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Source Audio Bass Envelope Filter PRO (pics and clips)

#141
I just got my BEF Pro yesterday from bassefx.com and I am very impressed so far. A few thoughts:

It sounds really, really good. The guys developing these products obviously have very good ears. I was worried about the lack of sensitivity control, but it responds beautifully to all kinds of different amplitudes. Tweaking the range and frequency knobs are the key to a lot of different possible filter sounds. Add that to the different filter models and control over attack/decay, LFO, MIDI, Eq, etc... and this competes with any VST filter I've used in terms of versatility, and is WAY better soundwise than anything I've tried in the virtual world (WOW, Fab, Damage, etc..). It would be really hard for me to distinguish this from an analog filter in a blind test. That's just me though, and I don't claim to have the world's best ear for that kind of thing. The phaser sounds really good too, and I like having the option to control by envelope follower (really wish you could control with exp though!), or LFO.

The only gripes I can come up with is lack of MIDI thru (not many people would care about this though), and only being able to use expression to control LFO rate (subdivisions) when linked to MIDI clock. I use MIDI clock a lot, but it would be nice to be able to change the rate in tap mode with my foot. One question about controlling LFO rate with expression: Is there a way to limit the range in such a way that you would only have three subdivisions for an entire sweep of the pedal? For example, heel down would be eighth notes, heel up would be sixteenth with triplets in the middle. I read the manual but was a little confused by the section that deals with expression depth and the best way to configure that. Thanks in advance if anyone can help.
 
#142
I've used the MIDI clock in the past for some LFO stuff...there are no markings to say so on the interface, but the Speed Knob gets broken into different sections for different subdivisions. If you have an expression pedal set to control the Speed knob (setting #1 on the backpage menu) then it should do exactly what you're asking.

You can also set the range of the expression pedal with the 'XD' back-page parameter. You can use that to set what will be your slowest and fastest sub-divison.

The product page has some more documentation that we wrote up to dig deeper into some of these things. You'll see it on the right side bar if you scroll down just a bit:

Soundblox® Pro Bass Envelope Filter


Hope that helps!

Will
 
#143
itswac said:
I've used the MIDI clock in the past for some LFO stuff...there are no markings to say so on the interface, but the Speed Knob gets broken into different sections for different subdivisions. If you have an expression pedal set to control the Speed knob (setting #1 on the backpage menu) then it should do exactly what you're asking.

You can also set the range of the expression pedal with the 'XD' back-page parameter. You can use that to set what will be your slowest and fastest sub-divison.

The product page has some more documentation that we wrote up to dig deeper into some of these things. You'll see it on the right side bar if you scroll down just a bit:

Soundblox® Pro Bass Envelope Filter


Hope that helps!

Will
Click to expand...

Thanks, Will!

Yeah, I can get it to change rate using the expression pedal, I was just having trouble configuring the range using the XD section of the back page menu. I read through the manual again, and I will work with it a little more tonight. Still really liking what I'm hearing from this pedal!
 
#144
There are a couple of things that are bugging me about my BEF Pro, and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if that's just the way the pedal works.

1. If I have an expression pedal plugged in, I can't use tap tempo. I have XD set to 0 so the the expression pedal has no effect, but tapping doesn't change the tempo. As soon as I unplug the exp pedal, tap temp works fine.

2. When I have the Mode set to Hot Hand, it doesn't save the Speed setting. I'll set everything up the way I want, and then hold 1 of the footswitches down to save. Then I go to another preset and change the Speed. When I go back to the 1st preset, the Speed knob is in a different position and because it didn't save, the Hot Hand sounds like doodie. :scowl:

Has anyone else experience this? Am I doing something wrong? :help:
 
#145
eshears said:
There are a couple of things that are bugging me about my BEF Pro, and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if that's just the way the pedal works.

1. If I have an expression pedal plugged in, I can't use tap tempo. I have XD set to 0 so the the expression pedal has no effect, but tapping doesn't change the tempo. As soon as I unplug the exp pedal, tap temp works fine.

2. When I have the Mode set to Hot Hand, it doesn't save the Speed setting. I'll set everything up the way I want, and then hold 1 of the footswitches down to save. Then I go to another preset and change the Speed. When I go back to the 1st preset, the Speed knob is in a different position and because it didn't save, the Hot Hand sounds like doodie. :scowl:

Has anyone else experience this? Am I doing something wrong? :help:
Click to expand...

Just sent a note to Will about this. I need his help. The President is worthless, sorry to say.
 
#146
eshears said:
There are a couple of things that are bugging me about my BEF Pro, and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if that's just the way the pedal works.

1. If I have an expression pedal plugged in, I can't use tap tempo. I have XD set to 0 so the the expression pedal has no effect, but tapping doesn't change the tempo. As soon as I unplug the exp pedal, tap temp works fine.

