I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on why they use and prefer the drum editor? I always use the piano roll and personally I think it’s faster and easier for me to work with. For me it’s easier to select parts, change lengths and nudge start times, etc in piano roll than in drum editor. Do you prefer drum editor? Why? I’m always interested in getting better at the parts of Cubase I don’t use much. Thanks!
From my own perspective, working with BFD3, which can have many articulations for one kit piece it’s indispensable.
BFD3 and other ‘real’ drum vstis use articulations to help them sound as real as possible… i don’t know how much you know about real acoustic drums so apologies if this is a little simplistic.
Take a snare drum for instance. if you hit it in the centre of the drum it will sound different to hitting it at the edge, it will also sound different the harder you hit it, you can also hit the metal hoop and edge of the skin together at the same time causing a ringing sound called a ‘rim shot’… one drum can yield MANY different sounds and using articulations is how they deal with this.
Therefore a snare drum won’t just be covered by one midi note, it will need one for a regular ‘hit’, one for a rimshot, one for sidestick, one for a stick drag etc etc…
Trying to manage kick (two artics and thus two midi notes), up to six snare artics, three artics per tom typically with three toms in a kit, thee or four cymbals each with three artics. For hats i generally use variable tip and shank with cc4 to control them, other people will use note number per artic instead which is around a dozen IIRC.
I also very often will mix other sounds in with a kit like a Linn or DMX type ‘drum machine’ which i can edit from the same drum map/drum editor so i don’t have to flip between midi tracks if i want to tweak one in regard to the other (‘real’ drums against the ‘drum machine’ to get the groove feeling just right)… it’s INCREDIBLY elegant in that respect… i might also decide to include percussion from halion too, again all doable from the editor in one window if one sets it up right.
Once you get your head around the drum map editor it’s very quick and easy, ok you spend some time setting it up but i find that i make that time back as it’s so fast to work on complex parts VERY quickly.
For people who want a very simple kick, snare, hat type thing there’s not really the need for the drum editor or drum maps.
A few months back i was working on a track that just needed a very simple setup that needed just that so i did it on the piano roll as it was just three sounds or three midi notes in effect…
HTH!
^^^ What he said. I must say that the recent improvements to the drum editor were very welcome. To be able to restrict the view to only those parts used/played saves so much time and effort.
It really is worth the time and effort to get to know the drum editor. It has improved the quality of my drum parts beyond all expectations.
This is great. I’m so glad I asked this question. I had no idea that a single instance could handle multiple articulations and layers. I do a lot of work with drum sound creation-building elements from multiple layers of other sounds, etc. My current work flow for example with closed hats is to have three or so different instrument tracks with battery 4 and then each one is playing a different closed hat and those are all eq’ed and filtered to create the single closed hat that I like and then I bounce the three down to audio as a single closed hat and I’ll use an audio track for that.
From what you are describing it sounds like this is a way to still do all that but maybe control everything from this single drum editor (maybe like abletons drum rack?)
Yep!
Not sure about ableton though…