Cubase Drum Editor

hello everyone we're going to look at the drum editor in cubase now the drum editor i think out of all of the daws i've used the drum editor is the most powerful one certainly that i or the most efficient one i feel inside all of the daws for editing drum information certainly midi drum information even in cubase there's different ways of editing midi drum information which we will look at but the reason i wanted to look at this is because it's my go-to it's the one that i always if i'm editing drums 95 of the time i'm going to do it in the drum editor in cubase now i've got a completely blank blank project here in cubase if you wanted to use the past project that we made when we looked at the piano role or the key editor in cubase by all means do that so i've got a completely blank cubase project the first thing we have to do is load a drum instrument otherwise when we go to the drum editor we're not going to hear any sound we want to audition it against sound so like everything in cubase there's a few ways of doing it we're going to right click add an instrument track is one way in this left area we've got the little plus sign we can add instrument we've also got the shortcut remember which can be quite useful which is f11 so f11 you can add an instrument track or as many people are using now as cubase has developed this zonal idea of left and right and bottom zones you've got the right zone and you can search your instruments up in here and there he is we can put him in so let's do it that way so we're going to go to the right zone i'm going to left click drag it over and then let go now if you haven't got the right zone so you're in i think the right zone came in into playing about cubase eight so if you've got something um before cubase eight use one of the other ways so the right click add instrument track or the blue plus sign or f11 still works okay so i've made us a drum instrument track we know we've got groove agent here i can actually change the name like we did in the key editor so i could call this drums now what we don't have is anything to edit like when we looked at the piano roll before we haven't got any information here to edit so i'm going to use this locator along the top the ruler gonna highlight bar starter bar one to the starter bar two or the under bar one so just a one bar highlight i'm going to double click in there that's giving us a blank canvas so we have something to edit now now i could now go up to midi open drum editor and it will load my drum editor up i could also double click on the information but as you can see it's just loaded my piano roll up but there's a little shortcut in cubase which is see where it says here ring along the left hand side we're in groove i'm sorry groove agent you see it says here no drum map let's flick that to drum map now when i double click we're in the drum editor so that that is a really efficient way of speeding up your workflow now if you imagine you've got a composition where you've got say 20 tracks and three of them are drum and percussion tracks if you just highlight on those ones that drums and percussion tracks and put gm map it's a way of getting us into the drum editor really quickly now you can also set up a shortcut using the keypad and remember if you want to do that i'm not going to do that today but at some point we will but remember edit and it's key commands now if i wanted to find the drums i just type in drum here under my key command and press find and then go to drum editor i can write the key i wanted so whichever key you choose just make sure it's not one that you use a lot already and then press assign and okay and it will come up here and that's how you can make a shortcut we looked at that before for editing midi instruments so it's handy definitely definitely handy worth doing so once you know you've got a key you want to use to get too quickly to the drum editor that's a good way doing it so it's edit key commands search the drum go to drum editor add it in and then okay yeah and you can make a shortcut that's great okay so so far we've set up a drum instrument we've got a drum area in which we know we can edit the information we've even made a shortcut to make it to our drum editor now i'm just going to go to this edit instrument button and at the moment in groov agent we haven't got any sound so we want when we go into the drum editor we want to hear something so we can audition what we're doing so i'm going to move up to this area up here it's blank here up here and i'm going to click on there and with cubase pro you can see it's given us a lot of options now if you're on cubase elements it doesn't matter at all you'll probably just have a few just a few options up here but it doesn't matter whichever you want to click on for today so i'm going to click on studio kit it's under drums and percussion and these are my options these are all the drum presets we've got but i'm going to it's on something called deep into the ground so i'm just going to click on it now groove agent i'm we'll look at this in much more detail because it is a it's a really cool drum editor and actually you can use it for slicing vocal loops and all sorts of things but for today we're just going to look at it in this basic form so it's loaded as a preset up you've got some things if you want to mess around with the microphones and stuff on the front page but also on each one of these it tells you the midi note and we can right click and we can also rename this pad and also set the color i find that quite useful sometimes certainly if you've made your own drum samples which i'll show you how we can get it into groove agent but having color coordinating the pads can be it just makes it look nice as well okay so now we know we have an instrument loaded we've got a blank headed area to edit we've set it between just a one bar from start of bar one to the end of bar one we've made it a drum map so i can double click on here now when i double crit click sorry um here's my drum editor so if i expand this out clicking automatically with me at the moment my drumstick has appeared if that doesn't you can right click and go to drumstick you've also got it at the top there in the toolbar or i think it's zero on your keypad it is and that will bring up the drumstick as well so one to go back to the object selection and zero for the drumstick that's another quick little work around now all of these are the same as when we looked in the previous video when we looked at the piano roll so you've got your solo all of these things are identical this is slightly different we're going to look at our options here so