First off I’ve played guitar for about 20 years so my timing is pretty good. That being said, I just got the pedal and have intended to use it to lay down riffs and chords to practice soloing over, develop timing, etc. But when I turn on a beat and then create a loop with my Ditto looper it always ends up out of time after about a minute or so of recycling itself against the BB. I’ve tried and retried thinking I must be playing off time or ending the loop on the offbeat or something, but can’t seem to make it sync up.
Is there something I’m missing or is it impossible to do what I’m attempting?
Thoughts? Comments? Snide remarks?
This happens when you record the BeatBuddy’s song as a loop.
The reason that the beat falls out of place over the course of a few measures is because it is very difficult for any musician to end a bar exactly on the beat. We are usually a fraction of a second off, at best. In a live playing scenario (with other musicians playing alongside you) this is barely noticeable. However, if you were to record a loop of drums and play a backing track above them in another loop, that fraction of a second will get progressively larger with each loop that passes. However, if you record the beat and the backing track on the same loop, then you will only be a fraction of a second off each time, because they are not separate loops, but they will still be that fraction of a second off.
If you want to have perfect syncing, then you will want to MIDI sync your BeatBuddy to a looper capable of that. The Ditto looper doesn’t have MIDI syncing capability.
What MIDI sync does is that it cuts off that fraction of a second (or lengthens the guitar playing by a fraction of a second), so it is exactly on the beat, and it will never go out of sync. If you want a looper that has really good MIDI syncing ability, we recommend the Pigtronix Infinity or the Boomerang III. We have found those to work the best with the BeatBuddy.
Midi sync works so well you can overdub drums and it sounds reasonable (although perhaps strange :D). It’s really the only way to do it.
Trying to step on the pedal at the right time seems like it would be some kind of torture.
I’ve used Ditto for a while, but, as already said, it’s impossible to have a perfect timing. Now I use a Pigtronix Infinity midi sync’d along with BeatBuddy and it’s great.
And, I must say, the problem is also that Ditto isn’t much responsive. I tried Pigronix without midi sync and the response is great, sometimes I think that could use it also without midi sync!
I had the same problem with my Ditto when I first got the Beatbuddy. Got a Boomerang III and synced, it is right on the money.
I would think for non-midi loopers, you would just send your instruments through the BB then to the looper so everything gets recorded at once, so drift wouldn’t be an issue. MIDI allows you to record instruments and drums separately and keep them in sync, which is why it’s so desirable, but non midi loopers have been used effectively since forever.