Ok, i came up with a new idea to workaround the click. Unfortunately u need additional equipment, but this should do it:
When building your drumkit, save certain midi area for bass notes (i use range from 1 to about 15 and the rest are reserved for actual drum sounds).
The bass notes are just midi, with no actual samples attached on the drumkit. You will need to connect an external module to beatbuddy to produce the sounds. Midi sync cable connected to a module with a bass sound should do the trick. I’m planning to try it out with an old korg keyboard module and see what happens. Basically beatbuddy just gives control signal to the module, and the module produces the desired bass note.
Yep your Idea should work if you hook up an external midi device that can play back bass on those midi notes you want to use. It’s the hassle of more gear for me. It’s almost perfect with the bass in the beatbuddy except for the clicking noise. Apparently there is a new update coming soon and I hope this can be resolved.
Just on the clicking; I haven’t read the entire post or replies so I’m not sure if you resolved it (apologies, I’m at work and should be working).
Reaper inserts (cross) fades by default when you cut an audio sample. This will quick fade the sample down or up. It does not fix the clicking sound, though it does diminish it. The clicking sound is caused when the wave reaches the end and the waveform is not at the Zero line; the jump between this offset and where the wav starts again (if it’s joined or repeating) causes the popping sound.
To fix this, most DAWs allow you to cut or snap at Zero (in Repear I think it’s called ‘trim at zero crossing’). This means that when you cut a wav form, it will seek to the closest point that the waveform goes through the Zero and cut it that point. Thus no clicking.
Thanks Ruairiau. Yep we kinda know what is causing the clicking and what needs to be done as you have pointed out but unfortunately it can only be sorted out by the developers. They are aware of the issue. There is allegedly a new firmware update coming, don’t know the time frame and am not sure if it is even one of their priorities. Lets hope we get a fix.
Close but no cigar… I spent many days building drum + bass tracks for live performance. I use ezdrummer with reaper for the build, making first both the drum parts and bass parts and then combine them to a single midi file.
As I posted previously, I used an old korg module to play bass sound. I got it working, sort of: bass lines play out (had to do a firmware update before the midi sync started working) - but…
The sound cuts out immediately after it starts playing. It’s like the bass notes don’t have a duration - they just start and fade out immediately. I tried to assign bass notes to a different midi channel but no help there. No control signal on the note duration seems to pass through. I’m starting to fear that beatbuddy doesn’t recognize signal length at all, just on/off. If so, this s**t got very tricky.
So it seems that at the moment the only way to put bass in the pedal is to customize a new drumkit for each song so that the bass notes (attached to song-specific bas WAV files) are triggered and also faded out at the right time.
This might be fixed with the impending firmware update. The new update, I think, is going to respect zero velocity notes, and note-off events. I’m hoping this will make the basslines snappier, and get rid of the clicking. Also, it will fascilitate my new super secret drumkit!!
The beatbuddy manager changes the midi file and notes when used in a song. If you export a midi file you have created and used in a song from the manager program and open it back up in Reaper you will see it has been changed so all the notes are the same length.
Well, I’ve tried to solve the issue the best I can. In the past, the midi import stripped the midi of note offs. Now that we want note-offs, and the player respects and plays note offs, we still have to deal with the previously imported crippled midi. I added a detection to the MIDI export, that if i see that there are not note offs, I add them back in. The problem with that, of course, is that I decided and have hard coded the length of those notes. This solution at least allows you to edit and fix the midi that was crippled by the previous more naive BB Manager.
Right now, the beatbuddy only reads the first track… You will have to merge them into one track. You will probably have to transpose the bass up a few octaves to match where the bass notes line up.
I have imported some songs that seem to turn out with no clicking/clipping sounds and others that do have what sounds like a clipping sound. I checked my cables and there doesn’t seem to be a problem there. I was thinking maybe in the production of these songs that i am downloading that maybe the volume levels were to high and as a result i’m getting what sounds like a clipping sound. I don’t know if I’m making any sense to you guys but am I ?
Yes I have done the full upgrade to both manager and be. I will try what you suggested and redownload the songs. But, a few of these songs were downloaded after I did the upgrade I will keep trying though.
Also keep in mind that if the songs were posted more than six months ago and they weren’t created or updated for use with one of the non-perc (NP) drum sets, it’s likely that they aren’t optimized to reduce the clicks and sound their best.
Ah ha maybe that’s the problem. I have downloaded a lot of songs over the last few weeks and some of those songs may very well have been older. Ok I will go through the repertoire of songs and post which song/s i am referring to. Thanks for your comcern.
Below are a just a few examples of the songs that don’t seem to jive well with my BB. I’m actually very disappointed after downloading so many songs to find out that when i replay them they sound horrific. I have downloaded and purchased almost all of your drum kits and beats.Back to the drawing board as they say.
Thanks for providing the links, Robert; I annotated each of the above with my findings. I tried these out with BBM 1.6.7b on my Mac laptop. The takeaways: 2/3 songs sound fine when played with what I think was their intended drum set; generally any songs posted by Phil are going to sound good as he uses NP drum sets and ≥1.6.4b to craft his tunes.
Which version of the BBM and firmware are you using? Because there are so many versions of the BBM and beta in use, stating “the latest” is not much help. Which drum sets were you playing them back with?
I will test these on another system connected to powered monitors to see if it changes my observations and will follow up later today.