A new workbook guide to Groove Agent 5 - in progress

Virtual instruments Groove Agent
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Hello all,
Because I was so impressed with GA5, about six weeks ago, I set myself the task of learning everything about it. As you may know, this can be a real challenge.
I started making comprehensive notes and soon I decided that these notes could be shared. So I converted them into a guide which I share here.
This guide has taken a lot of work, it’s still very much in draft form, and after I have a bit of a break and maybe some reaction here, i intend to review it, tidy it up and expand it.

Groove Agent is a big challenge, not least because it’s terminology for different operations and components is so similar. I don’t think I ever want to use the word “kit” again !! :woozy_face:

Apart from One Man and his songs, Anthony’s excellent video series, there is not much in the way fo written materials apart from the sparce manual.

It’s already nearly 20,000 words, 71 pages long!

It’s my view that it’s not enough to simply learn the controls of an app to produce music. Yes one needs comprehensive knowledge of these controls, but then one has to sit back and formulate a musical approach, a workflow, that suits the kind of music you intend to make. This wil be included in the final future chapter.

I really welcome all comments. Certainly this first draft is very rough and needs housekeeping. At the moment I need to step back a little to reflect, so I would welcome comments if anyone wishes. The guide does assume some knowledge of common DAW practices, but I have tried to make it available to new starters with Groove Agent.

Anyways… it’s here: Groove Agent 5 guide.,

A new workbook guide to Groove Agent 5 - in progress

Z

6 Likes
Groove Agent 5 is not user friendly
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Amazing work!!! Thanks for share this gem.!

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Well, GA 6 is out in the SE variant already. I guess that means the writing’s on the wall that also the full GA will be elevated to number 6 in the not so distant future.
I don’t think that everything will change with a new version but be prepared that your guide might be outdated rather soon.

But don’t let my comment curb your enthusiasm.

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Yes I know about GA6. I/we are working with GA5 at the moment and it can be really tough, so I thought |I would share.

As I said these are my notes on GA5, I can update them for GA6.

Z

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You should also look at the relationship between [SAMPLER TRACK] & [GROOVE AGENT], they can work hand in hand.

You can get a sample loaded in a Sampler Track, cut it up and edit inside it and then have its slices uploaded to Groove Agent.

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I thought there is a slice functionality in GA, too. Am I mistaken?

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Yes you do have the option in Groove Agent, but If you want to do some editing of slices with the whole screen as your editing area instead of the limited window in GA, use the Sampler Track.

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Good to know. Slicing is Page 119 of the manual. I have not ventured there. It’s an advanced skill - for me anyway. Groove Agent is so finely set up with such classy mutually compstible kits, with so much you can do, for me its an aside. I was wonder about setting up some sort of Bells percussion set, but even though I wrote the above, I am still working on workflows.
I think you could make your own kit, in a similar way to Halion (make your own kit), use velocity sampling etc, but I am not ready yet.

Z

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Since I wrote the above, which focusses on working within Groove Agent ‘within itself’ so to speak, I cam across an excellent Dom Siglaz Video, where he diverts its mixer channels away from Grove Agents “Kit Mix” summing channel, to individual outputs in Cubase. By making a simple adjustmnent in GA5s mixer channels, which are by default set to send to KitMix (seen at top of the channel), you can, by clicking on thewords Kit Mix, find 32 output channels. By sending each GA5 Mixer channel to a separate one of these, Cubase automatically assigns a channel strip to each output, and helpfully, renames them - conga, snare, according to the names in GA5’s Mixer. From there, of course, all the powerful tools of Cubase are available. I would especially mention using the tools in the Edit Channels window.
Her is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fdWwtonE1U

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Nice work

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Brilliant!! Appreciate you sharing your work, the Gotcha’s are especially helpful.

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