Hello Beat Buddies.
I use my Beat Buddy as a soundcard when programming my DOP song for my duo. I program the beats on my Mac in Presonus Studio One 4 and have the BB setup via MIDI as my output, and it works fine most of the time. But for some reason, it will not play some of the beats which are exactly on the measure. Only if I move them slightly off beat they will sound. Have you ever experienced that? What can I do to avoid this? Please advise.
Flemming
There are a couple things to be aware of when creating beats for playback using the Beat Buddy.
Not every drum tone in a standard midi-mapped kt (GM standard) is present in the BB. Be sure that there are actually samples in the midi note number that you are trying to trigger. You can examine this by viewing the kit in BB Manager. Double click on the kit’s name in BB Manager to open the kit, and you can see which midi locations have a corresponding drum kit piece.
I have experienced some erratic playback when using drum beats that were created in traditional drum machines. The source of the problem was found to be the very short notes that the traditional drum machines used as triggers. Many of these notes were only a couple of midi ticks long, and they did not even appear to be present when viewing a section in the BB midi editor. To fix this, i made sure that all my notes were a minimum of 40 midi ticks long. If you need notes that are shorter than 1/32 notes, keep this in mind when creating your song sections.
In very fast pieces, it is possible that during a part change, for example from a main loop to a fill or transition, the BB might appear to miss a note on beat, as you describe. Be extra sure that the note is actually placed directly on the zero location for that beat, and not slightly before it. If the problem persists, you may need to work around it, by offsetting those notes by a few ticks. The result should be unnoticeable to the audience.
One other thing to keep an eye on, sometimes the Manager can do weird things with the 1st beat of the bar of a song part. However, it’s actually caused by the song part before it. You can tell because if you go to edit the midi and scroll right to the end you’ll see a thin red line. This means there is ‘more’ hidden behind the last beat of the song part (it could even be just something blank). When you transition into the next song part it won’t play anything on the very first beat. It can often appear when you load a song part into a song.
Here’s an example.
To fix this just open the song part in the Midi editor and increase the length of the part by 1 bar, and then reduce it by 1 bar. Then it’s gone.
Oh, maybe I did not express myself clearly. This problem arises at the programming stage. As I program the beats in my DAW (some of) the drum sounds are not audible, until I move them slightly back or forth in time.
When I transfer the finished MIDI file to the Manager (and the pedal) I can hear every sound.
That means that the problem is a MIDI timing issue between my Mac and the pedal, when I use it as a soundcard.
Please advise.
This is now sounding like a choke group issue. In the kit or kits that you are trying to use on the BB, are there any choke groups? What DAW are you using? Does it have a polyphony limit? If I understand correctly, if you solo the drum track in the DAW there are notes you can’t hear. But if you create a midi track from the DAW and add it to a BBM song, all notes play in BB manager and in the pedal. This would indicate something is going on in the DAW.
Yes, that is correct. I use Presonus Studio One 4 Pro, and it has no polyphony limit that I can find. I only use the Standard Pro v2.0 drumset and have not changed anything in choke group settings. By the way, the problem is also there when I use only one sound (ie kickdrum) like in a break or an intro.
You got me stumped on this one. Have your tried asking in a Studio One Group?
