I play guitar in an acoustic duo. We cover everything from Kid Rock, to Bob Seger, to Mellencamp, Eric Church, Buffett, etc. I’m wondering if those of you out there in similar gigs find the BB easy to program when playing covers. “Easy” is a relative term, and I’m not looking for exact renditions, but for other non-drummers out there like me, do you find it reasonably easy to use in this application? Thanks for any opinions.
Well, if you happen to find MIDI drum file for the songs you cover, this will be relatively easy.
All you have to do is manually split this MIDI file into parts (like chorus and verse), and find some fills (like drums buildup, maybe extra cymbal crashes going from verse to chorus etc.)
Add this all into a song, and you are good to go! 
thanx for the info, but that just might be easier said than done, if you’re not used to working with midi…
you also need to move the midi notes to the correct positions, for bb to read them correctly, right?
That’s a pretty rare occasion, when a MIDI file uses note 35 for Kick Drums. Then you need to replace it to 36.
Another note that was giving me troubles is MIDI note 40. You should replace that with 38.
Aside from those two notes, I had no problems in playing drum files with my BeatBuddy.
Well, so to say, everything in this life is much easier said than done, especially if you haven’t done it before.
I do it pretty much like that:
- Find Guitar Pro tab file via Google for the song I like - there are plenty available on the internet.
- I use my Guitar Pro 5.2 to look at the drum track of the downloaded file.
- I open another (empty) window of Guitar Pro to save individual parts. Create a drumset track there and delete the default instrument track.
- I find patterns that correspond to different main song parts (or fills), then copy-paste it into the empty Guitar Pro window.
- Every time a drum pattern is copied to another window, I make sure there are no notes 35 (replace to 36) and 40 (-> 38), and then export this piece to MIDI as a separate file.
After this process, I have all the necessary MIDI files to use in BBManager.
I would just add that you may need to move some of the midi notes before splitting the track e.g a crash in a fill needs to be before the actual end of the bar as does the bass drum, otherwise when you split the track the crash or what ever midi note will be at the beginning of the next loop. I usually move the notes at the end of a loop backward or forwards to the last possible position before the bar, which means the part will loop nicely.