Toontrack’s recently released update to their drum VI favourite saw a surprise new feature in Bandmate, the groove generator that actually learns the music. Can it deal with a whole song? The results are in…
Finally solving the perennial drum VI elephant in the room, EZdrummer 3’s Bandmate feature finally gives songwriters a drummer that listens to the music and comes up with a beat. This feature will be the icing on the cake for many writers, by taking away the guesswork of tapping or drawing parts, and giving back time otherwise lost in clicking through endless MIDI clips with names that can never fully portray their feel.
The workflow is devastatingly simple: drag and drop (or click to import) audio or MIDI from your song into the Bandmate page. Wait for it to analyse, then listen to its suggestions. In our recent article, Russ Hughes took Bandmate for a spin with two sources; acoustic guitar and bass, with results that will make even the most hardened cynic sit up and take notice.
Breaking Bandmate
So far, the team has only tried Bandmate with short clips of audio to get a feel for its ear for a song. This got us thinking… How would Bandmate cope with a whole song? Does it average out the input to give a homogenised beat that will end up needing lots of help from the writer? Or will it follow the ebb and flow of the music, changing its hits accordingly?
The tech behind Bandmate doesn’t claim to be perfect. A quick read through the user guide encourages the user to give it unprocessed, simple audio or MIDI parts to listen to. Certainly, Bandmate can discern between transient and tonal information, but it can’t really work when the content is devoid of transient info. So Bandmate likes simple, dynamic material to work with. When you think about it, considering that no-one would reasonably expect a real drummer to listen to a drum-less song and know the writer’s intent, this seems like a fairly reasonable prerequisite!
Given Bandmate’s requirements, what would happen in a worse case scenario? Such as when individual tracks and MIDI are unavailable and a premixed track is the only file available? And how does it respond to longer-form audio as opposed to short two or four bar snippets? Watch below and judge for yourself…
A Whole Song Done Right?
That Bandmate has the ability to interpolate a coherent, musically appropriate drum part from any audio is impressive enough. This groundbreaking feature will win EZdrummer 3 many friends, including those of us on the team who have tried it. As we now know, the tech behind Bandmate is more resilient than we first thought, and far from being fickle, it offers an impressive alternative to a sentient collaborator under some pretty real-world conditions. What is truly impressive is how close its own parts can be to pre existing, human-created ones, and how it offers variation and nuance for the duration of longer-form material just like a real drummer would. This will instil confidence for anyone leaning on the tech’s ability to bring genuine musical input to their song.