I had a few hours tonight to try it on my TC-Helcon units, a VLPlay GTX and VoiceLive Touch…but nothing, I could not get any kind of sync going, no recognition of the BB, nada
The GTX appears to have no midi synch, so that pretty much rules it out for that, The VLT is supposed to be able to accept a midi clock, but I went though the midi settings and couldn’t find anything, so that was a dead end
I’m probably missing something, Is there some explicit way to get the BB to be the master? Or is it just down to what cables you connect?
I have a TC Helicon Voice Live 2 as well, which I belive is a little more midi friendly, I’ll try that over the weekend.
David, hook your BB midi cable up to the BB and put the one midi cable you have in the “midi OUT” of the BB breakout cable. then go to the midi in on the rang.
this will make BB the master and rang the slave.
It’s not like I’ve ever setup anything on my BeatBuddy after I connected its MIDI Out with my Boomerang III MIDI In. Everything worked right after that. Looks like the problem MIDI support of the loopers you are using is not so great after all.
Yeah, reading the TC helicon site when scanning for keyword MIDI it seems that they really have not implemented it very well on older devices…bummer
I still have the VL2 to try, and it kinda works with the RC-300 but I need to see if I can work something out… I’m not a midi expert at all, in fact aside from a controller board I set up, this is my first real attempt at midi sync, its a shame its such a hit and miss process for what is meant to be an industry standard.
The sync function in these is not standard midi, so it’s likely it will midi sync (if that’s what your asking).
Unless they changed it recently, which i’m pretty sure they haven’t.
I must admit, I am finding that most loopers are absolutely rubbish at implementing MIDI…what a strange a silly omission.
I guess loopers are still pretty new, we’re in the 2nd or 3rd generation of them I think…and they’ve progressed from very long delay units to machines capable of genuinely amazing music…but the midi thing is just mad, only a few of them seem to have done it according to the standard that’s been around since the 80’s.
sigh.
Maybe the next generation of loop stations will get it right.
The market evolved, and nowadays people are readily buying simple garbage. It indeed costs some amount of efforts to support MIDI, so companies are readily thrashing that idea to make more money.
Let me make an analogy here with the gaming industry nowadays. Absent MIDI support is like having all these F2P and DLC “features” in modern games.
yeah, I agree, the games industry is going to shit, its almost impossible to make money out of it now unless you get some grinding pointless crap in the game that relies on in app payments. As a game developer this makes me very sad.
but…lets not get started on that rant. Lets stick to this one.
ok that’s 2, though the boomerang is hard to locate here in Europe…but Jamman, Boss, TC Helicon, TC Electronic, Zoom…are the market leaders in devices that use loopers and have midi control…I have all of them, only the top end RC-300 almost works, and 1 of my TC-Helicon devices is at least recognizing it, but so far not playing…I need to spend some time…the rest are useless…
As much as I am sorely tempted, I can’t really afford to buy new loopers to get the most out of my BB which is as far as I can tell functioning perfectly.
Unfortunately, this is not a BeatBuddy problem. Every other MIDI-enabled Master Sync device will run into the same issues with your heap of loopers
Boomerang III is the only looper I’ve ever tried (yet it is even harder to find where I live!). This means you’d better analyze the market and user comments before buying next time!
no I know its not a BB problem, I thought I’d made that clear? Its entirely the strange policy of the makers of my stack of loopers, but it does limit my use of the BB somewhat to live playing, which I am rubbish at
I did review the market and user comments Daefecator, and in all cases they are the best you can buy and indeed they still are…but that was before I knew I needed midi to use the BB with them.
I’ve had the Boss and Jammans for several years, the TC’s over a year…the Zoom more recently,its only with the addition to the BB in my setup that I now realize, as will many others, that these units are useless, so this is a good warning to people hoping to hook up their BB’s to a midi device…check 1st.
I’ll report back on the VL2 soon, but as its mainly a vocal looping unit it may not be the best example of a looper to use, the VL3 apparently does not have any midi sync…which is even more bizzare as its brand new and designed for singing guitarists…
Subbed as a BB/Infinity user. Overall syncing works fantastic. Having some issues when using the pause/unpause function (viewtopic.php?f=18&t=823), but I’m still happy with it.
I’ve an issue syncing tempos that are not 4/4 (for example bues 12/8). Mi Pigtronix infinity “read” them as 4/4, so sync comes not correct. Is that a way to solve that?
Looks like Pigtronix is a much smarter device when it comes to MIDI than Boomerang III. In order for Boomerang III to work, only MIDI quarter notes are sufficient, but Pigtronix probably requires proper MIDI header (including time signature) to start sync’ing correctly.
A rather simple workaround would be to think as follows - you need to use the appropriate amount of 12/8 bars, that could be re-aligned as 4/4. 12/8 is 6 MIDI quarter notes, 4/4 is 4 MIDI quarter notes. 2 bars of 12/8 would be 12 quarter notes, but that is exactly the same as 3 x 4/4 bars! So you need to always loop an even number of 12/8 bars and your Pigtronix will be able to sync them perfectly.
I’ll try to elaborate. Mathematically speaking, you need to solve the equation X * (tempo) = Y * 4/4 for integer X and Y.
In this example, 2 * 12/8 = 24/8 = 3 * 4/4. This means that every recorded pair of 12/8 bars will be treated by Pigtronix like a triplet of 4/4 bars.
It’s a good trick but i can’t use it, as I loop the entire song while the singer sings, then I start playback to solo over recorded loop. So I can’t decide how many bars record, it depends on the song we’re playing.
BTW, Infiinity looper is much more responsive than the Ditto I used before, so I noticed that midi syncing is not actually a must. I tried to use it without syncing and hadn’t great troubles to stay in time (but of course the possibility of syncing let me much more “relaxed” while playing)
I haven’t done it yet but allegedly you can adjust the time signature of the Infinity in a preset using the software, so you can sync to non-4/4 signatures. You can set the Infinity to quantize on a per-beat instead of per-measure basis (again, according to the manual, via the software, and I haven’t attempted it).
