I just thought I’d share my current live setup so that it might help others. I’ve talked about various bits mentioned below in other posts, but I figured I’d collate all that information into one post so as to help newer people.
I play in a 2 piece, the singer plays guitar and uses a Boomerang loop pedal. I play bass and control the BeatBuddy. The BeatBuddy MIDI out is connected to the MIDI IN on the Boomerang to keep it in sync. With version 1.77 firmware, we now have this set to only sync while playing, this allows us to play songs without drums and it not interfere with the timing (no more pulling out the cable!).
This is my pedal board:
http://imgur.com/Y3GVep5
We both have iPads with OnSong, my iPad is configured to send out a MIDI command to the Beat Buddy via a PUC+ (see http://jamstik.com/products/pucplus) when I select a song; this sets the tempo and navigates to the correct folder and drum pattern. Here’s what one of my songs looks like in OnSong:
Psycho Killer
Talking Heads
Tempo:124
(Country 6 straight with count in)
MIDI: 0.23:9, CC106:0, CC107:124
So it’s got the name, artist and tempo. Then I have a comment in brackets to let me know what the beat is. Then lastly I have 3 MIDI commands that get sent to the beatbuddy via the PUC+. The first command selects the folder and drum beat. The next 2 set the tempo - it’s 124BPM in this example. CC106 is multples of 128 and CC107 is single values up to 127; both of these are summed to give the total BPM. Here’s another example:
Walk Of Life
Dire Straights
tempo:170
(Blues 1 count in)
MIDI: 0.23:0, CC106:1, CC107:42
CC106:1 = 128 + CC107:42= 42
Total (128+42) =170BPM
So whilst the beat buddy is a great design, having one pedal that does start, fill, transition and stop can cause a train wreck in a live gig. So I use an iRig Blueboard (see http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irigblueboard/). Out of the box, the blueboard is quite difficult to use as the buttons are all set to latch. But of you hold down button ‘C’ while turning the device on, it will configure it to be a bluetooth MIDI device - this we can work with.
BeatBuddy version 1.77 firmware allows you to send midi CC messages to control things like fills, transitions and outros but the CC values don’t match what the blueboard is sending and there’s no way to change them or route them to the PUC+ (and thus the beatbuddy). So we need to use Midiflow app on the iPad to do this (plus you need to purchase the controller remapping addon). You can download my preset from here: http://preset.midiflow.com/mgIR9B4q0d. This will configure the buttons as follows:
A: Fill
B: Transition
C: Start
D: Outro
So what about drum beats? We play covers of popular songs and really the drums don’t need to be that complicated. Whilst I’ve made some custom drum beats for songs (you can find them in the resources section of this forum), I generally stick to basic beats where I can. I’ve created a custom folder with a selection of beats that pretty much do most songs that you’ll come across. Then I’ve made them all have a hi-hat count as part 1, then the main beat as part 2. So when we play live, when I start a beat we’ll get the hi-hats, then we transition into the main beat. If we come to a break, I transition back to the hi-hats and repeat as needed. Simple. You can download my drum beats here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1buwhf3l9xd83k/Go_To_Beats_Count_In.pbf?dl=0
