You may be able to take the E .wav file and use Audacity to lower it a half step… Just a thought…
Hey Joe, I’d like to do the same thing (with a sonuus). Could you elaborate on how you went about it? I’m new to the MIDI world…
(sonuus g2m) This is a cool guitar to midi product… I use piano roll using mixcraft. You can easily down load midi files on line and jjust the same way you borrow drum beats and chop them up to use on your beat buddy. You can do the same with the basslines in the midi files. Its a snap. guitar stu really made this pedal a band at your feet.
Yep I’ve been doing a few with grabbing the bass lines out of song midi files. Just have to relocate the files to higher up the piano roll to the correct midi notes to use with the bass drumkit in Beatbuddy. I feel I have really got it down pat now as there are so many ways to create songs using all the fills, transitions and multiple parts to put the song together. My Advice is to put it together so you can control the song with as little button pushes as possible. I have found when using beatbuddy that its a pain to transition or put in to many single fills and have gone towards creating extended parts for the fills. It probably gets closer to a drum machine that is programed to just run through a whole song but you still have the flexibility to choose when to trigger changes.
For example you can have a Main part that does the verse and main part of the song and can improvise around this part and then create a fill that starts with the fill into a chorus, the whole chorus and the fill back to the verse so there is one button push to trigger fill and chorus and it comes back to verse by it self and no need to worry about transitions.
For Example I just uploaded Sweet Child o’ Mine which has numerous parts to the song. I have an extended intro which leads into the verse which is Main A. I have fill 1 which has a fill leading into the oh-oh-oh part and comes back to the Main by itself for the interlude and next verse. I have two Fill 1’s then I have fill 2 which is the same as fill one but twice as long to lead into the solo. There is a transition at the end of fill 2 to Main B. Main B is the main riff at the second part of the solo and the end so to start the solo at the end of the transition I have to start B Fill 1 straight away which will play out the first part of the solo and lead into the second part of the solo with no button pushes. One more Fill for the “where do we go” with the quiet drums and one more fill for the “Now now now now now now” part and then outro. Seven button pushes, one transiton and an outro for a complex song which allows plenty of room to improvise and extend parts and concentrate more on playing and less on button pushing.
amen Brother I’ve been doing the same. Keep it simple to use. less errors and more focus on the show.
very cool indeed:-)
too bad about the audible glitches (pops/clicks) between notes, though…
but i’m sure it’s a lot better than no bass at all and hopefully those glitches might not be that audible with guitars and vocals in the mix…
Wow! I love the idea of being able to have a bass player in the pedal alongside the drummer, but I have no idea what language you guys are talking in!! Must be an age thing, or experience in the IT/Tech/Programming world but I guess I will have to be patient and wait and see if something is brought through by the BB team as a downloadable enhancement to this great product. Thanks anyway. From an old dude!
I think I may have worked out what the clicking sound is. Check the samples and make sure the WAV at the beginning and end of the file crosses at zero. If it doesn’t, you’ll hear a click.
Im not sure what you mean about the WAV file crossing at zero Nick. It may be what Im thinking of. Ill post a graphic of what happens to the WAV file and why the clicking sound happens as I understand it. I will try and make a simplistic explanation as I can and is not to insult anyones intelligence on what they know about the subject.
Edit. I just had another look at reaper and I understand what your talking about and it’s the same thing Nick. When you split a WAV file in Reaper it automatically adds what I called decay but it calls fade to make the WAV shape hit Zero when the file ends. This is what beat buddy needs to incorporate.
In the picture below
In Track 1 is the the full WAV file for the Low A in the “Rock with bass” drumset and if you zoom the picture out it is 14 seconds long. If triggered with one midi note in the beatbuddy it will play for 14 sec and there will be no clicking noise. I have programmed the drumset so if another bass note is triggered the beatbuddy imeadiately cuts the WAV file short so there is no overlapping of notes. My first try let all the notes ring out and it sounds like a horrible mess. The way to stop this in the drum editor is to assign all the bass notes to a choke group and the polyphony setting to 1 so there is only one bass note playing at a time and hence you can’t hit two bass notes like an octave at once and have them both ring out.
Track 2 is what happens when the WAV file is cut short and this example is at 1 sec. You can see the end of the file is a straight cut and if you play this track you get the clicking noise as soon as the WAV is cut off.
Track 3 is the same 1 sec WAV file but the Reaper DAW allows you to add a decay type effect to the WAV file and hence the shape of the file is a curve to Zero over a couple of milli seconds and when this note is played there is no clicking noise.