2. When I have the Mode set to Hot Hand, it doesn't save the Speed setting. I'll set everything up the way I want, and then hold 1 of the footswitches down to save. Then I go to another preset and change the Speed. When I go back to the 1st preset, the Speed knob is in a different position and because it didn't save, the Hot Hand sounds like doodie. :scowl:

Has anyone else experience this? Am I doing something wrong? :help:
Click to expand...

1. Is your expression pedal set to Speed? If that's the case, it will override the tap tempo with its position.

2. In Hot Hand mode, the speed knob becomes the Hot Hand axis select and sensitivity knob. Also, if you have the expression pedal still plugged in and set to speed on this preset, you will have the same issues as in question #1.
 
#147
eshears said:
There are a couple of things that are bugging me about my BEF Pro, and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if that's just the way the pedal works.

1. If I have an expression pedal plugged in, I can't use tap tempo. I have XD set to 0 so the the expression pedal has no effect, but tapping doesn't change the tempo. As soon as I unplug the exp pedal, tap temp works fine.

2. When I have the Mode set to Hot Hand, it doesn't save the Speed setting. I'll set everything up the way I want, and then hold 1 of the footswitches down to save. Then I go to another preset and change the Speed. When I go back to the 1st preset, the Speed knob is in a different position and because it didn't save, the Hot Hand sounds like doodie. :scowl:

Has anyone else experience this? Am I doing something wrong? :help:
Click to expand...

I'm also having problem #2. That particular parameter (Speed/Hot Hand sensitivity) does not seem to save in my presets and always defaults to whatever setting the knob is set to when I activate HH-enabled presets..
 
#150
Thread resurrection! Last night I tried for the first time to sync my BEF Pro to a midi clock with mixed success. I got everything hooked up and the BEF was getting the clock messages (I could see the tap temp light change as the clock tempo changed), but it still wasn't always exactly synced.

I have 2 presets that I have set to sync to midi clock. If I go from pedal off to turning on 1 of the presets, it was maybe 50/50 that it would be synced. If I went from 1 preset (even if it wasn't synced properly) to the 2nd preset, it seemed to sync up better. And sometimes it seemed to stray off-beat. It was very frustrating! I was expecting it to be synced up perfectly every time.

The 2nd issue I'm having is with the expression pedal controlling beat divisions. I want heel-down to be quarter notes and toe-down to be 16th notes, but no matter how I set the XD on the backpage heel-down was always whole-notes. Is there something else I'm missing?
 
#152
eshears said:
Last night I tried for the first time to sync my BEF Pro to a midi clock with mixed success. I got everything hooked up and the BEF was getting the clock messages (I could see the tap temp light change as the clock tempo changed), but it still wasn't always exactly synced.

I have 2 presets that I have set to sync to midi clock. If I go from pedal off to turning on 1 of the presets, it was maybe 50/50 that it would be synced. If I went from 1 preset (even if it wasn't synced properly) to the 2nd preset, it seemed to sync up better. And sometimes it seemed to stray off-beat. It was very frustrating! I was expecting it to be synced up perfectly every time.
Click to expand...

I'm not saying this is what's going on, but this could simply be due to a misunderstanding of how MIDI Clock works. I had this same confusion when I first started with MIDI Clock.

The important thing to understand about MIDI Clock is that it's positional agnostic. The receiving device doesn't know if your Clock source is on the first beat, the second beat, or any other specific beat or position within a measure. It only knows the Clock source is sending tempo data and the receiving source needs to manually calculate the clock rate based on the receiving of those quavers. The calculation is based on the fact that there 24 MIDI Clocks in every quarter note.

The reason this is important is that if you have something like a drum machine that's outputting MIDI Clock constantly (lets say my Roland TD-6 is set to 120bpm), but the triggered drum pattern only starts when you manually press Play on the drum machine, the drum machine is the only device that knows it just started playing on the 1 beat. The downstream devices just know there's a tempo of 120bpm.

Maybe not the best example. Let me be more specific. On my TD-6 I can set a tempo. There's also a built-in click source that'll bark out "One! Two! Three! Four!" as a verbal metronome based on the tempo. The only thing that knows where the One! is is that metronome voice and me because I hear it barking it out. The downstream devices had no idea when the metronome actually started as they're positional agnostic, they just know the TD-6 was sending out a click of 120bpm. I had that exact and specific experience when first trying MIDI Clock, and it took me a while to understand what the hell was going on and why nothing was synced to the verbal metronome. :)

So it's possible the LFO on the BEF Pro (or any other downstream device) will correctly compute a clock of 120bpm, but may not be starting the LFO exactly and precisely within the measure like you want it to. This is mostly noticeable if you have a slower, and obviously beat synced effect.

You'll have much better and accurate luck with sequencers that only start the clock when you press Play. Like having your DAW (Reaper in my case) send Clock. It doesn't send clock when it's not actively playing/recording. Thus the DAW starts the clock immediately at play/record start, thus the downstream hardware more or less can start computing the One! beat correctly.

However, even with that there's a very slight delay between the DAW starting and the downstream devices receiving and then correctly computing the clock. So there's could be a millisecond of deviation, and that deviation becomes more and more obvious the longer the clock runs.

