Yeah when songs mix time signatures you have to get creative. Sometimes you can get around the limitation if you construct the entire verse or chorus rather than relying on looping, and things work out by the end of the verse or chorus. If there’s just a single bar of 2/4 in a 4/4 verse, you’re screwed (like when I tried to make a track for Cross-eyed Mary). Just don’t look at the BB display while playing as it will be “off” some of the time 
I imagine the verse track for Metallica’s “One” would complicated by doable.
I was thinking Enter Sandman… and maybe Nothing Else Matters. On the back burner for now. I’m starting with my attempt at Lithium by Nirvana. I’ll share it when I’m happy with it.
Hey @CharlesSpencer, is there any way to get a beat builder with guitar stu’s drum with bass, even if it’s a simplistic one? I love the simplicity of your grid setup, but I can’t figure out how to get the drums/w/bass “instrument” in anything else other than an old garageband. so it… woooorks… but is really difficult to execute, esp since GB won’t let you save out midi
I haven’t yet looked into how he implemented the bass lines, but obviously he had to pick MIDI notes that wouldn’t collide with channel 10 drum notes. I was thinking I could have a separate grid for the bass line with one of those movable splitters in between so you could adjust the display and not make yourself crazy with scrolling up and down. Really the only tricky bit would be synchronizing the two tables horizontally. I have a to-do list for the track editor and I’ll investigate this, as it seems a lot of people are making use of the bass.
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Two questions please:
-
I am a complete novice at this and would be greatly helped by hearing the beat looped. Am I correct in thinking that Beatbuilder doesn’t keep looping and only plays “all” or “selection” just once?
-
I am attempting to work around this by using Hydrogen software and exporting midi and then tweaking within Beatbuilder. however, I cannot figure out how to assign notes to instruments (C1, F#1, etc…) properly. Can you tell me what are the note values for each instrument in Beatbuilder. I apologize for having to ask a question I am sure you have answered somewhere, but I can’t find it. Thank you for taking the time to help me in this.
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He basically just took out some extra instruments, and added two octaves of bass notes E-E at the top of the midi notes, from 64 to 88. I have a simplistic version of it (where there is just a single wav for each instrument, so no velocity nuance).
I was able to create this in (an old) Garageband by mapping the notes, so each wav file has its midi note in the title:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hboang91jwlzufe/mykit.tar?dl=0
http://home.lunabell.com/mykit.tar
In the older versions of Garageband you used to be able to create your own instrument through the Musical Typing thing, mapping wavs to midi notes.
If you take a look at the wavs in the tar file, it will be pretty obvious. One of the main issues he was struggling with is that the entire drum kit had to be under a certain size, hence the removal of some. to make it easier for myself to map, the ones that say xx.wav shouldn’t actually be there. I put them there for my sanity in the tedious process of mapping all the notes 
I might be able to help answer part 2. You can assume the notes are within 1 note of this map: (the reason why “within one note” is that sometimes there are two kick drums, or snare drums so you need to figure out if it’s one or the other)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GMStandardDrumMap.gif
In WildMidi, this is done like this. They have the fixed size table of MIDI notes of size 128 (0-127). But then each note descriptor has a field id and a pointer next to the same note descriptor. Every usual note has an id between 0 and 127. Every drumset note has an id of its real note plus 127*(drum set number+1), so that a default (number 0) drumset note 36 would have an id of 127+36 = 163. And it would be place in the table as the next for the usual note 36.
So, you are having all the notes in a single table [0, 127]
0 - note 0 (id:0)
1 - note 1 (id:1)
…
36 - note 36 (id:36) → drumset note 36 (id: 163)
…
41 - note 41 (id:41) → drumset note 41 (id: 164)
…
and so on.
Lookup in this table is done like this - when you need a note with id X, you read the table[X&0xFF], and then compare id of the note with X, going to the next if not equal.
I think there’s some syncing issues when editing midi with 6/8 time. For example the Blues 5 6/8.
Everything works as is. But when you start to edit, for example, the Fill 46 6_8 half bar full kit (open it midi editor and hit save), and reimport it back to BBManager, the sync between main drum loop and drum fill is messed up.
I don’t know if this is a BBManager or MIDI editor.
Thanks!
I wish that there will be a MidiEditor in the BB manager menu that will help us easily edit midi files as easy as 1.2.3…
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I was unable to replicate your problem when editing a fill you’ve specified with my Guitar Pro editor I always use.
Let’s wait for @CharlesSpencer to comment on this.
Well… Me too. I have no ETA for this, though 
Yeah there’s a bug where non-4/4 time signatures get messed up. For instance 6/8 gets saved as 6/4. I’m on it.
Hey fellas… So I added tambourine and shaker to the “brushes” kit and I can now get tambourine but no shaker…
When I play it in beat builder, it works but when I save it, before adding it to beat buddy, I can’t hear the shaker just in its raw MIDI file, you know, just clicking on it in explorer and it opens in a little audio player… Any ideas?
I’m sure this is a rhetorical question but each instrument in the Beat Builder is the same as MIDI map??? Like Tam=54 and Shaker = 82?
The more I mess with this thing the more I understand it and seems like it should work
The shaker note I used was 104 because that mapped to a shaker in the Latin BeatBuddy kit. It doesn’t correspond to the standard MIDI mapping, which makes transposing Latin percussion challenging, but, BeatBuddy has a lot more instruments and that’s the tradeoff.
Thanks Charles… That did the trick… I pretty much got this thing…
Well, tried to get this .jar program to extract but Win 7 64 simply does not open .jar files or recognize Java. Have tried new and old Java versions with no luck. Giving up.
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you don’t have to extract the .jar … it’s the .exe altenative.
(meaning it IS the program)
No, it isn’t. A .jar file needs to be extracted by either Java or 7zip to produce executable files neither of which will work on win 7 64 bit platform. This is a common issue with many, many ineffective solutions. Neither Java or Microsoft have any solution whatsoever. You can mess with registry files to attempt a work-around but most of these do not work and screwing with the registry is inviting disaster. This program needs to be compressed so it opens with winzip. Java is becoming obsolete so I’m surprised the BB programmers even considered Java for file compression.
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did you click on the jar file to try opening it …cause I just did!
Yes, you have a computer that has a working version of Java. Java is the script program which unzips .jar files. Unfortunately, Java is being blocked by windows 7 64 bit OS. A Microsoft update to Windows 7 back in April '14 seems to have knocked Java off the “recognized” software list so it will not run. If anyone knows of a work-around, I’d like to hear it.