I have been gigging with the BB for about a year now. Things I don’t use are the intros, or the fills. I delete them all from the songs I end up using the BB on. They are typically unevenly mixed to the drum beat itself or they are way to over the top. I would put a real drummer in a headlock if he/she did fills like the ones the BB has.
Could we have a way to normalize all our songs??? The drumkit to drumkit variation can be pretty drastic. I know I can use MIDI to do this but why not have it built into the BB Manager? I don’t wish to remove the dynamics of the beats etc, just keep all the beats at a common basic volume.
For me the BB is a great platform for my duo. I have just learned what I like and don’t like and work with it. The pros far outweigh the cons of this box.
My duo plays everything from jazz to current day stuff with an acoustic bent. It is challenging to get exactly the groove I want sometimes but it certainly works.
As far as MIDI editing, I am very comfortable with MIDI, but honestly I don’t want to spend time tweaking every song, so I do agree with @Mike Mahalo in the sense not everyone has the time or desire, there are too many other things I have to work on (learning material, promoting the duo, equipment, etc).
I do think there is a bit of a separation in what people want from BB too. Some want the BB to recreate a songs exact beat and fills etc. Others like me are looking for a percussive accompanist or drummer that lays down a solid rhythm. For me personally I am NOT trying to highlight the fact I have BB as my drummer / percussionist, I use it in a more subtle way to lay down a groove for me to loop on top of.
With that said…I really think the BB is great, and it has been an exceptional addition to our duo…and the people on the forum are pretty great too!
Normalizing kits is going to be relatively impossible, unless you only want to use factory kits. Individual developers who provide kits for free on this Forum, like myself, find our samples from a number of sources. They are rarely balanced, and adjustments need to made to the volume level for each sample in the kit. Personally, I knew there was a way to do something like normalization; I had remembered it from a DAW I used years ago. But the process had not immediately occurred to me. I “rediscovered” normalization in Logic ProX this week, and am now normalizing samples. I intend to normalize the kits I already posted, but there will still be perceived volume differences. What we really need is metadata that gets added to the .sng file that stores the volume settings for the drum kit used on that song with the song. I will be posting that request to the feature requests.
@Mike Mahalo regarding the comment above regarding “people with so much free time:” I am one of those. I am retired, and I enjoy spending my time programming arrangements for songs I might want to do, and building drum kits for those songs. I was willing to excuse what I perceived as your rudeness at New Year’s when I saw that you lived in another culture from mine. People act differently in different places and what a Westerner perceives as “rude” or insulting may be just the norm for someone from the East. I sympathize with your frustration. The product has not lived up to your lofty expectations. However, there is no need to insult those of us who want to devote our time and efforts to making it better.
I can recall trying to program Alexis midi boxes and Roland keyboards and not having the patience or skill to get what I heard in my head into the machine. The Beat Buddy, for me, is easier to use than any of that stuff. For $299, it’s the best value in a drum machine I ever found.
I am sorry, but you are not going to get Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Neil Peart, Phil Collins, Carl Palmer, Billy Cobham or even Ringo Starr in a little box. You want the equivalent of a live drummer who can respond to the dynamics of every situation in which you find yourself. Good luck with that. When you find that drummer in a box who will just magically play along with every song in your set, please let us all know.
I wonder if an audio compressor would resolve some of these issues of changing kits and fill volume. Perhaps the firmware might be tweaked to allow this. “Cafe setting” anyone?
I think that’s the point … it’s your show and in order for a very powerful tool to work for EVERYONE’S show, it has to be customizable. My research before I purchased made this obvious. Apparently, yours did not.
^
Necro-post?
Your post probably falls on deaf ears as Abbott hasn’t been on the forum for 13 months—he found an instrument that better suited his needs and expectations.
I am interested in your comments. My initial focus has been to technically involved with process.
I play piano and have occasionally used accompanying audio files for mostly rhythms.
Playing inside the rhym and still expressing the piano within the song and balancing piano, drums and vocal is quite a challenge.
