How to Make Beats with The Drum Editor in Cubase | Music Production for Beginners

hey there in this video we're going to take a look at how you can quickly create beats using the drum editor in Cubase it's easy it's fun and the drum editor integrates perfectly with other areas of Cubase let's quickly take a look the very first thing you need to do in order to work with the drum editor is get some sounds I'm going to select an instrument track now in this instrument track I really want to have something that's relevant to drums so groove agent se comes inside Cubase and it's an awesome drum VST instrument once I add the track you can see a new track showing up there and I can just click on this little button here to bring up the instrument itself so this is groove agent I see there's lots of pads and if you right mouse click over that icon you can now bring up all the content I'm selecting laser beams because it's this fantastic new content pack that's come with Cubase 10 now you can see the different categories in our media Bay at the top and it's a matter of you selecting a preset that you like just double click on them to load them into groove agent se and then you can preview the different types of instrument hits by clicking on the pads there's a number of different banks so make sure you check out all of the different sounds that come included with this preset you can also go across to patterns when you click on one of the pattern pads it will play a pattern and you can also drag and drop a pattern up into that groove agent track and double click on it and there is the editor down the bottom but today we're going to create our own from scratch so I'm getting my pencil and I'm drawing in an event up here in the first bar and it's going to lock perfectly into the first bar because I've got my snap button on if I take it off you can go back to the arrow you can see that I can move that end bar anywhere but I want it to lock in to the first bar so let's turn it back on again and move it back now this is one of the rules of editing if you've got the snap button on in any editor it's going to snap onto the grid which kind of keeps us locked into time now down the bottom in my editor you can see that I've got a piano scroll over on the left hand side and if I wanted to I could now start drawing in notes and those notes are obviously locked in to my grid again do type of editing's more relevant for musical notes when we're editing drums we're really editing hits so I'm going down the bottom and I'm switching over to my drum editor straightaway the pianos girl's been replaced by drum names and if I go over to my drum stick tool I can now start entering hits on the grid that correspond with these different drum names the drum names that I have over here in this list may not correspond exactly with the drum hits that we have up in groove agent se so there's a neat little trick I'm going to show you to make sure that they do first of all let's go up and select the track over in the inspector on the left hand side I'm just going to click on this tab and select create drum map from instrument and straightaway that list of drums has changed and you can see that I've got patterns I could draw the patterns in but we want to work with these individual drum hits and create our own patterns so let's quickly go back to the pattern tab and click on this Omni button and straightaway you can see all of our drums are now corresponding exactly with the pads now it's really just a matter of making some beats which you can do here in the lower zone or we can enlarge the window to a full size view which gives us more access or more visual access I guess to all of the different drum hits that we've got here in our groove agent se 3 preset you can use GNH on your computer keypad to zoom in and out and that will of course change the grid and don't forget that we're locked into this grid so if you need more resolution to enter more notes just zoom out now I'm using my drumstick tool and I'm simply placing kick drums really at random so you can see how easy it is to enter information and also delete information so if you get a note on the wrong grid line you can simply click on it again and then re-enter it so now it's a matter of choosing the different components that you want to have in your groove if you're a bit stuck in terms of where things should go then maybe go and have a look at some of the grooves or the patterns that are included inside of those pattern banks and groove agent se3 I'm going to setup a cycle point here and I'm going to loop this bar over and over again so that I can actually hear how my loops sounding as creating it so to do that I just set the locators and turn the cycle on on the transport and now my loop is go to play over and over and over again that really saves me having to go back and keep hitting stuff and then rewind and then play back while that groups cycling backwards and forwards I am quickly entering notes using the drumstick tool you can also move notes across different drums just by picking up on the diamond and dragging it up and down so if you feel like I keep drum might be better suited to another kick drum sound just pick up and move it you can also do that with the arrow as well it doesn't need to be with the drumstick tool hold down with the drumstick tool and drag to the right to enter multiple notes based on the resolution of the grid it's a really quick way to be able to do things like hi-hat shovels for instance at the moment these claps are kind of annoying me so I either experiment with putting them in different spots or removing them or maybe I experiment with the velocity so I'm selecting them all and now down in the bottom editor I can actually lower the velocity of all of them by picking up on the handle in the middle and that's sounding a little bit better to me once I'm happy with that first bar or pattern that I've created I can start to expand on my ideas let's say for instance I want to put a drum brake in so now I'm going to move over to the next bar I'm dragging out to the right with the drumstick tool and