How to Create Interesting Drum Beats in Cubase | Q&A with Greg Ondo

one of the questions I get asked frequently is what tools are available in Cubase to help me make a drum beat one of the great solutions for this is using the MIDI plugin called beat designer so to load up beat designer we can select a MIDI or instrument track go to the inspector click on MIDI inserts and in one of the slots select beat designer so when you see beat designer we can see eight different lanes and we see a sixteen step grid if you click to the left you can audition and hear the different sound sources are being triggered in MIDI if the labels don't seem to correlate with the sounds the labels will be based on the drum map so we can select a top inspector tab go to the bottom value window here and then we could load the drum map but if it's an instrument like Hallion or groove agent you could actually extract and derive the drum map from the instrument automatically like so so now all the labels will match the instrument now the user interface of beat designer can be enlarged by dragging the lower right hand corner like that we see that we have eight different lanes if we need to add additional lanes we can click in the plus sign of the very bottom right hand corner Lane it's very subtle but you see a little plus sign and then as you do that you can add more lanes like that we see that there's a sixteen step grid where the downbeats are differentiated by a slightly lighter shade of black if you need additional steps of grid you can adjust the amount of steps in a grid with about you if you wanted to put in different rhythmic values you say I want to put in eighth notes so you can actually have your step resolution determined like so there are a number of great presets that come with beat designer so if we wanted to load up preset we can do so and we see that there are four banks of presets and each Bank can have an octaves worth of patterns so now when I hit play this pattern is being sent directly to our sound source which is the groove agent se and if I wanted to take a different pattern there are different jump modes so if you wanted to immediately switch you could have it jump if you wanted to jump at the end of the pattern or jump now would allow you to immediately jump on playback to the newly selected pattern if you wanted to create your own beat I'm gonna go to an empty preset here in bank 2 and let's go ahead and turn on my click track by hitting the letter C and let's program our beat if I wanted to adjust the velocity I could hold down the left mouse button on each of the events and let's say if I wanted that to play back you know hand clap instead or a different kick you should change the sound from the list so say I put in handclaps 2 & 4 and let's adjust that velocity if I click at the bottom you could actually have up to 3 flam's so if I wanted to adjust the position of flam's I could also adjust the volume level of my flam so if I wanted to spread the flames out so let's go ahead and I'll just throw in a couple of shakers in my lower right hand corner we have two different swing presets so if I wanted my shakers to have a different swing than my handclaps we could do that if I wanted to just kind of switch this to let's say Tom and we could be a little more creative with our velocities here now there's some really good handy editing tips a lot of people aren't aware of if I wanted to shift an entire lane over by step I could hold down the shift key and just move and just try out different feels like that to get rid of a value just click on it again now if I want it to do an alternate or an inverted selection if I hold down the Alt key and drag across it'll just place values where there were no values and erase values where there were so this way I could just hold down the Alt key and invert the values that easily if I wanted to make a copy of a lane to another Lane if I hold down the Alt key and just go to the left of the event at that point I could just drag it up and make a copy each Lane can also be solo or muted very easily now in the upper left-hand corner there's a little drop-down menu and there's some handy tools in here for your pattern so if you wanted to shift everything to the left shift it to the left again or shift it to the right just to get a different feel or even reverse the pattern we can just place those different elements right there to kind of get variations of our pattern as well so if I wanted to take that pattern copy it go to a different one to a different preset I can now paste that pattern and then just do variations on that one and still have both patterns available quite easily now in the drop-down menu there's some other choices as well so let's say I have my left and right locator set between measures 1 through 16 here so if I wanted to take this pattern I could just say let's fill the loop with pattern and this will automatically take that pattern and place it directly into my project timeline so if I didn't like that I could also if I have a number of presets within this bank I could choose to insert the sub Bank at the cursor and then all the different presets will automatically be placed directly into my timeline as well so you can see how easy it is with the flexibility to program drumbeats quite effectively using the beat designer plugin to really enhance your creativity with Cubase if you found this video helpful please feel free to like the video and to subscribe to the channel you

Channel: Cubase

Views: 77,084

Keywords: Creating beats, drum beats, how to create a drum beat in Cubase, tools in Cubase for drums, beats, drum patterns, MIDI, beat designer, VSTi, VST Instrument track, VST track, MIDI track, Instrument track, drum map, HALion, Groove Agent, Best music software, best daw software, best daw software for mac, best daw software for windows, best daw for home studio, best recording studio, best music production, best workflow, best digital audio workstation

Id: WlJtLG9juNU

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2018