Who says you don’t need a drum machine on your pedalboard? We certainly don’t, as we’ll be looking at the BeatBuddy Mini 2 in today’s breakdown and review.
The BeatBuddy Mini 2 Brings Versatile Drum Sounds Straight to Your Pedalboard
The BeatBuddy Mini is a drum machine in pedal format. It contains nine different drum kits that were each carefully sampled from real drums, so there’s no synthesized sounds happening here.
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The nine sampled kits are further broken down into 24 selectable genres. Once you add up the various loops under every genre, you have over 200 grooves and styles to choose from. It’s quite impressive how they’ve managed to pack so much into a standard stompbox.
Singular Sound BeatBuddy Mini 2 Review: How Does It Perform?
Specs & Design
You can see right away that the BeatBuddy Mini 2 looks like any other effects pedal. Everything is housed in a brushed metal enclosure with a large, rounded footswitch that’s easy on bare feet and impossible to miss during a live performance.
The drum machine really only has two functional knobs: volume and a multifunction click/rotary encoder. The design is highly intuitive and streamlined, and it’s easy to access basic features from the first power-up.
Dialing in a Beat
The BeatBuddy utilizes a single knob to navigate through three parameters in order to dial in a beat. By default, the first selection is Genre. You can rotate the encoder to scan through all 24 genres. Once you’ve settled on one, you can then click the encoder to move over to the next selection.
Here we have Song. Genres are further broken down in subcategories called Song, under which you’ll find a number of different beats/patterns to experiment with. Click the encoder again, and we finally move down to Tempo, which is pretty self-explanatory!
Once you dialed in a beat, it’s time to start jamming along. From here, we can use the footswitch to add fills and transitions. That way you can actually perform a whole arrangement instead of just playing over the same loop on repeat.
How Many Variations Does the BeatBuddy Mini 2 Offer?
The BeatBuddy Mini 2 doubles the amount of content over the previous generation. We covered a quick once-over of its specs, which include nine sampled drum sets (performed by real studio drummers), 24 genres, and over 200 total beats/loops.
There’s definitely no shortage of content to sift through, which is pretty incredible for a drum machine pedal that retails for under a couple hundred bucks.
When Would You Use the BeatBuddy Mini?
The BeatBuddy Mini 2 is built for whatever you’d like to throw at it. That could be a basic practice companion, where you can choose a tempo and loop and grind out scales — at least it would be more entertaining than a regular metronome.
It’s also a useful tool for developing songs and arrangements. You can audition your riffs with a rhythm section going to feel out how it would work as a fully realized song. Arguably it would be faster to kick on the drum machine than it would to program out a beat in your DAW.
The BeatBuddy is also great for soloists performing live. As a singer-songwriter you’re sort of expected to just bring your guitar and voice, but you can surprise folks by adding drums to your compositions — if that’s your thing!
The BeatBuddy 2 Will Enhance Your Rhythm Capabilities with Ease
There’s truly a wealth of potential inside the BeatBuddy pedal. The sounds are surprisingly realistic thanks to 16-bit audio quality and actual drum samples, and there’s more than enough variety between genres and styles to find something tailored to your liking. As a practice or performance tool, this is a fun little pedal to add to your board.