As far as I can tell this is the only fix to get rid of the clicking noise and would be needed to be impemented by the beatbuddy development crew in a firmware update.
It doesn’t annoy me to much as It’s not that bad but I don’t play out live with the beatbuddy and would imagine that it may be a bit distracting in that situation especially through a high quality PA.
Any Ideas from other users would be welcome.
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I mean if you zoom right into the WAV file, have a check what the actual wave line is doing at the cut. You need to cut where the line passes through the zero or horizontal centre.
Yep but as far as i can tell it’s not possible to cut it right at the zero or horizontal centre because the length of the bass note is determined by how long between each midi trigger and the tempo and each of the 25 bass notes from low E to E two octaves has a different WAV shape. There are alot of variables. As far as I can tell the only way to have the WAV end right on Zero is with a fade. Here is another example close up of the fade. The fade is only over the last 10ms of the WAV but stops the click noise.
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I’ve uploaded the Drum and Bass file to the Drumset Folder on the SD Card but i don’t here the bass. Can someone let me know what i may be doing wrong??? Thanks!!
@Dazeo What you have done is definitely correct in terms of how things should generally be done, and I really hope BeatBuddy will soon be acting like this! Unfortunately, right now this is simply not supported. In order to make any changes to the pedal content, you must use BBManager software.
- Open BBManager
- Import - Export > Import Project from Pedal (to get started, aka download SD card content for editing in BBManager)
- Import - Export > Import Drumset (this will correctly add the drumset to the project on your hard drive)
- Import - Export > Export Project to Pedal (to upload your changes to the pedal SD card correctly)
Without these (highly unintuitive) steps, pedal is unable to see the changes you’ve made (like uploading a file directly onto SD card).
Awesome!! I’ll try that. I really appreciate the quick and helpful response. God Bless.
Thank you @Guitar Stu[/USER]. I’m creating a song - The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” - from scratch using [USER=389]@CharlesSpencer’s Beatbuilder midi editor. I’ve got the first verse more or less done and have tested the intro and verse in in the BeatBuddy Manager and the BeatBuddy itself. I also use Reaper and Anvil and I have a Roland GR-55 with the GK pickup so I think I’m set up to at least add bass through your drumset. To raise the bar a little I’ll try to edit the drumset and add a synth sound as well. Whew, this is great stuff and thanks again to you and Charles for paving the way. Cheers!
A few years ago, I posted this video about the Sonuus G2M. I haven’t used it much because it was really difficult to get it working with my Yamaha synth and it’s monophonic. I am using a Roland GR-55 today. Here’s the video:
Good luck with your song Mark. I’m not sure how you will go trying to add the synth. There is a limit to how big the drumset can be and I think its 100mb. I had to delete some of the standard drum instruments to get the bass to fit so I you may not be able to add any more instruments without deleting something else.
Thanks Stu. I’ve created the drum parts and stitched them together in the Manager as well as in Reaper. Yeah, through this exercise I’m testing the envelope of the 500 note midi file limits, the drumset size as well as the operational capability. Just pressing the footswitch to trigger the various parts of the song at the right time is a bear. I’m finding that I may have to rethink this whole idea of putting together long sections with verse 1 + synth solo, verse 2, chorus 1 + guitar solo, verse 3, etc. The BeatBuddy is not designed to be a midi song sequencer with one or two clicks of the pedal. Hate to say it but with reaper, a good midi editor and a good drum sound generator - in Reaper I use Manta’s free Power DrumKit 2 which has pretty good rock kit sounds - it may be a lot easier to create whole song wave files in Reaper, compress them down to mp3 to save memory card space, and then load them into a recorder/player like a Tascam DR-05.
Sorry, this turned into an off topic, long winded, semi-gripe but hopefully the BB product and software will improve to the point where I think a lot of us will be completely satisfied with its functionality and user options.
Once I get at least the bass parts combined with the drums, I’ll post the results. 
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@Guitar Stu I’m having a difficult time in Reaper to record the midi bass line. I downloaded the 4front bass VSTi and set up a new track with that plugin. The track input is supposed to look at a Scarlett 2i4 (made sure that was enabled as a midi device in preferences) that I’ve plugged the midi out from the GR-55 into. That is, midi out from GR-55 to midi in on the 2i4 with all midi channels enabled in the track. No sound, no recording, nada. Any tips to offer? Thanks in advance.
@MarkFromHawaii, if you haven’t already, you will need to click the switch to turn on live monitoring for the track. Also, once you’re happy with the sequence you’ll need to transpose it so that the lowest note is at least E64.