Wow! That was a lot of typing.

If this doesn't apply to your situation at least you maybe know more about MIDI Clock than you did before. :)
 
#153
Thanks for the input gastric...this is very helpful as this is my first foray into MIDI. I'll definitely keep this in mind as I delve further in, but I'm not sure this is what I was seeing the other night.

When I was testing this, I wan't playing a drum pattern...I just had the drum machine's metronome beeping at me. I had the BEF Pro set to a square wave LFO synced to quarter notes...again, no crazy patterns. I expected to hear the metronome beep and my bass signal pulsing at the same time...sometimes it did...sometimes it wasn't even close. And then sometimes I'd turn the on the BEF to one of my LFO presets and it was not synced, and then I'd switch directly to the 2nd LFO preset and it was magically synced! :confused:
 
#155
eshears said:
I also considered that there might be a firmware update for the BEF Pro, but I didn't see anything on the website. I got it pretty soon after it was released, but I was pretty sure I got it after the one firmware update I heard about. I don't even know if that firmware update addressed any MIDI issues...
Click to expand...

Please send a note to [email protected] if you get stuck!
 
#156
eshears said:
Thanks for the input gastric...this is very helpful as this is my first foray into MIDI. I'll definitely keep this in mind as I delve further in, but I'm not sure this is what I was seeing the other night.

When I was testing this, I wan't playing a drum pattern...I just had the drum machine's metronome beeping at me. I had the BEF Pro set to a square wave LFO synced to quarter notes...again, no crazy patterns. I expected to hear the metronome beep and my bass signal pulsing at the same time...sometimes it did...sometimes it wasn't even close. And then sometimes I'd turn the on the BEF to one of my LFO presets and it was not synced, and then I'd switch directly to the 2nd LFO preset and it was magically synced! :confused:
Click to expand...

If your BEF LFO is bouncing on quarter notes, but simply isn't bouncing exactly on the click/metronome heard from your drum machine, then you're probably hitting the exact issue I described where the both devices are synced to the same TEMPO but are not synced positionally within the measure. It would be the same if we both manually programmed our own individual drum machines to 120bpm, you press play whenever you want, and I press play whenever I want. They're both playing the click/metronome/drum patter at 120bpm. But they're not synced positionally.

MIDI Clock doesn't include any positional functionality at all. It's literally just a tempo.

Now, if you're drum machine is clicking away at 120bpm but the BEF Pro LFO is running at some completely different tempo, say 190bpm, then that's a totally different issue.
 
#157
OK, it seems like this is the issue I'm seeing then. That's disappointing...I really thought I'd be able to click the BEF off and on and still be synced. This really won't work with how I was planning on using it live.

So what's the best way to keep it synced? Should I have the BEF preset on and ready before the drum machine starts the beat?
 
#158
You should still be able to do what you want.

You just need to have the clock off, and then start at precisely the start of the song. That'll help keep everything starting the beginning of the measure at mostly the same time. This is how most DAW work, the MIDI Clock only starts when the playback starts. Unfortunately it seems most drum machines / drum brains start the clock as soon as you select the patch, then start the metronome/pattern when you press Play so that might be starting at who-knows-when within the measure.

An interesting point about all of this clock / tempo sync stuff. The issue disappears with TRIGGERED effects like Delay. The reason being the delay is set to repeat on quarter notes. But those quarter notes are directly triggered from your playing. So as long as you play on the One! then the delay will repeat on the Two! thanks to the clock sync. Or if you play on the One-And! the delay will repeat on the Two-And! Works perfectly. :)

Again, it's mostly an issue when the clock is already running before you start synced playback. And only when using run-on LFO type effects like phasers, LFO filters, and what not.

It's confusing, hopefully I've helped describe this to clear it up.

But don't blame the BEF Pro. :) It only knows that the clock started, and that it's set to 120bpm (or whatever your tempo is). And that's all any other downstream MIDI Clock aware gear will know, either.

This is another reason people love laptop music. Since it's all software plugins it's directly tied to all of the knowledge of the DAW and it will know exactly what position within the measure everything is, can utilize more complex time signatures, and more.

Crazy stuff all this music technology.
 
#159
Well, this is all starting to make more sense...I've definitely still got some work to do to try to get this sorted out!

I had another question that no one's addresses yet, so I quoted it below. Anyone have any thoughts in this:

eshears said:
The 2nd issue I'm having is with the expression pedal controlling beat divisions. I want heel-down to be quarter notes and toe-down to be 16th notes, but no matter how I set the XD on the backpage heel-down was always whole-notes. Is there something else I'm missing?
Click to expand...
 
#160
**Zombie Thread Alert**

Is anyone able to get triplets from the LFO? If i send a MIDI clock to the pedal and then twiddle the speed knob there are just this subdivisions of the tempo: 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16

Is there anything else to tweak besides the speed knob? The manual doesn't help.
 

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