Baffling difference between Key Editor and Drum editor

Apologies for what may seem like a dumb question. I write and record songs but find putting down a drum part very difficult, to be avoided where possible. One aspect drives me crazy. If I want to change a midi note from, say, a C to a D in the key editor I simply move it up two semitones, no problem. But if do something similar in the drum editor to change a sound, Cubase does not treat the moved midi note the same as others at the same register. For instance, the moved note is ignored if you take a nominally identical keyed-in one and try select all instances of it. Sometimes the moved note sound different from the others, as if it carries some of the attributes of its original position. The result is a lot of ghost notes in my messy drums tracks. Is this a bug in Cubase (as well as me) or am I missing something? I’m on version 10.5 but this one goes back a long way.

Not sure what you are doing. I move notes up and down regularly and haven’t noticed any problems. I am a drummer and set my own drum map to match SD3.
The biggest move I do is snare to cross stick. I just select the notes and drag them down. It really is just the note value and doesn’t take anything else.

By the way you don’t have to use the drum editor.

Indeed. You can even open the same Part in both the Key & Drum Editors at the same time and jump back and forth between them depending on which is easier for your current task. Same holds for the Score Editor too.


Thankyou for your replies. I clearly chose a bad title for this post. I’m talking about the difference between editing musical notes and drums in Midi. I remain baffled. Attached is a shot of part of a drum part. I should point out that this is a multiple view – each drum has its own track, but they were separated out from a single Groove Agent track. I highlighted one beat of Tabla 4 (D#), which I would expect to expose in the controller lane the velocity values of all instances of that sound. But, as the screenshot shows, only some show up. If I click a beat that does not show up I get a completely different set of instances and velocities. The same thing happens if I switch the view to the key editor.

As a non-percussionist I have a tendency to think of drum sounds as notes and velocities as volume, which is of course wrong on both counts. On the face of it, some of the midi notes appear to have retained parameters from an earlier incarnation. But I suspect that there is something about drum programming that eludes me. Can anyone explain, or point me to relevant explanations?

What you show in the picture is not the drum editor. You have to assign a drum map to a part and then you can name each instrument. I’m struggling to get what you mean. In the drum map you have the notes and the name down the left. The name can be changed. If you click on say a snare drum diamond then you will see the velocity for those notes at the bottom (if that’s what you have selected in the box bottom left). If you choose another instrument say ride cymbal you get the velocity for that at the bottom. If you drag the ride cymbal note onto snare you get a snare note. This of course all depends if the drum map is setup correctly. I don’t use groove agent but are there drum maps fir groove agent?

The drums are listed according the musical note assigned to them under Groove Agent. The highlighted D#2 is a drum I labelled Tabla 4, For some reason the Drum Editor (and this is the drum editor) has retained the note name but I have had a similar problem on tracks without this kind of confusion. If you look at the controller lane under the D#2 track, velocity values in the controller lane are given for only some of the beats. The ‘missing’ beats do play but they sound differently. If I select one of them, the others also show up in the controller lane but the ones shown here disappear. This is also the case if I switch to the key editor. I’m just trying to understand what is happening.

You’ve highlighted all the instances of the note in the part the selected note belong to. Your screenshot indicates that there are instances of the same note belonging to other parts (i.e., parts the selected note doesn’t belong to).

Exactly. This is exactly what I don’t understand. There are no other parts. The four tracks of shown in this screenshot are each one-note sequences, separated out from a single track to allow their levels to be controlled separately. But as you rightly point out the D#2 track seems to hold two sets of information. Why and how?

You may have multiple parts placed on the same track and stacked on top of one another. If the parts are of the same length all one sees is the top one. Dragging it sideways would uncover what’s underneath it. Check if that’s the case.

Alvaras, Thanks for your help. You are almost right. Somehow I have two D#2 tracks with different names, which the Drum editor combined into one. Don’t exactly know how it happened – perhaps when I concatenated two sequences. But I know now what to look for and correct. I’ve been using Cubase for years but never got the feel of drum programming and I’m still learning. I can’t be the only person that has had this problem – I have hit it before – and I wish I had used a better topic heading so that other confused people can pick it up. Thanks again.

Ah so your not using the diamond shapes for the drum editor. I find them easier for one shot sounds. Glad you got sorted and I think I now understand

Congrats on getting that hurdle out of the way!

I had a thought… the OP said they separated the MIDI info from a single stream generated by Groove Agent.

Is it possible that there are multiple samples layered on the same pad (note)? So, if you extracted only one of the layers ( sample for a particular velocity range)… you would be missing part of the performance?