Merry Christmas and thanks for sharing your experience with your BeatBuddy, Tim.
While you’re thinking about the downsides, please share how the BB as a system—software, firmware, pedal and forum meet or don’t meet your requirements and expectations.
It would also be good to hear about how you prepare the beats and drums to support your songs.
Hi Tim,
I’m hoping to get out and play live with my new Beat Buddy, so it’s nice to see somebody doing similar. I personally like the interaction and ability to switch between verse / chorus with fills as and when required (not got to grips with one press…). So thank you for inspirational post.
Just one question, can you expand on “I have modified the BB with 3 external pedals”? As I would be keen to see how to make this pedal even better?
Best regards
Carl.
Hi Persist, thanks for your Christmas message. The delay in my reply is partly due to lots of family celebrations and parties!
To start off with, learning how to use BB Manager took some experimentation. I found that most of the supplied beats needed editing, sometimes because they were too “busy” as with most of the jazz and reggae beats but mostly because they didn’t fit the songs I wanted to play. Therein lay a voyage of discovery because the BBM editor is only useful for very minor “tweaks”. Learning why the excellent fee Beatbuilder.jar app would not edit my purchased latin beats took a little time, then finding a simple midi editor(s) that worked for me took ages. I still haven’t solved that one to my satisfaction, WaveDNA’s Liquid Rhythm and Fingerlabs DM1 are part of my toolbox but Liquid Rhythm won’t do 3/4, 6/8 etc. beats (so important for many great songs). DM1’s midi output files won’t work directly in BB, but can be brought into Liquid Rhythm for a re-save that works. Most of the DAWs are too complex and costly.
The juggling between midi velocity and dynamic volume took some work. But because the BB’s output sounds so great, I persevered.
The software folder/file structure and file naming are a little strange, with an old “Windoze” feel. For instance the actual filename is not read by the BBM, which takes it’s naming from elsewhere in the file. Also updating the BB memory card sometimes brings up “file not found” errors (I must take a screen shot to show you next time that happens).
I will continue in another post…
Thanks, Tim and Happy 2018. Looking forward to your discoveries from your continued BB journey! I certainly know what you mean by your quest for a simple MIDI editor. I’m always looking for a fly swatter but end up trying to swing an 18 lb. sledge. Logic Pro X and Reaper do a great job but they’re Swiss Chronographs and I just need the sundial versions.
Hi Carl,
Some songs for my band work best as one press, but not many. I like the flexibility for the lead vocalist to turn to me and the keyboard player and say “again” on the chorus and we can just do it straight off. Also during instrumental breaks I like to have a different beat with more “flowery” fills and the ability to repeat some of the fills with an instrumental solo makes the drums feel more authentic.
I modified my pedal by replacing the headphones mini-jack socket with a mono mini-jack and wiring it in parallel with the main pedal switch with some careful soldering motivated and guided by another post in this forum somewhere (I keep on losing the link to it!). I have two new pedals that do the same job as the BB extension pedal, fed from the extension pedal socket. The result is that I have three low pedals at my feet and the BB on the side of my mic stand where I can see it better and change the songs more easily. Because I play double bass in some gigs it is really difficult to bend down to change the songs. I will put some more pictures of the pedals up when I find the time.
I find putting the songs in alphabetical order on the BB makes it easier as our set lists change a lot and we often change it to suit the mood of the audience and as we have a repertoire of about 50 songs now it just makes life easier keeping them in the same order as the iReal Pro music sheets we use.
Well put and 100% agree!
Thank Tim, really appreciate the pointers and the detailed reply.
I am a beatbuddy-user for about 3 months. I play guitar in an acoustic-duo, this weekend we had a 6 hours new-years gig in a little location (50 - 60 guests). Our repertoir goes from german oldies up to modern pop - just party-music. For the first time we used a beatbuddy live.
My setup was just “standard”: beatbuddy, beatbuddy footswitch, yamaha bluetooth midi connector. We organize our chordsheets with ipad and forscore-app. For reducing live adjustments, i prepared 3 folders: a) about 30 basic patterns of all genres; b) international Songs (about 90); c) german Songs (about 70). We don’t want to play perfect covers. So I made simple drum beats for each song, most only have Intro, Verse, Chorus and Outro, with several fills and transitions, including the drumset and bpm. Meanwhile I bought some premium content and groove monkee material, a lot of our songs can be found as midi-files in www, but most of them you have to work over. Then I took forscore, made 2 songlists (like the folders on the beatbuddy), and made a midi-command for each song to choose the song on the beatbuddy via midi. (like the way described for onsong). Then I made an empty chord-sheet with several different midi-commands, so that i can choose the basic patterns via midi (beat adjustment via foot tapping). Everything worked best, and we had a good concert. By the way: with this workflow it is not possible to put the songs always in alphabetical order within the beatbuddy-manager-folders - only for the first time, when creating the folder. After programming midi commands for the pattern-location, new songs have to be put at the end, or you always have to change your midi-commands too, because the midi command only contains the place of a file within the folder, not the the name. As you see all of my work was described in many posts before: thanks to all of you who made it possible for me to get such a fast progress. I learned a lot. Beatbuddy and the forum is great.
