New Gear: BeatBuddy ~ The First Pedal Drum Machine | Guitar Gear Home About GuitarGear Blog Archive Guitar Gear Real. Guitar. Feeds: Posts Comments « First Impressions: Modal Buddy App Yup… The BeatBuddy Is Definitely a Game-Changer! B-B-B-Bossa Nova Veloso » New Gear: BeatBuddy ~ The First Pedal Drum Machine September 25, 2014 by GoofyDawg As an active performing musician with 75% of my gigs being solo (I do roughly 200 gigs a year), I’m always looking for ways to expand my musical offerings either by introducing new material, or adding new gear. A few years ago, I started using a looper, and that changed the game for me; allowing me to solo over chord progressions I’d come up with live. But one thing that I missed, especially for certain songs, was percussion. Enter the BeatBuddy. I’ve been waiting for this to arrive for many months, and mine arrived yesterday afternoon (it’s 1AM PST right now), and I’ve been playing with this pedal for the past few hours. It’s truly amazing! I was impressed with the introductory video, and have been watching the growing number of video demos of various musicians playing with it while it has been in production. But nothing could prepare me for the real thing. I’m so totally blown away, it’s hard to describe what I’m feeling. This is another game-changer for me! First off, it’s super easy to use. You start out with a tap to get an intro fill. The main beat then starts off. You tap another time to get a fill (most have 3 different fills). To change to the chorus, you hold down the pedal for a second or so. The BeatBuddy then does a lead-in fill, then changes the pattern. You then can tap to get fills in the chorus. To return back to the main pattern, you hold again. The cool thing is that the fills aren’t restricted to playing just a whole measure. I was concerned about this, as some stuff I play has only 2-beat transitions. But with the BeatBuddy, that’s not a problem. If you tap on “2” you’ll get a three-beat fill. The damn thing is smart, and will just fill to the end of the measure then go back to the pattern! And like a it keeps perfect time. 🙂 Here’s something I quickly put together once I got the hang of it. Excuse the little mistakes I made. I did both guitar tracks in single takes. https://guitargear.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/beat_buddy.mp3 Admittedly, before I start using this in a live setting, I’m going to have to both practice, and find the right drum tracks for the stuff I play. It’s really not hard to find a track to fit a song, but I do know that I’ll probably want to tweak some tracks to fit some songs. I’m starting to fall asleep, so I’m going to sign off… But please, check out the BeatBuddy web site. Even if you’re not a gigging musician, you could use this just for practice. I know I’m going to do it. It’s better than playing to a metronome because you can add a bit of drama to your playing! Share this: Facebook Twitter More Reddit Like this: Like Loading... Related Posted in guitar pedals, new gear | Tagged BeatBuddy, drum machine, new gear | 9 Comments 9 Responses on September 25, 2014 at 1:33 pm | Reply George Hi Dawg ! I received mine the other day also. I can’t wait to try it out. Your sound sample sounds great. It seems like you’re already getting the hang of it. George on September 25, 2014 at 1:49 pm | Reply GoofyDawg It took a few hours of practice, and I probably still have several hours of practice before I feel confident to play this live. But luckily, it’s easy to use. on September 25, 2014 at 8:13 pm | Reply Alex Flores Wow this is really cool! Thanks for the demo. I do loops for practicing improvisation all the time but because I’m not much of a drummer I feel like some of the energy/urgency is lacking without drums. I’m going to look into this more because it looks like a perfect solution 🙂 on October 1, 2014 at 4:42 pm | Reply GoofyDawg Alex, I finally got some time to play with the pedal, and I too make lots of loops. Having a beat to play off of is marvelous! It really helps with expression. on October 24, 2014 at 5:15 pm | Reply JCS I guess for some people and situations this would be good, but for anyone working with a computer (And seriously, who isn’t?) I’d still lean toward using drum software instead. on October 25, 2014 at 8:45 am | Reply GoofyDawg That’s a good point. But with the MIDI sync feature, you can use it with a computer as well. I’ve done exactly that, and it works fantastic. on November 11, 2014 at 4:53 pm | Reply Alex Jurowsky Don’t most loop pedals already have drum/percussion functionality? My Boss RC-3 has a fairly nice slate of drumbeats, and that’s been around for years. Not sure where the claim that this is the “first drum machine pedal” comes from. on November 11, 2014 at 5:31 pm | Reply GoofyDawg This is COMPLETELY different. I have an RC-2 that has only a single beat loop. But the BeatBuddy is like a drummer in a pedal. It gives you fills, song parts, and intro and outro fills. It’s a totally different animal. Furthermore, with the BeatBuddy Manager, you can create your own loop “songs” to tailor to your particular set. I’m still practicing with it to include in my solo gigs, but it’s totally cool to have a backing rhythm. When I want to switch to the chorus, I hold the pedal down and it switches to the chorus, I can tap to get fills (usually two or three fills per verse or chorus part), I can even pause in the middle of a loop. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a great video done by Andy at ProGuitarShops: on July 14, 2022 at 6:04 pm | Reply Cody Garrett Great reead thankyou Comments RSS Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here... Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email (required) (Address never made public) Name (required) Website You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change ) You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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