Hi all! I’m a new forum user who is considering getting a BeatBuddy. I play in an amateur acoustic guitar/uke duo. The way we arrange songs is conducing to having some kind of drums/percussion, because most of the time, my guitar parts include bass & rhythm elements. Therefore I’m thinking about a drum machine to use live. My requirements are:
The ability to load custom samples (if that is not possible, the at least adjust the EQ of the different drum sounds, e.g. tame the bottom end of the bass drum)
The ability to create custom drum parts in a friendly and familiar environment such as a PC
Tempo tap
Several parts per song, switchable arbitrarily mid-song
Adjustable relative levels in the drum mix (between bass drum/snare/hi-hat etc.)
Fine timing control (quantize to 1/16ths won’t cut it — I need better control for the right feel)
Expandable foot pedal control; ideally, I’d like to be able to connect smth. like a MIDI controller and have separate pedals for starting/stopping, song change, tempo tap, and 2 to 3 song parts
Would BeatBuddy be the right choice for me? Are there some other important details I need to know about BeatBuddy, given my intended application?
Ill answer what I can
You can use the Beatbuddy for just drum tracks or drums and bass or other instruments. I use drums and bass in all the tracks I use.
You can add your own samples. You can fully customize the drum kits. Add samples to existing kits, create your own from scratch, replace existing samples etc.
You can use any midi editing program to create custom drum parts. I use Reaper
Tap Tempo Yes
There are many ways you can program a song. My advise is download the Manager program and check it out. The songs that come with the program are normally like Part A and Part B with fills for each but there are plenty of user downloads that do things differently. Midi controller can be used if you have more than two parts and want to change parts in any order. Some of my songs are:
Funkytown: Programmed to play the whole song from start to finish
Rockin in the Free World: Loop plays verse until I trigger a fill that plays full chorus and then ends back up on verse loop and repeat.
Gravity: Loop plays Intro/verse progression. I trigger a fill at first chorus which plays Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Solo/Chorus and ends back on loop to jam out on till I end the song.
Lots of options
You can adjust levels in the drumset editor.
Create your midi files to your liking in a third party editior the beat buddy will play them as is.
My answer would be hit the ‘go to cart’ button and buy it now ,its incredible with authentic kits with percussion kits through to 70’s ludwig kit and all in between and user forum resources where members have upoaded kits you can add to your BB.I put the same set of songs into 4 different folders each folder assigned to a different kit so if we play at a groovy coffee house we would use World Percussion Kit a bigger venue the Ludwig or Pro Kit, another option is Ballad Kit which has a slight reverb sound,you can also download kits from the resources in forum one of my fav kits is the Roland 909 kit for a great 80’s sound I use for Posrtishead type grooves (not that Portishead is 80’s) but the kit seems to work nicely.
You can do up to 9 changes per song not counting fills /transition fills to be honest I rarely have over 5 transitions thats purely because Id rather concentrate on my playing than my foot hitting the pedal all the time.I’ve found because we do our own arrangements of cover songs its kind of cool to keep it simple ,but thats just me.
you can adjust the volume of the various intruments of kit in the drum editor.I found especially with the ludwig kit the toms/crash were really loud in comparison to the rest of kit.You can also just apply volume changes in the midi editor.It took me a while to get my head aroud all this midi editing stuff but I got there.There’s a guy called Phil Flood on the user forum who is an awesome guy and will bend over backwards to help with any questions ,he also has some great kits available.
Thank you very much for your kind and detailed replies, GuitarStu and AnthonyR! After some more reading, I can see that indeed, BeatBuddy looks like something that our duo could use.