I agree. I have 2 x Bose L1 Model 2 with B2 bass bins. I saved up my gig money for years to buy them secondhand! I put everything for our 3 piece plus BB through a Behringer X12-Air mixer (iPad out-front adjustment via WiFi) into these 2 x Bose L1s and it sounds great. Apart from my Phil Jones Bass Suitcase amp, it is the only set up that does my double bass (AKG contact mic and mag-pickup mixed) and Sandberg electric bass guitar, justice (I play blues, jazz & R&B). Usually when I play gigs through a big PA (or house PA with wedge monitors now), I just hate the sound, the lack of clarity, the bad monitor mixes that are usually fine in the sound check and then deteriorate during the gig to the point that I put in my ear-plugs to protect my hearing and hear my vocals in my head! With those old-fashioned set-ups, somebody always turns up their backline and the PA mixer man usually can’t hear it as I do. When I go to other bands’ gigs, I collect frequency spectrum and dB level screenshots on my iPhone now - that’s OCD sound-nerd territory! Plus Bose L1 gives the best hi-fi disco sound - supposedly ~750 Watts RMS each (Bose don’t publish electrical amplifier ratings).
OK now fo
IMG_1943.jpg shows the 3 pedals
I’ve been using bbm for a little over three years now. Never explored too much just used the songs available on bbm. I’m aware that I can change the beat in a song but not the tempo because I’ve done it a long time ago. What I did then was take a different beat from another song, but that would take it out of the original song. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think there’s a place to go to with different beats somewhere in bbm, but for some reason I can’t remember where.
Can someone help me if you understand my request
Hey Tim how did you get the songs to sort in alpha order (or did you manually do it)? That’s one thing I wanted to do since I have over 500 songs in my setlist master (I use the SetList Helper app) that I build my individual set lists from (who knew I knew that many songs…but I just turned 60 yesterday so I may have forgotten a few!!LOL). I too prepare set lists but depending on the requests and the mood of the crowd it’s nice to be able to jump to a song in an alpha list.
Thank you,
Geri
You can copy beats from one song to another without taking them out of the original song. Just hover the mouse over the beat you want to copy and Control+C (Command+C on a Mac), then paste to your target location with Control+V (Command +V on a Mac).
There are other beats you can purchase from Singular or from Groove Monkee. You can also download songs from this Forum.
You have sort songs manual to get them in alphabetical order. You hold the song title and drag it up or down in the folder or to another folder. If you go to another folder, it moves the song. It does not copy the song. Also, be aware that there is a 99 song per folder limit, so you may want to break yours out into some sort of logical groups.
For me the easiest way to sort so many songs (as described here many times), is to use an app with the ability of sending midi commands to the beatbuddy for loading a song. Each song has its own midi command where it is stored on the beatbuddy. So you can leave your song folders on the beatbuddy unsorted, but you can make setlist and sort them as you want within the app.
Ive been using my regularly for about year. I find running it thru its own speaker, located where drummer would normally setup, works a lot better for me.
P.A is QSC K12s and KSUB for bigger gigs. A&H ZED16FX
This video was from June last year, just basic audio from the GoPro, also prior to me working out Beat Buddy having its own speaker feels / sounds a lot better imo. Ive changed my drum patterns a lot since this video also… I find the standard fills a bit too full on for me, so ive gone in and made them all very simple. And a lot of my songs are just kick, snare, shaker, tambo. My latest find has been the Jazz kit - the brushed snare on it sounds really good. I tend to like the "train" type beats rather than 4 on the floor beats, looking forward to gigging with new Jazz kit as opposed to the brushes kit ive always used, as the short and long snare swipes sound really great, they give that shaker effect imo, keeps things moving along with out being to harsh.
Hey Trent I realized this past Saturday when I played my BB for the first time in my shows that I need a dedicated speaker for the BB as well. Even though I could hear from my mains it wasn’t enough. I don’t use a floor monitor so I’m thinking of getting a small monitor or speaker to use and set up behind me. Do you also run it thru your main board or separately?
I’ve shared this many others, get an iPad a Bluetooth device, like a puc+, or a Yamaha, get OnSong and put the midi commands in the songs on OnSong, and speed up your show, stop bending over. It works great
Bose L1 is behind you, you hear what the audience hears, right to the back of the room. And you don’t get deafened.