I was curious just how much a Boss RC 600 could hold up to the beatbuddy.
I’m definitely keeping my beatbuddy but love owning both
BOSS RC 600 vs SINGULAR SOUNDS BEATBUDDY - YouTube
The following started out as a reply to the above post, but turned into something else. Sorry for the detour. I’m going to leave my diatribe below, but the short answer is that I believe the BeatBuddy’s drum sounds are way better.
So, I watched the video. I have several thoughts; in no particular order… First, the Boss unit seems intended to be primarily a looper, albeit with other useful features and functions. I have great respect for Boss products, and if I needed a looper, I would consider that unit. However, I bought the BeatBuddy to use as a drum accompaniment for solo and duo acoustic guitar and vocal live performance, which I would point out is exactly what it was designed for. I am right in line with others who are critical for some of the shortcomings related to BeatBuddy Manager software and other issues, but mostly I have to say it works as advertised. And the drum sounds are unparalleled. The video above shows that while there is some overlap between functionality of the Boss RC 600 and the BeatBuddy, the Boss pedal cannot hold a candle to the quality of the drum sounds of the BeatBuddy–that is why I bought it. And to be fair to the BeatBuddy, I ask more of it than it was supposed to do. I don’t really use the stock beats. I program each song in our set to be one-press, like a backing track, to emulate the original artist’s beats as closely as possible. I get lots of compliments on the quality of our drums. I also confess that I am unfortunately ignorant of how to do this in a DAW, so I literally plug it in the BBM one beat at a time, since I don’t believe there is a way to copy/paste or anything like that in BBM. Yeah, I know it’s nuts but it sure sounds good. I export and back up the MIDI files so I don’t have to worry about losing them. I know it’s not the most efficient way to do it, but I’m lost on how to do it in a DAW. I’ve purchased almost 100 of the Pro beats from Singular Sound, but it’s difficult to advance through the parts and fills etc while playing guitar, singing, and sometimes even a little harmonica (think Heart Of Gold). So I manually duplicate the Pro beats into a separate one-press with a count-in and it works great. Just realized I got way off-track. Apologies for getting off-topic…
I wasted my time watching that video, too. Oh, here are some stock beats from the RC-600. Here are some from the BB. Let’s play them all at the same tempo, out of context, and you can try to decide which machine is better. Utter garbage.
I fully agree on versatility of the BB. What’s more is that you can put any sounds you like in it, if you don’t want to use Goran’s drums. But, the real beauty is, as you note, the ability to build a long track that does not require interaction. I gave up on several devices over the years because of memory limitations or limits on phrase length. The BB gets past all that, and does it in a pedal format that you can easily haul to a gig. There really isn’t a need to compare the two units. They are two pieces of gear fit for different tasks.
I have both and they do two different things. I have yet to use the RC-600 drums for anything other than click in the ear. Don’t get me wrong, the drums are usable, but just not something that I plan on using when I already have the BB. Moreover, when I want something in particular, I will use Ableton with a Push rather than RC-600. Disclosure: I do not like trying to program my own drumsets in the BB Manager… It is not as easy as some seasoned users on Windows OS would like us to believe.
All that said, I do not use the BB as much as I would like because of the limitations of the BB manager. So many times I just can’t bring myself to interact with a 2016 program (that looks circa 2007), hope it doesn’t crash multiple times, finally lose patience and use Logic, Import, export, re-import, arrange, Close BB manager, wipe an SD and drag/drop files to said SD (BB manager still does not export to SD directly on Mac), re-insert SD to BB, redo all my settings that were lost as a result of drag/drop (Rather than export function), realize I want to tweak something and start the process again (though more likely express my frustration with superlatives and return to it later given I’ve used all my music playing time on the BB manager).This paragraph is long, but represents theIn efficient BB manager process. BTW: Singular Sound … a program that does even less than the BB.
I use Mac. I program in Logic Pro X. I create drumsets using Logic Pro X with whatever plug-ins i desired to create wav files. I run those through NCH Switch to get rid of the meta data that causes the wavs to not work in BBM. I do all midi programming in Logic Pro X. I like Ableton too. it’s time stretching, Warp, is without equal. I wish it’s interfaces on its instruments were larger. But, I never touch anything on Windows, except keygen programs that i use to get software which I try out. If I like the program, I buy it.
My BB Manager has not crashed in YEARS. I run version 1.66 on Mac. And, yes, the export to SD card takes too long.
I and most on here would consider you a super user.
How exactly do you do this? Any guidance is appreciated. Thank You.
It was a tedious process, but I was programming each hit in the BeatBuddy Manager software. It’s not really designed for that, at least it’s not very user-friendly, but I think the version that has come out since my original posting is much better. I would just listen to the drums on the original recording, or find an internet video of someone covering the drums for a particular song, and then key the beats in to BBM as closely as I could replicate them. I would start with one measure of count-in, and then my partner and I would play through to the end. All I would have to do is start the song in the BeatBuddy and we’d play along. It worked really well, and we did quite a few gigs like that. We have since switched to programming backing tracks in a DAW; much faster to create and edit the tracks and far more versatile.
The easiest way is to use an existing midi file of the song, and extract just the drum part. This can be done is a DAW. You may have to remap some of the drums to match where they are in the BB. Example - midi files often have the kick drum at 35-B0, and the BB kits usually have it at 36-C1. You would need to select the line in the DAW for B) and move those hits to C1.
Of course, with this method you are relying on the original midi creator to have done a good job with the song. Sometimes, the results are not the best, because some creators are the the best. Also, for more obscure material, you will not find existing midi files.