Questions from a new BB2 User - Best practises and sharing songs

BeatBuddy 2 Help, Questions, and Bugs
1

Hello community, I hope you are all well.
I am new to the BB2 and also have the superswitch. I am a singing bassist and want to use my BB2 setup to perform in a duo with a singing guitarist. I use logic to program my drum parts and then transfer the midi files to BBMO. I have a few questions about best practice work flow and sharing songs:

  1. I am creating a new drum kit for each song. I have chosen to do this to keep the number of drum samples to a minimum to reduce loading times and also because if I tried to keep all the sounds I wanted in one kit, I would run out of capacity. What do you do?
  2. As different songs require different drum sound, each kit ends up with different sounds on the same note, eg for one song there are four tomtom sounds, but for the same notes another kit has two tomtom sounds, hand claps and finger clicks. Am I going to run into problems down the line?
    3.To keep volumes even across songs, I set the levels in logic at 0 then adjust the midi note volumes of the drums so that they stay between -2 and 0 on the meters. This means that depending on what kit is selected the bass drum doesn’t always have the midi volume as other songs (ie. the bass drum isn’t always 100 as it will peak - other values may be used). What do you do to ensure continuity of levels between songs? (I am happy to use a bit of compression at gigs).
  3. At present I can’t get the BB2 plug in to recognise DMX drums in logic. This is ok as I can audition the drum sounds I want in BBMO but I have to use different sounds when programming. Does anyone else have this problem and is there a work-around?
  4. I would like to share my songs, so am I right in thinking it would be necessary to share the kits I have made for each song given my workflow above? Some of the kits, or sounds are imported from boutique kits (ie paid for kits). Personally I don’t mind doing this, but I am sure Singular Sound wouldn’t be so pleased if I am sharing paid content. Would this be ok, what are your views on sharing kits? I realise there are hundreds already shared!
    Thanks for reading any advice is greatly appreciated.
    Justin
2

The plug-in is reportedly not working for several Logic Pro X users using Apple Silicon computers. It might still work on Catalina.

You’re right. They won’t be pleased so best to avoid trouble. You can, however, share kits that don’t have their content.

3

Thank you for this suggestion persist :folded_hands: . Do you and other users tend to use kits that are readily available on this forum? What works for you?

4

I try to serve the song with what’s best available. Not always easy to do and that’s why several users (Phil_Flood among the more prominent) that create a different kit for each song.

Me, I’m not that skilled at drum set creation so I tend to use three user-created kits that are my “go to” drum sets: SUB-Standard Pro Plain, SUB-Std Pro PL Bass 0-31 and STAX 4 octave piano & strings. Why? Consistency of the instruments, positions and velocities. It’s really difficult to maintain uniform song volume.

5

Thanks again persist. Trying to serve the song is a priority for me too, and thanks also for mentioning Phil_Flood - very generous of them to make the vast array of content available. I auditioned the kits you mentioned and they really are terrific. Thanks for your help, I hope to use these new kits in future songs. I’m not sure how effective it will be trying to maintain uniform song volume by watching the meter levels on logic, or my audio interface software, but fingers crossed.
Thanks again,

Justin

6

You’re welcome.

7

Re: sharing.

If you are making custom kits for songs, yes, you really need to share the kit to share the song. This runs you into one problem. The upload size limit on the Forum is too small to share many kits. That’s why my kits are in a Dropbox. Clearly, you could use Google drive or some other file-storage-sharing system, but it is something you need to keep in mind as you move forward with this.