Ballad with odd number of measures in verse

BeatBuddy Help, Questions and Bugs
1

Hi All,
I have a song in which the verse has the following pattern:
3 measures
3 measures
3 measures
4 measures

It is a ballad, any ballad pattern goes well with it.
However, all the ballads in BB have two measure patterns, and the transition is also 2 measures.
So if I want to make a transition in my song at the end of the verse, and I start it on the last measure, the transition will spill over the next verse or chorus.

Does somebody have a solution for this?
The easiest would be to have a ballad with only patterns of one measure length. But I was not able to find such in the default library, or the Premium one either. I must confess, did not check all the songs.

Editing the transition could be a solution, but this is what I found:

  1. The built in MIDI editor does not always recognize the patterns nicely, and it is pretty tricky to use
  2. Tried MuseScore, which was able to load only 50% of the MIDI files from BeatBuddy
  3. Tried GarageBand, which was able to import all the transitions, but I was not able to save midi file in one step.

It might be a Google search away, but I was not able to find a good MIDI editor for Mac which lets me edit these midi files really nicely.

If you have any suggestions, where to look, or how to solve my issue in other ways, let me know.

Thanks,
Attila

2

Hey there, the transition will only keep going until you let go of the pedal, if you want to force a 3 measure section all you have to do is press and hold and then release before the 4th measure begins.

You could use the MIDI files we have on our support page, just download the MIDI Loop Library and cut them in half to have a 1 measure section instead of 2 measures and reimport the files.

Am I missing something here? Let me know!

Thanks for the question.

1 Like
3

Hi @BrennanSingularSound ,
you are right, I just checked it, and for the situation I described your solution works.

However, I misspoke earlier. The song in question is slow - 67BPM - I miscalculated the bars.
So the situation is this:
2 measures
2 measures
2 measures
2,5 measures

And my problem is with the last line, of course, where the transition is started after the 2nd measure, and goes over a half bar to the next verse or chorus.

Definitely, for this song cutting the midi in half would be a cool solution, to have a half measure transition.

I asked this on my other question as well. Is there a suggested MIDI editor, that is well suited for this kind of basic MIDI editing: cutting in half, making it double time, or half time. This is all I need for the moment, I know there are a myriad of options, only asking if you have an obvious suggestion for Mac.

Thank you,
Attila

4

It sounds like what you are describing is a song that goes to 6/4 for a measure and is usually 4/4? What would be nice would be if the BB could support Transitions in a different time signature than the Transitioning-From Beat.

I’ve never found an easy way to do that except for creating a 6/4 part in a midi editor. Even that is not optimal because the BB Transition doesn’t seem to support a transition beat in a different time signature. If I put the 6/4 part as a transition beat, it always ends up it like a 4/4 beat with the 1 and 2 beats cut. I wonder if the transition math calculates the “beats left in measure” and sees “4” and then just plays the last 4, without account for the measure being 6 beats instead of 4.

5

@josborn777 Yes, that is a pretty good description that you gave!
An example would be Cats in the cradle, end of verse one, for example.
The math most probably works as you described, since wherever the BeatBuddy is in the measure when you are triggering a transition, it must make sure to end the transition at the end of the measure, so it takes whatever fits exactly in the remaining time.

Given this, it is probably impossible to solve this situation, unless a new Command would be implemented, say “Transition with 1.5X current time signature”. And then you could assign this to your footswitch, or another midi controller.

One could say this is crazy, you could go with 1.25X, 1.75X, 2X, why stop here.
But I guess the 1.5x transition is a relatively common scenario (going from 4/4 to 6/4 in your nice words) so I think this is a viable idea.

I saw that there is a one-press version of the Cats in the cradle uploaded in the forum. I will check it out. But at the moment I kind of regard BB as an instrument - so I like the idea that it actually needs my attention, and does what I tell it to do, not just playing a backing track.

So it would be nice if it could do this 1.5X transition thing, and we could have some ballads with longer transitions. Those would work with the regular, and the longer transitions as well.

I might not see all the issues that could arise, but this could be a valid feature request in my opinion.

6

If you made the midi in 2/4, you’d have full measures for every section.

7

Hi @BrennanSingularSound
Are the contents of the ballad-mini folder supposed to be in this BeatBuddy-Default-Content-v.2.1-MIDI-sources.zip as well? I was not able to locate them.
Thank you.

8

Ballad-mini.pbf (749.0 KB)
Hi, it should be but if not here you have the pbf with midi files

9

@BrennanSingularSound Thank you for the file.
Not to beat a dead horse, but my problem is that exporting midi parts from BBManager results in midi files which are not always loadable into midi editors.
I had this issue with Ballad 3, where the transition on the second part was not loadable in Aria Maestosa.
All the other parts, fills, transitions were.
I managed to convert them to 2/4, removed the first measure, and this way I made this Ballad 3 into a 2/4 beat, which definitely makes the transitions, fills sound less professional, but at least I can make transitions when the song transitions from 4/4 to 6/4 (or 2/4, however you want to put it)
I was happy when I saw the midi pieces in this big zip, and was sad when I saw that the ballads are not there, I was hoping that the original midi files have no issues when opening them in Aria Maestosa.

Anyway, I reused the part 1 transition in part 2, so my song is cool now, just wanted to mention that maybe some content is not included in the zip although maybe it should be.

Thanks for your help,
Attila