Our sound guy noticed that the drum sounds from the BB were much better quality than those that came with the Roland TD-9 we bought a couple of years ago. After learning how to use midi commands and notes from the folks on the forum, I decided to try using the v-drum to control the BB.
I connected the midi out of the TD-9 to the midi-in of the BB, tweaked a few of the features in the TD-9 and the BB, did some minor remapping of the midi notes, and the whole thing works great. The volume of the midi-driven drums out of the BB is lower compared to the internal beats of the BB but a quick turn of the volume fixed that.
I will follow up this post with the settings I used later today. I’ll post our drummer’s experiences once he gets back and has a chance to try it.
I have a roland SPD-30, and it to work both ways: beatbuddy driving the roland, and playing the roland driving the beatbuddy. One issue I can across was that i had to lengthen the midi “G.TIME” This is basically the time between “note on” and “note off”. i upped them all to 500ms and that seemed to sound good. If the notes all seem truncated, this is what you will have to do.
I wanted to add wav files for notes 22 and 26 (HH Edge) so I downloaded some reasonably suitable free wav files off the internet and added them to the Standard kit and the Rock kit. I’ll find out this Sunday how our drummer likes playing the v-drums through the BB.
I had a little difficulty getting the new instruments into the kits with BBManager 1.6.0.1 so I posted a bug report.
Drummer didn’t like the BB sounds - he preferred the Roland ones. The cymbals in the BB were too quiet when using the v-drums to trigger the BB, and I agree with him. I don’t think it’s a flaw in either unit, I think it’s the combo that isn’t fully tuned.