Start song, rotate middle knob, select kit, press middle knob, kit changes song keeps playing.
(look at the metronome) you “hear” or don’t hear rather silent beats for a few seconds while the kit loads. There’s even a line over the “Drum Set: XXXXXX” indicating the load time of the wav files. And then you can see, that the “DANCE” kit is apparently smaller in size (bits, Kb, Mb, Gb, bytes, KB, MB, GB) not by any number indication or unit of measurement… but because it loads so much faster than the other kits. And then when you go and load a new song, you can see that the midi track loads instantly, but that loading bar is over the drumkit again. And then if you cycle through the “funk” section, or two songs using the same kit, you can see there is no loading time for the kit because it’s already loaded which kind of makes it obvious that the midi notes and the wav files for the kits are loaded seperately, making the feature I’m requesting seem even more possible. Also leading me to the belief that loading the notes is rather instant as I can select a song, and immediately start it with the pedal.
Would you like a video of it as well?
This isn’t possible in BB manager afaik, but it is possible on the pedal itself.
Of course, with the loading times for it, changing the drumkits midsong is a useless feature but yes it is currently possible with the BB and its current firmware. It’s useless due to the loading times, but again if you switch songs using the same drumkit by default, it seems as if it’s ready to go instantly, only you have to tap the thing to start it, and I’d rather the option of it not stopping in the first place. Something you can enable or disable through settings. The only things that seem to take time to load are the drumkits themselves, which make sense as they’re .wav (audio) files which are likely much larger a file size than the lines of midi notes programmed into the songs. Perhaps changing kits midsong could be made not useless by the addition of a forced measure or two repeating the loop using the previous kit while the new kit loads, but again, I think that might be overcomplicating things, where being able to switch a song that seems to load instantly without switching kits seems like a simple enough thing to ask.
So yeah, I do see the feature I’m requesting as something that’s very possible with the effort of the creators and developers into the firmware… perhaps someone just needed to present the idea, but my hope is that SingularSound Devs see this and say “He’s on to something.”.
Now, as I made a feature request, and not a request for an explanation of existing features, are you for or against possibly having said features in the future? And can we leave it at that?
From my perspective, it seems like the only thing stopping either feature I’ve requested is that it needs to be coded into the firmware. Footswitches can already be assigned to certain functions, I think it’d be cool if they added the option to assign them to “fills 1,2, and 3” with an option to disable them from cycling per press.
I also think that it seems very likely, that as long as you’re using the same drumkit, switching songs without stopping playback sounds extremely doable. Again… the load times on that seem instant, unlike the drumkit wav files themselves. With a red screen for instant switch after current measure, or a white screen to play a transition into the next song, after rotating right knob for song and clicking it, triggered by a tap of the pedal once you’ve pressed the button to select the song. Sure, you’d still have to kneel down to switch the song, but if you’re with another musician, they could keep playing, Or at least the beat’s still going or maybe a bassline you’ve looped. Maybe THAT would be a good reason to have a programmable footswitch which adds the functionality to scroll through songs with your feet rather than turning knobs. And then - think about the ease of composing for the beatbuddy with such a feature. You could arrange song after song of 2 measure loops, 1 measure fills and 1 measure transitions and be able to switch to the next “song” on the fly, that you actually wrote as a bridge or verse or chorus or just a musicial MB session of whatever you want to play.
Both of these features, from my point of view as someone who likes to jam rather than play arrangements, would open up an entire world of flexibility with this pedal without hindering anything you’re currently capable of doing with it now, Mr. Phil.
The more the merrier when it comes to options and functionality. The Swiss army knife of beat pedals.