Used my BB for church worship for the first time

Hi there,

yesterday our cajon player didn’t turn up. :wink: Luckily I had prepared the songs we were going to play on my BeatBuddy.
All went great, even triggering the outros, although I can’t double-tap properly while playing, but that is going to be dealt with as soon as I get the BB footswitch from Thomann and reassign the outro to one of its switches.

I had to bend down a few times to adjust the tempo, which we hadn’t gotten right in the rehearsals on one of the songs for some reason.

To switch to the next song, I had to do that, too, after each one. It really would be great to have the option to auto-advance after a song’s outro, as suggested by another user.

The feedback from the congregation was good by and large. Except some didn’t like the pompous drum intros I had chosen from the blues tracks. For the quieter songs I used the cross-stick count-ins I created and posted here.

An external foot pedal is vital for controlling the BeatBuddy. If I don’t think an intro is appropriate I will drop it or use another one from another song. I am also currently only using the BB for songs that need drums. Yesterday we did Chris Tomlins “Wonderful Cross” and Casting Crowns version of “Glorious Day” during communion and even though I had the BB queued with vastly altered BB songs, I did not have the courage to start it so played the songs without.
The only “looks” or comments I have had was when the BB was too loud. This unfortunately could not be helped as I and the musicians need to be able to hear it. We are too small for in-ear monitors etc… Since making my first demonstration video I now lead from the gap next to the electronic drums to be closer to the monitor speaker. I have also edited the toms on the standard kit and lowered them by -10 dB. My wife suggested this morning that I edit the velocity of the intros so I may do that as well as the toms are quite “boomy”.

Well, I thought the intros were OK. :wink: But I get that some might not like them.
I’m also using ‘your’ low toms preset (thanks BTW :wink: ). Editing the velocity is a very good idea, too, but more effort. It may, however, yield even better results.

During communion we played (the German version of) “There is none like you”, for which I use Blues 2 with a MIDI file of my own for the first part (cross-stick instead of snare), and the first part of Blues 2 (closed hi-hats) for the second part. As intro I use my cross-stick count-in. I’m pretty sure people were fine with that, :wink: though I might tone down the velocity in those count-ins, too, since they don’t need to be very loud.

Oh, and I got only minimal immediate feedback. It was from an elderly brother who enjoyed the drums. :wink: However, I also asked a few people how they liked it and got mixed results.

About not being able to hear the Beat Buddy: I really like our monitoring setup.

We have two separate monitoring mixes, one for the singers/guitarist and one for the pianist and the contrabassist’s speaker (the large box sitting in the lower left corner in the picture). Due to the monitors being so high up on stands, we don’t need much volume on them and what we hear is completely separated from what the congregation hears. The whole setup wasn’t too expensive either.
The room mix is done by our ‘sound engineers’ (laypeople like ourselves) in the back behind the switching cabinets. Yesterday in the room mix the BeatBuddy (on a separate channel) drowned out my younger sisters voice, who was singing along with me. Nobody’s perfect, I guess. :wink: