, too short to tap to and these fills don’t tell you if it’s a bar, half a bar, two bars... some are longer some are shorter. I use the tap tempo for longer loops and it works well, just haven’t been successful with these really short fills. I took a fill that does have the bpm and dragged it into BM3 sampler and because it’s a fill some of the hits fall on the second beat, third beat which tells me I wouldn’t even be able to to figure the none labeled fills by trying to adjust the grid to fit because of how some the the non 1 beats fall.

Poppadocrock

Segments should give you a bpm when you load the file inside of it.

However I feel like fills could be tricky in terms of bpm because they might not be representative of the bpm of the whole track if that makes sense... They are often “sped up” so to speak, with many notes coming in a quick succession. If you time stretch the fills, they would probably work in a decent range of tempos. I‘m somewhat speculating here, so I could be wrong but it makes sense to me, so... I don’t know. Lol.

Samu

Trigger the sound every 1/16 or 1/8 or 1/4 etc and adjust the tempo or pitch until audible gaps are gone or until it sounds about right.

king_picadillo

Thanks for the advice, I’ll try all the suggestions til something lands.

rs2000

Since fills are often cut at odd locations, your best bet would be to try to imagine an appropriate musical context and tap the beat of it. It can take some time and practice but IMHO that's the most precise way of determining bpm without actually importing it into an existing piece.

If you have to match a fill that originally won't fit, sometimes it helps to split it into shorter slices.

Rebus_Knebus

If you can see/hear the transient/rise/fall that you want to land on a certain beat in something like Auditor, you can
1) make a selection that covers the range of the sample up to that transient/rise/fall
2) get the duration of the selection in seconds from Auditor,
3) determine by ear how many beats you want that selection to be,
4) do the math to convert to bpm.

For example, if your selection in Auditor is 1.88 seconds long and you want that selection to cover 2.5 beats then:

2.5 beats / 1.88 seconds * 60 seconds/minute = 80 bpm

White

You can use this:

BPM Buddy: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1523153748

king_picadillo

Thanks everyone, really great stuff here.

Poppadocrock

This app might help and it’s on sale. It is usually $2.99 but it’s currently free - Tempo Counter

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tempo-counter/id719309903

king_picadillo

@Poppadocrock copped! Thank you, I’ll try it out along with all the other suggestions til I find the solution or combination of things that work. This App sounds like a tap tempo for which I think these fills would be too short, but maybe there’s some AI working that isn’t evident on first look.

espiegel123

@king_picadillo said:
@Poppadocrock copped! Thank you, I’ll try it out along with all the other suggestions til I find the solution or combination of things that work. This App sounds like a tap tempo for which I think these fills would be too short, but maybe there’s some AI working that isn’t evident on first look.

If the fills are not weird fractions of a beat long, all you have to do is set the looping and tap along to the loop.

Poppadocrock

Cool. Good luck. If you get a chance it would be interesting to hear some of your results.

king_picadillo

@Poppadocrock will do once I’m confident in what I am doing, been writing all my life, but the production thing is very new to me and even though I’ve been told and some people are saying “I have good rhythm, the best probably, huge rhythm and I probably know more about rhythm than a lot of rhythm experts” I know I’m not quite up to par just yet. I do know good, punch in the gut stank face hip hop feel and I’m not there yet production wise. I’m getting a better grasp on the tech part every day and that is what is holding me back a bit but I’m committed. Averaging a track a day currently just need to add automation and fx at a level that I know is passable.