I am a loyal customer (meaning I purchased my Beat Buddy from the crowd funding mechanism you used to roll out Beat Buddy and have continued to make supplemental purchases) and up to this point have been a supporter of your company (meaning I have personal been responsible for at least 10 others purchasing your products). However, with the recent addition of the “Sobriety Function”, my support of your company and attendant future purchases are in jeapordy. Allow me to elaborate.
I am a recovered alcoholic. I am also a college professor, a licensed and credentialed Drug and Alcohol Counselor, and an Interventionist. I currently have the privilege of serving as the music minister at my church, which is where I often use your product. I, along with the rest of the western medical and mental health community, consider alcoholism a treatable disease. It is a disease that currently affects 10’s of millions of Americans at substantial costs to our society. That is to say the costs related to alcoholism are greater than heart disease, cancer, and high blood pressure COMBINED!
To put this in perspective, imagine someone came to you and suggested you offer a "Cancer Function” - allowing the user to choose between 4 levels of dysfunction of a drummer based on one of the 4 stages of cancer. Or how about a “Parkinson’s Control”, so the drummer has an ever-increasing hand tremors that mimics Parkinson’s.
I am sure those ideas would have been rejected outright as insensitive and likely to place the company reputation at risk.
Why on earth, then, would this idea of an impaired individual seem funny or useful to you in your efforts to grow and expand your company? The rampant use of drugs and alcohol in the musician community, and the mystery and damage to countless innocents, is well documented. That alone should have been reason enough to quash the idea. But surely you know someone who is afflicted by this disease - how could you marginalize someone you KNOW who is affected by the disease of addiction?
I will not be taking further action at this time as I will wait to see your reply. However, I urge you to consider the thoughtless of this new feature and take appropriate responsible action to remedy the situation. Failure to reply will be interpreted as disinterest on your part and will influence my course of action in this matter.
Yours,
Mr. Smith has a very valid point. Way more eloquent than I could have said. I hadn’t thought of that aspect, but I was certainly confused by the addition of something that has absolutely zero musical value.
If they had called it the Randomized play function would you still be offended because that’s really what it is.
I’m not minimizing your struggles, hell, I’ve got plenty of daemons of my own but put it (this feature and it’s name) into perspective. On the basis of your comments I can only assume that you are probably offended by every drink advert on the TV and by every bar that you pass because the only way you could NOT be so offended is if you live under a rock and I’m pretty sure you don’t. So good for you that you don’t but don’t try to push the problems that you have with the way something is described because of your own issues onto the rest of us.
Put it this way. My father died at 67, probably because he smoked 60 a day for most of his life and while I do my best to avoid smokey environments I am certainly not going to prevent people from smoking just because ‘I’ don’t like it. If I took your point of view I’d be wanting to permanently ban the sale of cigarettes and while I think that I should be able to enjoy a meal without is tasting like an ashtray, I certainly have no problem with anyone trying to kill themselves slowly if that’s their thing, just don’t try to take me out with you huh (different subject for a different time maybe).
Ultimately you have a choice:
Accept that there are differences in the world and deal with it.
Avoid what you don’t like
Force your opinions onto others.
Personally I think that 1 and 2 work best. Option 3 is for Ass Hole Politicians that want to tell us how to think. Don’t be an AHP.
PS. Having played drunk (at home only) on more than one occasion I can attest to the fact that it can be quite amusing. The hang over the following day, not so much!
Your mileage may vary. That’s just my $0.02 worth.
I agree that maybe it was just poor naming… I think it was a cool idea to add a randomize feature since the BeatBuddy is normally the perfect drummer with no errors whatsoever… I haven’t tried it yet but I’m thinking on the lower settings it might humanize it a little more. (I have no desire to try the wasted function besides maybe just to test how good I can react to it.) The names don’t offend me personally at all but I understand where you’re coming from…
I personnaly like this new function, I cannot wait to try it next time i’m a little drunk. If you have/had alcohol problems just stay on sober mode, and i wish you well.
I just tried it and while it is interesting and certainly could add a hint of realism to the drumming, at least on the tipsy setting, I’m not sure I wold use it at all (might try the tipsy setting just to see if makes things seem more realistic) although the wasted setting is certainly 'interesting to try to play with!
I was going to say that since the tempo varies I could not use it as it would not stay in sync with my loop pedal as I use the BB as a slave and I just let them run free without any sync messages but they stay in sync, maybe I got lucky.
However I found that while, within each bar, the timing is all over the place (they vary the tempo up and down on the fly), each bar seems to stay aligned with the loop pedal loop so in reality it stays in time even though it ‘appears’ to have been smoking the wacky baccy.!
While this an interesting debate and personally I can’t see a use for this feature and was really surprised it being added despite not hearing any requests to loosen up the timing. A useful function would be to tighten up the timing based on some comments from users.
However I think this should be directed directly at singular sound, you have written a letter and posted it on a forum with no guaranty that one of the team will see it.
I will also say this - just because someone is drunk does not mean they are an alcoholic. They have just had too much to drink and this is what it is simulating. Bad name, maybe, making fun of alcoholics definitely not!
