If you haven’t touched it for a year, I strongly suggest starting out with updating your firmware and downloading the newest BB manager software.
I really don’t understand how you are having so many issues. I had my BB on stage a week after it arrived, and have been using it for more set pieces each week with only slightly modified stock songs.
I’ve just bought my Beat Buddy and waiting for it to be processed and delivered, so I’ve only played with the BB Manager - which serves as a pretty good emulator.
I found it fairly easy to get started and build drum patterns using the BB Manager. Although, I would have preferred to have the ability to audition drum loops like you can in EZ Drummer 2 and easily mix and match them. Right now, it seems you can replace MIDI parts by loading them from file; this isn’t very intuitive or fun to work with - but it is what it is.
I play in an acoustic band doing covers. My plan is to scour the web for the Guitar Pro tracks for the songs we do where drums are included, extract the MIDI, clean it up a little if needed and chop it up into usable parts using something like Reaper. Is this possible? Has anyone done this? What issues might I face?
Also, I plan on using some midi extracted from my EZ Drummer library. It seems like a natural fit since it has a huge catalogue of midi grooves and some great song building tools.
I am a single guy playing music, so I use the beatbuddy as my backup bass player and drummer. So what you are describing is not only possible, but the way many use it. If you don’t need the basslines, then the drumming parts become even easier, so there’s that whole thing too.
I tried it out last night and the results were both good and not so good. Like any tool, it’s important to figure out what it can do as well as what it can’t.
The Good:
You can add your BB midi library to EzDrummer 2 and easily put together songs. So you can use the song builder, find suitable midi parts and build a song structure in the EZDrummer timeline section. This gives you a chance to set up the drums for the entire song then grab your guitar and do a play through without having to export it to the BB. You can sorta get a feel for how much footwork you’re gonna have to do to pull it all together. When you’re done, then simply drag these midi parts directly into a new song in the BB Manager - you can literally drag them from the EZDrummer window directly onto BB Manager.
The Not So Good:
The EZ Drummer midi files are hit and miss (pun intended). The extended midi of these files is unrecognised by BB and results in missing drum parts. I tried to figure out how to remap them and scoured the forums here, but had no luck finding an easy, workable solution.
Conclusion:
I think it’s probably best to keep it simple, this product isn’t going to replace a drummer and on more complicated songs it may not be practical. Using the EZDrummer 2 interface is a much better way to to find and arrange your drum midi but keep in mind it has to be broken up into workable parts and you don’t want to be tap dancing through your sets.
If you look at the drum kit editor, you can see which instruments/notes are implemented. I made a spreadsheet, and compared it with the general midi spec, so I keep that handy. For instance, there are two kicks in GM, 35 and 36, but 35 isn’t implemented. Two snares, 38 and 40, but only 38 is implemented. It’s not hard to remap them once you know what to look for.
Yeah I did look into this. I created a track in Reaper, remapped some of the drums using MIDI_KeyMap and bounced that output to a new midi track. It worked, but honestly it just wasn’t a nice solution - I’ll only ever do it for edge cases where I need a specific fill transformed.
It’s also easy enough to open a midi clip in the Reaper midi editor, load the midi names for the specific BB Kit your using (found scattered throughout this forum) and move invalid notes to a more suitable valid note.
I think for most songs that I play, the default loops will do just fine.
Well, I have had the unit for over a year. Worked my butt off to get to the point of usability. Took my song list and worked until I felt I had a decent match, but when I play with the group that I normally perform with, there are not too many times we feel comfortable with the drum backgrounds. Sometimes they feel too restrictive and do not allow any flex in terms of start and end of a measure and our lead guitar player, who is a master musician, finds himself chomping at the bit with the machine. He has a band locally and they play with a drummer all of the time, who is really good, but he is more flexible. So I have pretty much gotten to the point that I will use the machine for practice and working on a rhythm for a new song, and practicing some of the old ones, but we are not going to be using it very much in live performances. I started out gung ho and balls to the wall, but now I have a really top quality metronome.