Beebo

[Paul_C]

Rather than clutter up the Gasalcoholic thread with my Beebo experiences I thought I'd start a new thread.

It arrived safe and sound and a quick run through of some of the patches suggests I'm going to have fun.

Tweaking existing patches seems relatively simple compared to the Zoia, I might have a go at making a patch later which is more than I've managed with the Zoia too, though there aren't as many ready made cool patches so if I want them it looks like I'll have to make them.

[echorec]

I’ve been curious to hear more insights on this. My concern is the processing power. (about two effects at once?) I feel like the next gen will allow you to run double or triple the patches without loading issues. As of now, I’m thinking about grabbing a Helix LT—won’t cover the MI stuff, but it appears you can run far more effects with greater stability.

I hope you make some great stuff with the Beebo, though, as it seems like there’s a ton of soundshaping possibilities in there.

[backwardsvoyager]

You picked a great time to join the gang (there must be a whole 4 or 5 of us now), the most recent firmware update is a huge improvement!

Beebo has been the 'brain' of my guitar+bass rig for about a year now.
At the moment it's doing envelope-controlled vibrato, slapback, modulated delay, pitch divebombs, convolution reverb, and an FX loop to blend dirt peds with a filtered clean signal - in one patch, sitting at ~80% DSP usage.

The DSP situation is similar to the Zoia I think, some modules chew it up way more than others (you can stack 20 delays just fine but only 3 or 4 reverbs, for example). Personally I've never maxed it out when trying to build something.

My only gripe at this point is that changing patches is kinda slow and awkward. Every other issue I ran into got patched really quickly. It's also paid itself off because I keep managing to recreate or improve upon sounds I used other digital pedals for and selling those (Tensor, Super Neo Matic..)

[Paul_C]

You picked a great time to join the gang (there must be a whole 4 or 5 of us now), the most recent firmware update is a huge improvement!

Beebo has been the 'brain' of my guitar+bass rig for about a year now.
At the moment it's doing envelope-controlled vibrato, slapback, modulated delay, pitch divebombs, convolution reverb, and an FX loop to blend dirt peds with a filtered clean signal - in one patch, sitting at ~80% DSP usage.

The DSP situation is similar to the Zoia I think, some modules chew it up way more than others (you can stack 20 delays just fine but only 3 or 4 reverbs, for example). Personally I've never maxed it out when trying to build something.

My only gripe at this point is that changing patches is kinda slow and awkward. Every other issue I ran into got patched really quickly. It's also paid itself off because I keep managing to recreate or improve upon sounds I used other digital pedals for and selling those (Tensor, Super Neo Matic..)

Nice - is there anywhere other than Patchstorage for downloading patches ?

I have a feeling I'm going to spend a lot more time tinkering with this than with my Zoias, partly because it's a lot clearer what's going on without having to do a lot of research and also because there doesn't seem to be the vast library of patches freely available.

I'm fortunate that I don't use a whole lot of reverb for my stuff, so running out of processing power hopefully won't be an issue and to be honest I won't care that much if it happens now and again as nothing I do is that precious to me

[backwardsvoyager]

Nice - is there anywhere other than Patchstorage for downloading patches ?

Not that I'm aware of. Most of the ones on Patchstorage aren't that great, either.

The pedal kind of encourages you to design patches that fit into your personal workflow, so there's probably not much impetus to share them. Having all the routing visually laid out in front of you means you end up thinking of it less as a self-contained effect and more as a 'network' within your signal chain.

[manymanyhaha]

I was an early adopter, Loki said I had units #3 and #4 of the Digit, and thus suffered I think through some of the early-adopter problems. The 4-in, 4-out in a small format and the flexibility appealed to me. Eventually sold them, found them too often buggy, slow both in reaction time to programming and just slow to program, and limited by processing power. My time in my studio is limited unfortunately, and the last place I want my patience tested.

Having said that, I was impressed with Loki: Awesome customer service, would listen to suggestions, came out with updates with tireless regularity, full of ideas, endlessly positive. The kind of person I want to have my money, and yours!