My efforts have been to include the BeatBuddy with My iKMultimedia iRig Keys 49/iPad Pro which has no outside direct midi wired connection. So I’ve added the PUC+ and learned about midi controls using CC and HEX Coded MIDI commands. I’m using forScore as my music reference source as well as Songbook Chordpro. Both can utilize MIDI commands. My goal is to learn/master/implement the Midi management and focus on the music.
I am comfortable working with midi files enough to adjust drum mixes to satisfy my needs.
Just jamming with the BeatBuddy makes me very excited in integrating it into my music.
I just purchased a BeatBuddy online but it has not yet arrived. I downloaded the Manager program and the backup file and have created a project and imported everything from the backup. To be honest I am now considering sending it back without even opening it because I agree with Mike Mahalo that most of the beats are way overplayed for someone who just wants a drum accompaniment for a solo or duo singing gig. I can’t find a single beat to use with the old Van Morrison song Moondance, which is a very simple medium swing tune. I see there are a bunch of additional songs available for purchase but am I going to run into the same problem, i.e. very busy drumming? Does anyone have any suggestions about this? Is the company listening to people like Mike and investing in simpler easier to use drum beats for those of us who are not into heavy metal, heavy rock or hip hop?
And if you want, there’s also the Premium Library SD Card which unlocks all premium library content and includes free updates from now until the end of 2019: https://singularsound.com/product/premium-sd-card/
Yes. We’re listening. Do you happen to have a MIDI for the Van Morrison Song or something similar? I could create a version of it over the weekend if I have time.
For all the non-love on here about the BB, a counterpoint: My BB, Waldo, has been part of my duo now for two years. Last year, in addition to weekly rehearsals, we played 53 shows, and, this year, we are on track to play over 60. I have worn out two units already, and cannot say enough good things about the support Jay provided when that happened.
All that to say, I have no issues with the company – hell, I’m here defending them – and I have ZERO(!!!) issues with the BB in the wild. I do find the fills overplayed in a vacuum, but in the context of a live stage (and I can’t stress this enough), no-one has an issue with what we present. Waldo is the reason we play every weekend.
I use the BB for my solo gig. I have spent literally thousands of hours building my song list. It’s much faster and easier now that I have it “mastered”. Was it worth it? Yes. it is more like a music writing and editing process for me. I simply use the tools I have to achieve the outcome through different kits and working with volumes and velocities. My drum kits are all custom tuned to make sure that nothing is too heavy or too soft according to the songs needs. I’m constantly tweaking the songs and make notes during performances so I can fix them. No it is not a “pull it off the shelf and play” tool unless you’re looking for just an accompaniment to fill the background. But with some work…and I think music is worthy of and expects hard work…anyone can tailor the BB to their needs. If not…there are several shared songs and resources to get you going quickly.
Hello, I just got an email with the comments by ciccaj, I still live in hope that the beat buddy will live up to expectations.
For simple swing jazz, as a piano player, with sax and vocals, the beat buddy was a diasaster as everything was too busy. With some keyboards I could split the keys and set the bass to double bass with subtle ride cymbal on every bass note, much better.
For rock piano, again the bb had nothing to rival the simple beats on my Yamaha P115 Piano. Sadly that has no fills, no ending, and no human feel. It has one simple rock beat and two shuffle beats that work from ballads to jerry lee lewis, it just works. No jazz or swing suitable for gigs.
Last week I had a jazz duo with sax at a venue that preferred some drumbeats, I used my Korg microarranger with five different excellent jazz swing beats, lots of latin funk and all the rest, fills and chorus.
If only the beat buddy had less busy beats then the interface and human feel would make it ideal for me.
Next I am preparing gigs for real piano, and if only if only the beat buddy had simple background beats with understated fills, as in keyboards by all major manufacturers.
Guitarists have different styles and needs, clearly there are many happy customers but for keyboards we are oversupplied with great simple widely used professional beats that are completely different on each keyboard, and then real piano gigs seem so empty.
There is a market for keyboard players who have gigs on different keyboards and who want one portable box with a foot control and the same setlists.