along the left hand side these are all of the um in a general midi drum kit these are what we get each one of these keys on the keyboard or when we click on this left hand side we can audition as well so when we play a1 on a keyboard we're getting a low tom the majority of these time of the time these will make sense with what they're saying sometimes a gm drum map might be different to what you're working in but that's why the audition tool there along the left-hand side so useful so say i wanted to create a kick drum first if i go along here i've got this set to grid i'm going to go to one apes now can you see once i've gone to eighth notes or these what we call quavers can you see it split it into eight segments so that means now [Music] i can make any one of these a kick drum and now because i'm working late i can keep left click down and just drag across now if i want to delete these these drums now once you've made it you just left click on it again and it will delete okay so i'm going to go for we'll make a really simple beat so i've got it on loop i'll take click off so press c to take the click off not the most exciting from beating the world okay now i'm going to go to my clothes hi-hats i'm going to put those on the offbeats okay so we've got we got some sort of groove going maybe we'll go we'll put it on the and as well the kick drum and how about if we go really wild we're going to go to 16th notes we could even put a kick just before the end before or the end of threes right after the end of three right now what can be quite cool with this we've made a sort of an idea can you see same as our key editor we can come down to the bottom here and we can change the velocity so that's exactly the same as when we were using midi to make um melodic sounds in the video before because if you imagine a drummer they're never going to hit exactly the kit all the same time they put they really humanize it by doing that so even high hats you imagine you can add that in so we can highlight the height the hi-hats and we can change them there's also a way we can put a groove to this using the quantize but i'm going to save that for another video if you wanted to experiment just in the meantime with that do you remember the snap tool because at the moment i've got snap on and remember j is the shortcut for that at the moment i've got it set to 16th notes and it'll only jump to every 16 but if i take snap off by pressing j you can actually move these around slightly because again when a drummer plays they don't exactly they won't be robotic on directly on that grid all the time so that's worth experimenting with but cubase will actually create a groove for you which we'll look at okay so we've got something we've got a drum idea what the other thing you might want to think about is perhaps with maybe the snare drum if we went to 32 so now we've split into 32 sections we could put this in this is going to sound really odd but until we bring these the velocity right down and then this is what we call i think it's ghost notes or in a drummer where you see them when they're grooving along they just really delicately hit that [Music] that skin so it kind of adds to the groove but it's not up there on the velocity level so it's really apparent so it's worth experimenting with those and bring them down and as you can see same as the key editor when we move the velocity down it changes the color of the actual hit note here which is cool and when i write them in at the moment the velocity is set to 100 if you wanted to turn up the velocity between anywhere between naught and 107 127 sorry um by all means change it there but i like to work to 100 and then it gives me a bit of headroom for moving up these up and down okay and remember if you can't see that the the velocity you right click and it's a it's in there somewhere insert velocity there it is okay so we've created a groove using the drum editor say you've you're happy you've you've composed your song and you've got everything in here that you're happy with you can actually there's a couple of things if you're using groove agent you can you can do show sounds here um by instrument and this will take away any sounds that aren't being used by the vst instrument but the one i like as well is the show drum sounds with events now can you see now because i've only used these three these three drums that's all i've got to edit with now so that's why i i kind of leave that towards the end because i might want to say a crash now if i do that can you see now we've got four so it's a way of tidying it up certainly towards the end of a project and you want to get to things quickly because you might listen through your project and think i won't mind a ride in there then you can add it in and then at the end just for the last bit of editing and stuff you can do that but as i say if you're using an instrument like um groove agent sc you can do use sounds by instrument as well and that can help tidy things it saves scrolling uh scrolling up and down but the most one thing that drum editors do is put probably the most common instruments or hits that you'll use towards the top so bass and snare and so forth so they are generally so you you shouldn't have to do too much scrolling down anyway okay so we know how to use the drum editor we've created a beat it's exactly the same as if we were using um the piano roller key editor in cubase if you wanted to then copy that across is ctrl d once you've highlighted it and the reason you can do that now if i set my locator so that would lube you might find that on bar two and four you wanted to emphasize some of the other drums more so you can then go to bar two and perhaps bring up the velocity of the kick or perhaps those ghost notes or add aggression or something like that so it's a way that you can actually make variation um the only other thing i wanted to say which i forgot to say when we're in the drum editor whatever we click on will affect the velocity the velocity will come up so if we click on the kick drum can you see these are our velocity changes if i click on the hi-hats these are the velocity changes i've made with that and remember that snap function is quite useful the j to take snap off if you want to move it slightly and back on if you want to snap to the grid and that's the same no matter what editor you're in okay well i hope that helps

Channel: Guitar With Matt

Views: 4,638

Keywords: Cubase, Drum Editor, Cubase Drums, Cubase Editor, cubase, drum editor, cubase tutorial, drum programming, midi drums, velocity, midi, instruments

Id: 9YLSbZa9FOE

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020