First gig tonight with the BB - some thoughts/feedback

Yes! And also the ones that don’t end with a cymbal crash. Dead air!

super are you going play with your own gig list. like to know how was it

I haven’t gigged with the beat buddy live but as a general suggestion I would just use 1 or 2 kits and that may help with consistency in volume. A real drummer only has one kit in front of him and besides the nuances in his playing for the most part his sound and volume are going to be pretty consistent. Some styles of music lend themselves more to dynamics but I think in a situation where you are in an acoustic duo and you are trying to focus on the performance you don’t want to be concerned with volume levels. Years ago I would sequence tunes for the duo that I played in or for other people and I found it saved alot of headache if you could get the drums and bass at a pretty consistent volume regardless of style. Unless of course you had a soundman out front. I’d love to see t he beatbuddy expanded into a slighty larger pedal with a few more footswitches and maybe an unboard volume pedal. Kind of like a multi effect unjit.

Variance in volume is a problem. Brushes are harder to hear and some of the “pop” beats are deafening. Tonight at a quieter venue we experiment with a compressor to try and level off the louder beats. We tinkered wit it in rehearsal and it seems to help. Tomorrow night is a loud bar and we will bring in my friend on bass. Two extremes of volume for the group and it will be interesting to see if we can tame the differences in level btwn beats. This will be our 4th and 5th live shows with BB.

I hear yah. Volume levels are a frustrating issue. When our keyboard player is not available I have parts that I have done myself that I send to our drummer on a stereo looper with one channel being click for him and the other front of the house mix. I can normalize these tracks as they are wave files but even then it is hard to get the levels exact from one song to the next. Especially when you factor in the size of the room and the type of P.A., bottom end etc. It would be nice if the beat buddy had a way of quickly getting the volume consistent from kit to kit and getting the EQ pretty similar for the most part. I 'd like to know how your gig works out. I have an acoustic gig next week with a bass player and another acoustic guitarist. I am considering incorporating the BeatBuddy but it is nice to know some of the issues that I may have to deal with.

I will definitely report back.

As a side note, we have also taken to using a powered subwoofer in larger venues and definitely when the bass player is part of the group. I use the sub in the rock band that I’m in so it’s always in my possession - a pain in the arse to schlep around at 80lbs but man does it fill the room with omnidirectional yet unobtrusive sound.

OK, we set up with a powered subwoofer, twin Yamaha 12" speakers, two 10" monitors. Big LOUD room (lots of crowd din) with very high celings and no soft surfaces. We had our bass player. We ran the BB thru a Boss compressor/sustainer pedal. I think it helped even things out but my partner, who is the sound-guru, says we need to get a compressor without sustainer. There’s a few songs that we do that have a 4 count hi hat tap (almost like a click track) for the first minute or so of the song, then the beat transitions in (Pink Houses and Turn the Page, for example). We have to turn the hi hat up (a lot) to hear it (in order to stay in time). BUT then when you transition to the drumbeat it’s deafening. I don’t think the BB is at fault for that. It’s just a problem that exists b/c it’s not a human being playing a kit. We were hoping the compressor would quell that super loud beat when it kicked in, but I don’t feel it did a good job of it.

I’ve also noticed that beats featuring open hi hat crashes (some of the rock beats) are hard to stay in time with b/c the crashes drown out the kick, and we are struggling to stay in time. That may be b/c of crappy monitors. Not really sure - but I think we will be able to work this out.