Here’s my duo playing Give Me One Reason at our first BB Enabled Show. This one is from the Premium Library, except I updated it to add a hi-hat intro and tempo beat until the actual drums come in.
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The best of the three! Loved it!
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This is inspiring me to open the box and start working with the BB. I got it last week but was thinking about returning it because I thought it might seem cheesy to build an act around it. Clearly not. BTW I love the keyboardist’s voice and the energy you both put into this performance. Congrats, you caught lightning in a bottle, hope you have a lot of success with it!
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We play 50-60 ahows a year with ours. Some pubs, some big stages. We have a YouTube playlist if you want more examples of using it live.
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We have now done 2 BeatBuddy enabled shows. WE do a mix of 70-90s rock and blues tunes along with a handful of other things to keep it fresh. I was a little worried about it sounding “cheesy” as well, but the sound quality of the drum set are great and the premium tunes are good as well. We have about 15 of our songs “BeatBuddy Enabled” and we have our next 10 or so tunes picked out.
It’s a game changer. Looper integration is great and makes it easy to have you loops timed correctly. It adds SO MUCH energy to the sound! It’s really allowed us to flip the script on what people expect from an acoustic guitar/piano duo.
Sounds great!
How did you update it to add the hi-hat until the drums come in?
I could use that on several songs I have!
In this case the drums actually come in on measure 24 of the song. That 24th measure with the pickup fill was included with the Premium Song as the Intro, which actually comes in right at the end of the second verse.
- So I created a simple .mid that was a single 4/4 measure with a foot hi-hat on each beat and exported the .mid…
- I then went into Garage Band and added the 4 count measure to a new track and copy/pasted that measure over and over until it was 25 measures long. So 25 measures of 4 count hi-hat.
- Then I added the measure with the “intro” drum fill to the end and exported it as a single 26 measure .mid.
- Finally, I added it as the Intro to the song in BBManager.
*It’s 26 measures because each verse is 12 measures, and there’s a pickup riff that leads in to measure 1 of the progression. The easiest way for me to get that on time is to have a full measure (4 counts) and then to start after best 6, or a little over halfway through the second measure. So my workflow is…
- Start the song on beatbuddy
- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…start the pickup note riff…7…8
- Song Measure 1 - Main progression, Start the loop recording…
- Song Measure 12 - Riff is complete after this measure, trigger loop to repeat the progressions
- Song Measure 13 - First Verse comes in. I get to take a break and let the looper and BB do all the work
- Song Measure 24 , End of second verse, the drums come in
- Song Measure 25 - Third verse. BeatBuddy is now playing the main drum part of the song. I am now adding the bass line to the loop
Hope this made sense! It was a little longer than I thought it would be! (TWSS)
Oh, and yes, I could have just made the 4 count hat measure “part 1” and the pickup fill the transition beat, with the main beat as “part 2”… but I try not to have to mess with any other pedals when I’m laying down a loop, so I wanted to be able to just focus on the loop creation, and not transitioning drum parts.
I agree with that approach. Wow, thanks for such a thorough explanation. I actually understood it all.
What did you use to create the simple 4-count midi file? (I’m not very fluent in midi.)
Also, love the (TWSS) tag. 
I used the BBManager application. If you click any new part or fill you should have the option to create a new part. Set the length to 1 measure and add a foot hi-hat, or whatever you want really on each quarter note. Then once you’ve done that, you can use the right-click menu to choose “Export MIDI File”
Well, that’s very cool. I didn’t know the software could do that!
I will be trying it out tomorrow.
Thanks a bunch!