Dear BeatBuddy Friends,
First, I just want to say that our single Impala Paula, (Greasy Dashiki), is out on Spotify and our album is due July 3rd.
All composing and recording was done on the BEATBUDDY!!!
I cannot sing enough praise for the BB!
Looking ahead, I want to change the way I record. I love using BeatBuddy Beats to write with, but when I transition to recording I need that separation, particularly the kick.
Is there anyway that I can record the MIDI signals in Reaper, into separate tracks, in real time, as I play a BB track.
In other words, use the midi out from BB into Reaper… into separate tracks… not the sounds just the midi signals… because I am sure that one I have the MIDI signals in Reaper I can assign them to any sound I want right(?)
You can tell I know nothing about MIDI!
Ideally, the BB midi editor would integrate with a DAW. That would be amazing.
At least a way to pan that kick to left and everything else right.
Help?
The BeatBuddy is a great tool, but I would strongly suggest you don’t do this. If you don’t quite understand MIDI, it might be hard for me to fully explain why it’s a bad idea. MIDI is just instructions, it’s not sounds; even if you were to hook it up to your DAW you would still need some sort of drum synth to hear the drums (and there’d be other issues too like mapping the correct drum sounds). Also, you wouldn’t separate the MIDI into tracks, you’d separate the drum synth output.
If you want to record drums in your DAW, have a look at something like EZ Drummer (see https://www.toontrack.com/product/ezdrummer-2/). There’s loads of great tutorials on YouTube to get you started and it’s much easier than what you’re trying to do.
I believe the midi files used in the beatbuddy songs are available for download. You can just import them into your DAW and edit the tracks as you want.
If your beats are not default content you can export the midi from BBM.
Uses Cubase Pro 10.5
Someone who has a video on import and export. Only gets messy when uploaded to BB / BB manager.
Hi, I also record the BB in reaper. I send midi to the beatbuddy and record the audio out. I can create my own midi, or just use CC commands to control the BB from reaper to transition parts, fills etc. Mostly comes down to how lazy I am. I sometimes use a drum VST to compose something in midi, then send the midi to the BB and record it. You’ll always want to record the BB in stereo for the best sound quality.
You can also record MIDI from the BB. You need to set the BB to send to a channel through onboard BB settings and then you can get all the midi from what you’re playing in BB. You can then take that midi and go ahead and play it back and mix, etc, however you like, including deleting midi, etc.
If you do want to isolate just 1 drum, like the kick, or even a group of midi from the BB and record it, you can do that by using the JS MIDI Note Filter plugin in reaper. There may be other plugins that are better, and if you’re using reaper, I encourage looking through the plugins as there are always delightful surprises, but this is what I found with a quick search. You can stick that on the track as an input plugin and it will record just that. Obviously that’d be some work since you’d essentially have to create a track for every midi note, but you can save them all as a track template and recall it whenever you.
There are lots of things you can do from there. You can record all the different output midi channels into different tracks and then even merge them all back together again to create 1 midi file with everything. You an humanize 1 midi, not the others, etc. Sky’s the limit really.
Hope that answered the question