Alternatively, they have already made a BB for the bedroom musician, the BB lite.
Nags
I Think the beatbuddy hardware is capable. They did a great job with the hardware. It’s the software where the improvements can all be done. This is not taking away from singular sound cause it seems with anything like this the software takes alot of work and hence alot of money to get right. The volume of sales of the beatbuddy would limit how much money can be poured into the software. Sure better software will generate more sales but is it going to be enough to recoup cost.
Here is to better things to come
Cheers
One of my bands became drummerless recently and subsequently discovered the BB. Fantastic piece of kit BUT…I’ve come to the same conclusions as others on this thread, remove the dreaded 500 note limit and provide a means for a midi controller to select parts. At least with the 500 limit removed, one could simplify a song from say 10 parts to 3 and avoid the expected train wreck. Thank heavens the BB samples can be triggered via midi, so you can hear what you write before dropping it into the BB.
A midi foot controller to select parts would be just fab.
I’m also using the BB with an RC300; great shame that the RC wont sync to the BB but, the BB syncs well to the RC albeit if you have an intro in the BB, you have to start BB first (for the intro), then be dead accurate with your foot when starting the RC. Carnage quite likely ! However, one thing I noticed with BB syncing off RCs midi clock, was that BBs timing wandered just a little. I decided this was a ‘humanising’ feature, and like it 
I totally agree. The changes being suggested would not affect how the beat buddy currently works. All we’re suggesting is that we can send a MIDI message from another device (like a foot controller) that specifically selects a song part.
So, if I have a floorboard connected with 4 buttons, each button would transition to parts 1-4 respectively of the current song.
All we need is a CC with value 127 for next part (like main switch), value 1 for song part 1, value 2 for part 2 etc…
Value 0 at switch release would give ability to decide changing Part with (and how long), or without transition (behaviour like main switch on BB Pedal). That way I can make Song changes with Midi controller for Looper (Infinity, Mobius) and BB with a single click and without being limited to a “song structure”.
Some of the song I play, I don’t vary them at all… just play them like the record. For those, my new structure is to have foot hats as the main loop, and the entire song as an outro. That way the only interaction is when to start the song, and it ends on its own.
You can also play with the time signature to get the metronome display to tell you where you are. You can specify 32/4, and it will give you 32 counts across the screen, instead of the standard 4. Not sure what the upper limit is.
Aash, you are a BB genius!
A midi foot controller to select parts would be just fab.
I have to agree with that. The footswitch dance to get back to where you want to be is horrible if you get the timing slightly wrong. Being able to just press a footswitch to get in on the next bar would be incredible. At the moment I’m torn between simplifying down to single verse/fills or keeping two verses but killing the transitions to allow me to just drop straight between verses when things get lost but it loses a lot of what makes the BB sound great. I would then be WAY more comfortable with having yet another ‘verse’ for a bridge section as I wouldn’t always have to loop through it
Part of this “problem” is due to the way the beatbuddy was designed. As a viewer of the source code, I can see that there is alot of “intelligence” built into the fact of what happens when you trigger a fill. It looks at where you are in the current measure, and how long the fill is and it decides whether or not to switch to the fill in THIS measure, or wait til the end. There is a Setting that was called “Cue Fill Setting” that helped it decide that.
For us Full Song people (because we have bass lines), we don’t really want that intelligence. We don’t want the last half measure of THIS measure to be cut off, or the first half measure of the NEXT measure to be cut off… but if you are just doing drum fills against a drum beat, that’s what you do want. If we can program the song structure in midi, we can get around this “intelligence”.
I actually created a version of the song player that had a “loop count” for each loop. so you could hit start, and the song would play: intro, loop 1 (repeat loop count times), do transition, then loop 2 (loop count times), and so on, and trigger the outro and be done. You wouldn’t have to touch it to play a song, but if you wanted, you could intervene and trigger whatever you wanted. However, storing the loop count in the song structure was problematic. Now, if the transitions and parts can be triggered via midi, we can achieve the same result.
Rereading this thread I realise that most of the time I want to play with a fixed song structure but occasionally I want to jump straight into a section. Being able to do that via midi solves it for me. I used to do this using ableton but the editing and song management was horrible. The BB is MUCH nicer for this
Asshideacon …what is the best setting for the cue fill using basslines ?
I think i have mine set at 50… that way i can consciously think “this measure” vs “after this measure”… At first i set it low, but then I couldn’t play Keep Your Hands to Yourself!