The content of this posting is an extraction from Municipal Man’s Youtube tutorial, “Beat Buddy Quick Tips: Footswitch Settings”. The full text below is a transcript of video’s narration.
Kit Bruiser here,
Get the full video experience of the content of this blog. My good friend Municipal Man will give you all the details.
Overview:
Part 1: Configure the Foot switch on the Beat Buddy Pedal
Insert the SD card into your Beat Buddy.
Press the middle and right dials simultaneously to access the menu.
Using the arrow buttons, scroll to “Footswitch”, select it with the centre button.
Select “Footswitch Detector”
When prompted, depress both left and right buttons on your outboard switch to “detect” the left and right buttons and confirm that the switch is set to “Latching”.
Return to the menu and configure the functions for each button in both “Stopped” and “Playing” modes.
Recommended button settings:
- Button 1
Stopped mode: Song Advance — moves forward through the songs in the project.
Playing mode: Pause and Unpause — pauses and resumes the song.
- Button 2
Stopped mode: Song Back — moves backward through the songs in the project.
Playing mode: Outro Fill — jumps directly to the song's outro.
- The settings are saved in the project.
Part 2: Save Foot Switch Settings on Your Computer
Insert the SD card into your computer using an SD card reader or an SD port and find the project folder. This usually stored in your Beat Buddy Workspace, but may be stored in your preferred location
Open the “Parameters” folder.
Locate the “Footswitch” document, which contains the pedal's current settings.
Option A: Use the Online BeatBuddy Manager
Open the project in the online version of BeatBuddy Manager.
Sync or export the project to the SD card.
The online version preserves the existing settings in the Parameters folder.
This method is generally preferable because it avoids having to restore the settings manually.
Option B: Use the Desktop BeatBuddy Manager
Export the project to the SD card using the desktop version.
Check the Parameters folder after exporting.
Be aware that the desktop version may reset the foot switch settings to their defaults.
To restore your preferred settings:
Keep a backup copy of the Foot Switch document on your computer.
After exporting the project, copy the saved document into the project's Parameters folder on the SD card.
Verify that the document contains your preferred settings before using the SD card in the pedal.
Key Takeaways:
Online BeatBuddy Manager: Preserves existing foot switch settings when exporting the project.
Desktop BeatBuddy Manager: May reset foot switch settings to defaults.
Best practice: Keep a backup of the Foot Switch document or use the online manager to avoid repeatedly reconfiguring your pedal.
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Call Me Lonesome - Radney Foster
Driving My Life Away - Eddie Rabbit
Fishing in the Dark - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Honey Bee - Blake Shelton
Friends in Low Places - Garth Brooks
Mama Tried - Merle Haggard
Rambling Man - The Allman Brothers Band
Take Me Home, Country Roads - John Denver
I Go Walking After Midnight - Patsy Cline
Your Man - Josh Turner
Your download includes:
10 separate song tracks
200+ midi loops - beats, fills, transitions, and finalé
Beat Buddy .sng files, and .pbf folder file for easy import (for Beat Buddy users)
file management instructions (.pdf)
Listen to samples of this drum arrangement below and get more information.
* drum arrangements are interpretations, made from scratch, based on time signature, phrasing, feel, and arrangement
** Intended for personal playing, and not to be construed as licence to perform, nor record, nor publish. Please conform to all standards of established copyright laws and regulations
*** arrangements may be altered and used for similar songs
Part 1: How to Save Your Beat Buddy Switch Settings on your Beat Buddy Pedal
Welcome to Beat Buddy Quick tips. Today, it's setting and saving the settings of your outboard switch.
With your SD card in, and the project up and running, push in the middle and right dials together and that will put you into the menu.
Scroll down to “Foot Switch” and the first thing to do is set the Foot switch detector, which will detect the left and right buttons, and it will also tell you that your foot switch is “latching”, which is what you need.
Scroll back to the menu and you can set the switch function each button will perform during the different modes, “Playing’ or “Stopped”
For the first button in the stopped mode, I like to choose “Song Advance”, which allows you to scroll forward in your project. And for the playing mode, I choose “Pause and Unpause”, which allows you to stop the song while it is playing.
For the second button, same thing. Scroll back to the menu, choose the second button, and for the stopped mode, I like to choose “Song Back”, which allows you to scroll backwards through the songs in your project.
And for “Song Playing”, I usually choose “Outro Fill”, which allows you to jump directly to the end of your song. Otherwise, you have to tap the Beat Buddy main pedal twice in order to jump to the outro. I find it a little more convenient just to tap the one button. However, you can choose whichever setting suits your fancy.
Once that is set, it is saved in the project, and if you're interested in looking at another method of doing this, please stay tuned for the rest of the video. We're also going to address a little quirk with the software, which might save you a little aggravation, so stay tuned for that in the next part.
Part 2: How to Save Your Beat Buddy Switch Settings from within the Project’s Documents on Your Computer
Well, if you are still here, that means that the quick tip was not enough for you and you have a thirst for knowledge, and that's a good thing because there is another way to save your pedal settings; we’re going to get into that, and then we're also going to address a little quirk that hopefully will be a time and annoyance saver for you. Okay, well, let's get into it.
Here is our SD card and our project, and if you look in the parameters folder, you will see a document called “Foot Switch”, and if we open it up, we will see the settings that we have just inputted into the pedal itself. So, that's where they are stored. Now we're going to address the little quirk that you may have noticed:
If we use the online version of the Beat Buddy Manager software and we sync the project to the SD card. Yet again, same project. You will see, firstly, that the online version exports projects to SD cards much more quickly than the desktop version. So, that's a nice upgrade.
You will also notice that it has done nothing to the parameters folder, so it keeps and saves the parameters that were there in the project that we set in the pedal. Which is good. Here is the problem:
If you use the computer-based version of the software, let's see what happens. So, we're going to export the project from here. Same project to the SD card. The first thing you will notice is it takes a lot longer. So, we're going to wait a minute for this. So, here is our SD card where we have just saved that same project, and if we go to the parameters folder, you can see it has reset it to default, which is not good because that means we've lost our pedal settings that we wanted to save. So, now if we take this SD card and put it into the beat buddy pedal, we'll have to reset the pedal settings.
There is another way to do it. If you have another project where the settings that you like are saved, you can actually just copy and paste these folders or files into the project folder saved on your SD card. Oops, sorry. Right there. Wrong one. Okay. And then that will save our pedal settings as we like them, and if we go and open this document, we will see it has the settings that as we set them in the first place. So, the bottom line is there are two ways to save your pedal settings. One is through the parameters folder and you save that foot switch document, and if you keep it aside on your computer, you can actually just copy and paste it each time you export the project.
Another choice is to use the online version of the software, which will keep your settings as you have them in the project until you change them in the pedal, which is probably a better choice because it saves you that extra step.
Conclusion
So, there you go. I hope that quick tip helped smooth things out for you, and you picked up a few little tips and tricks and, um, you should subscribe because there will be more quick tips coming down the pipe, and if you do have any questions or want any tasks addressed, put them in the comments, and if I know how to do them, I will let you know. Thank you for joining. We'll see you again next time. Take care.
