Well, last night’s gig went off without a single hitch, at least where the BeatBuddy is concerned. LOL Had a bad mic cable between my Vocalist Live 4 (guitar and my vocals) and mixer, but resolved that after first song. Fortunately I was playing as a duo, so bassist was singing and playing bass while I tried to figure out why my signal was out. :oops:
Besides the great sound, and naturalness of the song performances, all I had to do was make quick tempo adjustments for about 4 songs on the fly - you don’t realize how some tempos get varied to live performances until you try to play the song at actual tempo.
We noticed a few of the random fills felt a little odd for a few songs, but most fit well, granted we were using the stock songs.
For songs that I didn’t want drum intros, I just started song (without muting volume), and perhaps a beat or two played before I hit the Pause footswitch. I just made jokes telling our “drummer” not to be so eager, etc.
The crowd in this particular bar are not really “focused” listeners, so most of the time we’re just background music, BUT… we did have a few people dancing, and that’s a first for us, since we have always played acoustic, sans percussion.
The performance of “Banditos” (The Refreshments) was really fun, even though the stock song didn’t quite match (lots of accents that weren’t there), but it was cool finally being able to play the lead guitar bits. Can’t wait to program that one!
That’s great news. Fair play to you. It sounds like you had a blast. It’s a good tip to mute the intro and then pause the beat, then you just start off a new bar un-muted and away you go.
Not yet. I only received my BB last night and I had to work all day. So I’ll have a good play with it tomorrow. I’m looking forward to spending the whole day getting to know my new Buddy!!! I’m going to try check out beats for Dancing in the Moonlight, Jailbreak and Emerald. Also I have a set list of about 60 or 70 songs, so there is plenty of work for me to do. Good thing for me is that I play about 10 of the songs on your list that you put up. So you have helped cut my work load down. Cheers man!!! I’ll let you know what I come up with
How did you queue up different songs? Did you have a list of the beats that you needed, and then just knelt down between each song to manually select it? I have a show coming up on the 11th, and it seems unlikely that the software is going to be available in time to put a proper set list folder together.
I did debut my BeatBuddy in church yesterday and it went down really well, but I only used it for one song at the end.
If you wish to perform with the BeatBuddy, and all you want to do is reorder songs - I can actually help you do that without a manager software. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to create or change existing songs without the manager software - as I doubt if there is the way to do so.
Is it as simple as making a new folder on the card and dragging the desired beats into it and renaming them with appropriate numbers? I haven’t looked at the card on my PC yet, so this is just a guess, but if that’s possible that will definitely be a temporary solution for me. The custom beats will be nice in due course, but I can work with the presets for now.
Problem 1: All files are named like 0A7848DF.BBS (you won’t get what files you really need easily)
Problem 2: There needs to be a file CONFIG.CFG in the new folder (in order for your files to be seen by BeatBuddy)
Looks like the next step in that collaboration thread is going to be to match up the beat names with their file names. I’ll see if I can have a crack at it tonight :ugeek:
(Hopefully the file names are all the same for everybody, and not uniquely generated names for each card!)
There is actually a key to this puzzle. Actually, a CONFIG.CFG is a plain text file, that is a mapping between a hex-code file name and it’s BeatBuddy display name in a comma-separated values (.CSV) format.
Step 1. Opening CONFIG.CFG with any text editor like notepad Windows will help you understand what files you want to copy to your new folder.
Step 2. You can actually rename copied files in the new folder. Note, file names MUST have 8 or less symbols (seems like this is a limitation of BeatBuddy firmware)
Step 3. Create CONFIG.CFG in your new folder, that will map your new files to the names you want them to be displayed in a BeatBuddy. To better understand the syntax, just copy the file from original folder and edit it in a new one.
Step 4. There could be some funny bugs you can encounter while hacking into all of this, so…
Step 5. Whine on forums!
[EDIT] Oh, I forgot - in order for your new folder to be actually seen by BeatBuddy, note, that there is one more CONFIG.CFG that is one level higher (inside a SONGS folder on the SD card root).
Your newly created folder should be listed there as well
