I saw a guy playing with one of these last year and been looking for them..It basically tells you the time your playing in by how many times you hit the snare in a minute?? How does the one that does not attach to the snare work?
Not quite. It's just like the tap function on a metronome - it measures the time between snare hits and tells you how many per minute you're playing. So if you're playing a backbeat groove at 100bpm, the beatbug will show 50. It only needs two strokes to calculate the tempo (or half note tempo, rather) so you're getting feedback in realtime. If you could plug a trigger into a metronome and use that instead of tapping the button, it's basically the same thing. Since I started using it my confidence has grown hugely. I don't stare at it, but just glance at it occasionally to see where I'm at. Some of the songs we do depend on being within 2 or 3 bpm of the correct tempo and this solves that problem. Other songs have sections that need to be sped up or the punters stop dancing (mostly half time bridges) so I keep an eye on the Beat Bug and push the tempo slightly then fall back into the original tempo for the rest of the song.
For your second question I assume you mean the Beat Bug, as the one that sits on the snare is the Tempo Ref. It comes with a trigger which you place on the batter head, and you mount the device anywhere on your kit. You can also attach the trigger to your bottom hi hat which would be great if you're playing jazz or something with a lot of left foot action. In fact anything can be triggered, some users have a piece of wood next to their hi hat pedal and tap that to get the tempo. I've considered building a switch so I can flick between the snare trigger and one on my kick, for songs with four on the floor most of the way.
The trigger it comes with is just a very basic piezo element, I want to try using a decent trigger from Roland or the like which would be easier to attach and probably perform better. I currently use a clip on muffler to hold the trigger onto the head. The trigger it comes with does the job fine and also has a clip which attaches to a tension rod but I prefer the muffler so I can switch snares easily.
At first I thought only seeing the half note tempo was a negative, but it's actually a blessing, as a lower number/less strokes means you don't have to be as accurate to get a consistent reading. That might sound counter intuitive, but in reality the faster you're tapping it, the more accurate you need to be in order to prevent the numbers jumping around, to the point of unnecessary accuracy. At high tempos your snare hits would have to be accurate to within something like 15 milliseconds. The reason I said it's not so good for fast tempos is because the numbers jump around a lot, so it's actually hard to get any useful feedback from it. It only measures from your last two snare hits, as opposed to averaging a longer period like 2 or 4 bars
It's a pretty basic device, and has lots of room for improvement such as an averaging function and tolerance for missed hits/flubs, but for what it is, it works great. I think the guy just builds them himself from home and he's good to deal with. FWIW, I went with the beat bug over the tempo ref for a few reasons - I didn't like the idea of something dampening my snare too much, or the risk smashing it, I didn't need the metronome function, and the Tempo Ref has auto on and off - which means batteries may accidentally get drained when not in use.
Any more questions just fire them my way
