Hi just a general observation here anyone else find at times in the heat of the moment in a song when you go to press either the BB or the side pedal you don’t press hard enough to create the fill (or especially the transition) or make your stop? I find it tricky to press both buttons together on the side pedal to create the stop and accent hit together, you really have to get the width of your foot over them both and press hard, which can be difficult when you’re trying to sing and play guitar at the same time. Also I’m finding it difficult to decide on the best position for the pedals in relation to my mic stand and standing position. Too central it’s kind of in the way but either side I find I’m having to stretch a bit causing me to miss as I have just discussed. These are only mild observations though, overall I’m very happy with product, I’m finding it very useful especially for solo bedroom jamming.
When I play songs using the BeatBuddy, I have to interact with it at a minimum of twice per song, DURING the song, and those are rare. Typically, I don’t have to adjust my guitar tone (clean/dirty/lead) at all during a song. sometimes, i have to kick between clean/dirty, or kick to lead for the solo, but many songs are just clean all the way through, or dirty all the way through. My other interactive pedal is to kick on harmonies, and that obviously varies song to song. It takes practice to do all that toe tap dancing! That’s why to me it is so important to make the beatbuddy interactions as simple as possible. NOBODY CARES about my fleetfooted ability to trigger this and that and the other while I’m performing a song, as long as the result is something they want to listen to. That’s why I continually lobby for ways to make the beatbuddy more flexible with less interaction.
When I was playing on stage back when we didn’t have “Pedalboards”, I used a mike stand with a boom on it to reach across all my pedals I had on the floor. It made things easier so the mike stand didn’t get in the way. I had plenty of room to do what I had to do. Eventually, after I had the “Pedalboard” set up, I still kept the boom mike stand and it worked out OK. I’ve seen some bring the mike stand right up through the middle of the pedalboard which isn’t too bad either, I guess. Pushing on pedals was not too difficult because you were after the sound at the moment and it didn’t really matter how you got it as long as you did, so yes we done the dance. Sometimes it was funny and we made a big joke out of it and even the audience laughed so we all still had a good time. I remember one time when I was reaching for a distortion pedal to turn it off, lost my balance, fell, turned it off with my hand and finished the song sitting on the floor and never missed a beat. Lots of laughs that night.
Sincerely, Fingerstylepicker.