So I'm going to watch this thread because if he truly solved all of these problems, I might jump back in.

[Paul_C]

Well, without any reading of the manual I managed to clear the last patch from the screen, add two flangers and a filter, with one flanger turned on/off with a footswitch and tried a couple of ways to add bits to change parameters automatically.

It made some very unexpected sounds as I messed with parameters but it was relatively easy to create something useable without much effort, something that I could never do with the Zoia.

It'll be interesting to see if I can produce some really new sounds from it (which is what I bought it for) but for a very quick try I was impressed at how much I was able to do.

[Paul_C]

Made a couple more simple patches and liked them enough to save them - it's clear that anything I create for myself is going to be done on this.

I don't see myself selling the Zoias because there are so many great sounds for them already and new ones arriving all the time.

Meanwhile if I feel like tinkering and trying stuff out then the Beebo is perfect for me as it's way easier to create, tweak, delete etc. and I don't need to write out a whole plan before I start.

It's easier to take an existing patch and play with it on the fly (for live use) than a Zoia too. I tend to use my Zoia patches as they come and only adjust volume levels to suit what I want rather than tweak values while I'm playing, as it's not always obvious what might happen. It's partly because of this that I've started using a few more pedals again, but I'm fairly sure that once I start to understand the Beebo more I'll be playing with patches as I play along with the other pedals and continuing to throw different Zoia patches into the mix in the same way I'm doing now.

It's also making me have a rethink about how many of my current pedals I want to keep, as quite a lot will be of less use now.

[backwardsvoyager]

Be sure to try it out with a MIDI controller, too!
I use a disaster area thing for extra footswitches but you can also run e.g. an arturia beatstep off the USB port and map parameters to controls/pads for quick access and live performance.

[Paul_C]

I knew there'd be a way of spending more money !

[Paul_C]

I'm having a huge amount of fun making mad delay patches

Other than tweaking one or two existing patches I've stuck to delays while I explore what the various ways of controlling parameters do, and it's so easy to put a few things together and delete things if you don't like the result.

I did try the granular patch this evening but too much tweaking ended up with a huge booming feedback loop so back to the drawing board for that one !

It's lucky that I only got it now, as I doubt I'd have done as much recording this year if I'd bought one earlier - only 13 albums needed to get to 100 before the end of the year

[Tall Walls]

I've been hemming and hawing over getting a MIDI controller for months now. I'm leaning toward shelling out the $$$ for a Morningstar MC8, but I keep seeing those gigantic Behringer controllers with twelve buttons and two expression pedals (like Andre LaFosse uses) for like $90 on Reverb. The Loopler module is hard to use without a MIDI controller, especially since I keep my Beebo on a table.

It's too bad the patches on Patchstorage are so blah. I suppose I could improve matters by uploading my own patches, but mine all feel like very primitive works-in-progress, and in any case I'm so lazy.

It's also too bad that the only place where people are sharing any significant Beebo information is the Facebook group. That is, it seems as though there's information being exchanged somewhere within that hellish miasma.

[Paul_C]

I've got an MC6 but if I go down the midi controller route I'll look at something like the beatstep.

Made some more patches this evening which I like - I might have to upload some to Patchstorage at this rate

The next thing I want to try and do is use the Freeze module, with something turning it on and off at random - for some reason nothing I've connected to it yet allows me to control anything, but I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.

[cosmicevan]

Also team Beebo. I find the greatest challenge is finding the time to really learn it. I do watch a bunch of the videos posted and try to mimic things, but the Beebo updates so frequently that things are out of date almost as they are posted. I haven't even tried all the various patches and effects yet. The thing that really has been capturing my imagination is experimenting with the controllers to have them drive oscillators for drums and other noises. So much to learn and experiment with.

[Paul_C]

I've made myself 17 patches so far - mostly delays which make random pitch bleeps and bloops, which is my thing of course

I got advice on the Freeze on/off question from the guy who makes the pedal (on FB) but misunderstood what I was being told, so I'm going to have another try tomorrow.