it's creating these notes but the notes are still grayed out and that's because when I created that first event in the project window I only made it one bar so I'm picking up on this right handle and dragging it out and now you can see the colors changed and all of these notes that we can now enter are included in our MIDI event which is now two bars long now traditionally a drum brake or a fill like this would increase in volume so once again I'm highlighting all the notes and picking up on this handle on the left hand side and now you can see these notes are going to increase in velocity so that's really easy so in a matter of seconds I've created a drum fill or a drum break just to demonstrate even further that concept of zooming in to get a greater resolution I'm using H on my keypad and now I'm just entering more notes because I've got more lines on my grid I can enter more notes velocity is so important when it comes to creating groove and you can change the velocity of a hit when you enter it just keep holding down on your mouse and drag the mouse down and up and that will change the velocity at the point of entry you can still edit the velocity of notes even after you've entered them down in the bottom we've got the controller lanes and at the moment this is showing the velocity so all I need to do is go down with my mouse and just move the velocity on the note that I want to edit it's a really good way to create groove on things that are repetitive so things like high hats or in this case I've got a shaker so rather than having the shake of being all of the one velocity you can see it's moving around it just makes it a little bit more human now it's just a matter of going through and tightening it up and figuring out if I've got enough in there or if I've got too much let's say I want to keep this groove or pattern intact but I want to build on it well now I can select all of these hits and simply copy them I'm going over to the right hand side and I'm going to stretch my cycle point out so now it will cycle through three bars and of course I need to move this right marker out here so that my event also goes to three bars just clicking on the spot where I want to paste my groove and now it's pasted in so I've got two sections exactly the same only now I can build on it further by adding some of these base hits so very quickly I've created three different patterns my first section is my original groove my second section is a fill and my third section is my original groove with some base hits the thing about creating groove is it's usually been created in a 1 bar phrase or a 4 bar phrasal let's say a 3 bar phrase with a 1 bar fill and if we go back to our project window now we can use our scissors and we can actually chop this into 3 different sections and this is where it gets pretty cool so I can just copy this first event out and now I've got three bars of groove and one bar of fill and once again I can do this with this next section which has the base notes and I'm just going to copy and paste that event over now it's a matter of just dragging my cycle point out on the right hand side there and I've got eight bars of groove and that's all done relatively quickly we could take it a step further by going back to groove agent and the pattern tabs there and finding maybe another pattern that actually works so you can see that you can combine your own patterns with the patterns that are actually in groove agent so let's say I like that one I can drag it up and now I've got another four bar phrase just be careful if you're ever blending patterns from different sources that the velocities all match up so it's always good to just have a listen and compare between the ones that you've created yourself and maybe the ones you're borrowing from elsewhere and don't forget if you have borrowed them from elsewhere you can always go back and edit them further even after you've imported them into the actual project itself a couple of other cool things you can do is import your sample into the groove agent MIDI library so that means you can interchange your sample with any pad no matter what project using in Cubase you can also drag and drop your grooves over onto the pattern pads which means you can trigger them at a live performance if that's what you're into because we're working with MIDI you can also go into the media Bay and find a Content pack go up and select the MIDI filters so it might be things like MIDI files and patterns and loops and now you can see all of the drum loops that you have available in this particular content pack when you find one you like you simply drag and drop it straight over and that's kind of bypassing the groove agent SC interface but it's also another unique way of doing it and of course we can still edit these MIDI files or MIDI notes or drum hits down the bottom in the drum editor a couple of other very quick tips you can change the color in terms of how you view the different events down the bottom in the drum editor and you can also change things like the resolution of the grid to suit dotted notes and triplets so for example when i zoom in it's still giving me a very straight grid but if I go up into the quantized setting and select a triplet setting you can see now we've got triplets on the grid which means I can do a bit of a shuffle on the high hat if i zoom in so there's lots of different options in terms of working with different grid resolutions which are going to give us different types of grooves thanks for taking the time to stop by and checking out this video please like it if you've learned something and subscribe to the cube s YouTube channel for plenty more videos just like this I'll see you there you

Channel: Cubase

Views: 87,966

Keywords: how to make beats, how to make beats in Cubase, beats, drums, drum loops, music production, music production for beginners, drum editor, drum maps, groove, Groove Agent, Groove Agent in Cubase, drum sounds, VST Instrument, VST, drum samples, Groove Agent SE, drum sounds in Cubase, Cubase

Id: hO6TK4NlwQ8

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019