Hi All. I am having a blast with my beatbuddy! I wanted to know if anyone has experience using the midi out of the BB to trigger external sounds.
I use the BB & roland SPD-30 Octopads live and would like to have the BB use the Rolands drum sounds instead of the internal drum kits on the BB
Has anyone tried this?
I have heard that people have done this. I have an spd-30, but haven’t had a chance to try it. My knock on the '30 is that the regular drum sounds are lacking, and the bb would completely fix that! So I think it might be better if you did the opposite – used the spd-30 to trigger the bb’s sounds!
Thanks aashideacon… I originally thought the same thing. When I was messing around with the BB and the SPD-30 at a recent soundcheck I thought the SPD’s sounds were better than the BB’s. I suspect it may have had something to do with the attack in the midi settings, it seemed to have an inconsistency that changed the sound a bit every few beats. I know the beats have been played by a real drummer and not quantized etc, to give the human feel, but I also played the rhythms into the SPD and they sounded much better live.
Will keep trialling and testing and feedback the results. Will also trial getting the BB to trigger the SPD and if successful see if those inconsistencies still happen
Cheers
Just tried connecting my bb and spd-30 together, using the spd to trigger bb sounds. At first it sounded awful, then I discovered Menu → Midi → G.Time. the default is .1, and moving it up to .5 really helped. This setting is the duration of the sample. .1 was just too short. I suspect each different pad needs its own setting, but it really made a difference.
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Thanks aashideacon for the feedback, very interesting. I still haven’t tried it the other way around, having the BB trigger the SPD and using the SPD sounds. Please let me know if you find a way to make this work before I do
Cheers Mick
Just tried it, and it definitely works, both ways!. It took me a second to hear what was going on though.
If you connect them both together, they BOTH will play. If you are playing the spd-30, you are triggering its internal sounds, and via midi you are triggering the bb. I had them both hooked to my mixer, so i was hearing both. Similarly, if you played a song on the bb, you’d hear the bb version of the midi, as well as the spd-30 version.
the trick is to make the spd-30 drum kit match up with the midi that the bb is playing, instrument-wise. There is a section in the spd-30 midi set up to set the midi “note” of each pad triggered.
I feel like they neutered the spd-30 so that it wouldnt’ affect the sales of the td-20 (and greater), which was to defeat people exactly like me. I had an SPD-20, and was sad to see that the SPD-30 had even fewer useful sounds. They basically just have 2 or 3 regular drumkits. Granted, it does have a gazillion other instruments, so it’s great for world percussion, latin percussion, etc… but I was trying to make a regular drumset without having to go full vdrum. I use the spd-30 (and previously the 20) with and external snare/hat/kick so that it played mostly like a real drumkit. Perfect for tiny Manhattan apartments, and late night sessions 