Beat Studio 1.8: Turn Any Song Into a Drum Kit

This version brings something a little different.

Have you ever wanted to play Dave Grohl’s drum sound from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? Now you can. This update lets you extract both the pattern and the drum sounds from a song — build a custom kit from the drum stem, fine-tune each sample, and play it on your own kit.

Create a custom kit from a song

New feature: splice individual drum pad sounds directly from a song’s imported drum stem and build a playable kit from them. Beat Studio cuts the samples automatically at the hits on the grid; you pick a clip per drum, or tag clips into velocity levels and round-robin rotations.

The Kick row of the song kit builder with 17 automatically cut sample clips from the drum stem, some tagged with velocity levels from Very Hard down to Very Soft, and a Browse song button.

Per-sample fine-tuning. Basic editing tools let you polish each spliced sample. Trim the sample to remove excess sound:

The Trim panel showing a snare sample waveform with red start and end handles cutting away the sound before and after the hit, and Play, Play all and Original buttons.

Then adjust the EQ and other settings to improve the sound. The Smooth end option adds a natural decay.

The Sample EQ panel with a six-band EQ curve boosted in the mids, and sliders for Sustain, Smooth end, Width, Fade in, Fade out and Gain.

Softer velocity layers. Songs often don’t include hits at different velocities, so you can simulate them: create 1 to 5 softer layers from a single sample with one click, so soft hits sound soft and hard hits stay hard.

A sample clip's context menu with In the rotation, Not in the rotation, Remove this clip, and a Derive softer layers submenu offering 1 to 5 layers.

Borrow pads from other kits. Import individual pad sounds from any other kit. This is handy for cymbals, which are hard to extract from a drum stem with their full sustain — take the crashes and rides from a factory kit while keeping the song’s own kick, snare and toms.

The Source dropdown for the Snare row, listing This song, Skip this drum, and other kits to import the pad from, including Rock Kit II and several kits built from songs.

One thing to keep in mind: drum stems come from a full song mix, so they don’t always sound natural on their own — often a bit too bright, and sometimes only some samples end up being usable. It’s worth trying different samples, trims and EQ settings. Smooth end adds a natural decay to samples that cut off mid-sustain.

Custom kit editing

Redesigned kit editor. The kit edit dialog has a refreshed look and now includes the same audio editing tools as the create-kit-from-song workflow.

The Edit Drum Kit dialog for Smells Like Teen Spirit Kit, with six velocity layers of WAV files for kick and snare, each with a small waveform and a Browse button, and Trim and Sample EQ panels on the right.

Round-robin samples. Kits now support round-robin samples, so repeated hits can alternate between variations for a more natural sound. Two samples on the same velocity level alternate as round-robin variations.

Four kick sample slots: two on the Medium Hard level and two on the Hard level, each pair alternating as round-robin takes.

Softer layers here too. Derive 1 to 5 softer takes from a single sample with one click, just like in song kit creation.

A sample slot's dropdown menu in the kit editor with Remove, Duplicate take, and a Derive softer layers submenu offering 1 to 5 layers.

Pattern editor: Extract tool

Back in 1.6.0-BETA I said I’d come back to the Extract tool. Here it is:

Crash cymbal detection. Automatic pattern detection now recognizes crash hits, identifying them by their long sustain (shown in blue on the colorized waveform).
Tempo map creation. Extraction now builds a tempo map from the audio, so detected hits land much closer to the grid.

The pattern editor's Extract mode on Sweet Child O' Mine, with detected crash, hi-hat, kick and snare hits on the grid above a waveform coloured red, green and blue by frequency, and Kick, Snare, Hi-Hat and a new Crash tab with hit filter controls below.

Waveform colorize option. The audio waveform can now be colorized by its dominant frequency bands, so you can spot kicks (red/purple), snares (green/cyan) and cymbal wash (blue) at a glance.

The pattern edit dialog toolbar with the Audio display set to Overlaid and a checked Colorize checkbox.

MIDI mappings

MIDI mappings can now be edited directly in the Settings dialog, without going through the MIDI mapping wizard.

The MIDI Pad Mapping section of Settings, listing each drum with its assigned MIDI notes — kick 36, snare 38 and 40, crash 49, ride 51 and 53, and the toms — with a Set up button for the hi-hat and an Open Mapping Wizard button for guided setup.

Other

The kit you used last is now remembered and loaded at startup.
Simplified kit filtering.

The Kits tab with new Factory, Custom and All filter buttons above a list of kits including Brush Kit, Electronic Kit and Jazz Kit.

That’s 1.8. Download links are in separate posts on Patreon.