This is something I never knew I wanted: it’s called BeatBuddy and it’s basically a crowdfunded guitar stomp box that allows you to cue up and play drumbeats through your amplifier. That means you can run this in line with your guitar effects and add some undistorted, funky fresh breakbeatery, making yourself into a formidable and frightening Voltron-like all-electronic band. And who doesn’t want that?
It’s essentially a drum machine in a pedal and is, according to the team, the first of its kind. You activate various fills and patterns with your foot and you can do a lot of offline editing on your computer. A knob turns the tempo up and down. The team has blown past their goal of $75,000 and is now hovering at $111,000. The early bird pledge is $150 for a pedal and they expect to ship by April.
It’s a fairly simple system. You can trigger drumbeats by tapping the pedal to the tempo you want and you can also tap the pedal to add fills and alternate between verse and chorus. You can prepare MIDI beats that you can then load onto the device or just use the pedal’s 200+ built-in sounds.
1. Press pedal to start beat
2. Press again to add a fill. Different fills are played each time to create a live drummer sound
3. Hold pedal down to begin transition beat
4. Release pedal to end transition and go to next song part (e.g. verse to chorus)
5. Use footswitch to add accent hits. Accent hits are customized to the song part (e.g. hand claps for verse, cymbal crashes for chorus)
6. Press pedal twice to stop beat with ending fill (or 3 times to stop immediately)
It also comes with GoranGrooves Studio, a drum tracking program. The Miami-based team is led by David Packouz, a guitarist and songwriter. While there are plenty of ways to get drums onto your red hot rock and roll tracks, this one looks to be the most fun and it would be great if Union Square buskers used this to drown out their endless caterwauling of Brown Eyed Girl. Just sayin’.
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