BB as a midi file player?

BeatBuddy Help, Questions and Bugs
1

Hello again,

So I had this great plan… load all my midi files into BB, set it to midi out, then use it as a midi file player into my Roland Fantom XR.

Well… I can’t get ANY midi out of it at all.
Am I expecting too much from this fantastic little box ?? Will it do this at all ??

Cheers y’all

Jim

2

Probably not, unless you have a drum file that includes all of your instruments.

3

The BB is going to play everything coming out of it on 1 channel. It will not differentiate between the channels in your midi files as your Fantom would. You could take just the content of individual channels and use BB to play those. What you have in a BB drum file would be irrelevant to your process as you are using the Fantom to play the instruments. So, if you want to use the drum sounds in your Fantom, you could take your midi file and strip it down to just channel 10, load that into you BB, and your BB will play the midi file triggering the drum sounds in your Fantom. For that matter, you could technically do this with any individual channel in your midi file, and the Fantom should play that channel. But you would need to create the single channel midi file from your original midis for this to work.

When BB song creators have multiple instruments playing, we have taken a midi and stripped it down to just essential parts. Then, we move the notes for the instruments other than drums to locations not used by the drum kit for the song. These then trigger wav samples that have been mapped to the midi notes now being sent by the BB. So a bass that was originally programmed at E1 through G3 now has its notes moved to E-2 through G0, but is playing samples that match the E1 through G3.

2 Likes
4

Thank Chaps,

I have since discovered another problem… I have spent considerable time with the tempo track to match the playing tempo of a drummer.
But the BB doesn’t recognise tempo changes anyway so the whole exercise is a waste of time.
I think there’s a particular format in Nuendo (which I prog the midi file in) that allows me to export as a mode 0 or 1 (can’t remember) that MAY allow me to send all midi info in an embedded stream but like I said, the tempo thing kills it anyway. No matter.

BTW, I found out why nothing was getting to the XR… doh… I forgot I had put a midi merge pedal in front of the XR midi in & it wasn’t powered.

Thanks all.