Tips for using BeatPad

Power Usage.
We have designed BeatPad to use as little power as possible, but using the speaker and/or the serial port does draw a little extra power from your battery. To conserve power be sure that MIDI is turned off when you aren't actually using it (un-check the "MIDI" box in the MIDI Preferences screen.

Center your patterns.
Be aware of the center location of the pitch controls. When you select a "center pitch" in the master tab area. For example, if the center pitch is set to "A#4", notes that are set in the middle of the pitch control area will be played as A# (and in the 4th octave if the octave control is also centered). If you are going to perform with a number of patterns, design them so that they will sound in the same key, so you won't have to adjust the center pitch for each new pattern.

Saving.
BeatPad automatically saves patterns as you work on them. If you think you might want to "go back" to the way a pattern used to be, just make a copy of it. Just drag the inverted number or letter for the current pattern to another number or letter to make an exact copy of the pattern. You might even use one of the letters (e.g. "D") as a "working" bank of patterns and always copy a pattern to "D" before changing it.

You can also save copies of the whole database on your desktop computer. Palm Desktop backs up all of the files from your Palm. These are stored in a "backup" folder/directory, which sould be in another folder/directory with the same name as the user name you gave your Palm the first time you did a HotSync. You can make a copy of the "BeatPadDB.pdb" file from the backup directory and save it somewhere else on your hard drive. Later you can install this saved copy and it will return all of your patterns to the way they were when you copied the file.

If you feel comfortable with this process, you could save a whole collection of databases on your desktop computer and install different ones on your Palm when you need them.



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