Drum Beat MIDI Project suggestions

I have been assembling a Project with all of the drum tracks for all of the songs my trio does. Each song consists of a Folder track plus 1 or more midi tracks of the drum beats and possibly some keyboard midi tracks. I use Addictive Drums for most of the drum sounds. When I want to play a song’s drum beats, I just click solo for the folder track of the song and Cubase solos the midi tracks and mutes all the other tracks in the project.
When all of the songs are ready for performance, I plan to render each song to an audio file and download them to my JamMan looper pedal.

I did the project this way so I wouldn’t have to open another project when switching to a different song. One of the problems with this is the tempo - I have to enter the tempo each time I switch songs. The tempo track won’t work because there can be only one tempo track per project.
Seems like there is a way to set the tempo in a midi track but I can’t remember how…

Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Eddy

You can automate the tempo track. :slight_smile:

This wouldn’t really work unless I had each song in different starting and end bars. E.g. Song 1 in bar 2 - 120, song 2 in bars 122-200, etc.

True. But then you could hit play and “let the good times roll”. :wink:

So, you have each track starting at the same time, and plan on soloing the track you want audible? I beieve there would be absolutely no way to do what you want to do, in that case. Why would you rather have it that way? Seems counter-intuitive, imo.

Once you lay the track out in a linear fashion, you could set markers to find each song, instantly. I believe the marker track has a list of the markers you added, for extremely easy access and quick play. You can program the markers to play in any order as well, so you only have to set it up once, but can change the playlist. …just a thought.

That sounds like it could work. I will give it a try!

So, how would you do something like this? Make each song a project ?
Thanks,
Eddy

No. I mean, you could do it with multiple projects, but then youd have a bunch of projects to shuffle thru. Now, you could have all the projects open, and only one of the projects would be “active”, so that could work…

But, why not just do it in a single project? Like you said, youd have to have the 1st song on bar 1-200 and song 2 on 202-400 or whatever, but it would allow seamless transitions between each song. And with the Marker Track being able to bring instant access to each song and then create a playlist of the songs in any order you deem fit, it would be very efficient and would allow you to rearrange the order of song on the fly, all within a single project.

For example; a project called “Gig Night” could have a total of 16 songs in it, all the songs will have their own tempo values, and can be called upon with a click. So youd create a playlist of the markers (the markers are essentially the songs) and can literally just hit play and let the whole gig play out while you guys focus on jamming.

While ive never done this, I believe the process would be something like…

1-Import all songs you wish to add. (1st song on bar 2-200, song 2 on 202-400, etc)
2-Create Tempo Track and automate the different tempo values for each song (linear).
3-Create a Marker Track and create markers for each song and name them. (Song 1, or jssi.net’s rain song (?lol))
4-Create a playlist within the Marker Track to call on particular songs in particular orders. (or just import the songs in the particular order you wish to avoid this step, though it allows playlist changes on the fly if needed. So you could play song 1 first, and if you feel the crowd doesnt feel it yet, cut to song 9, then back to song 2, or whatever.)

I apologize for not having done this before and not giving a better detailed description of how to do so, but I feel that once you get it going, it will do everything you need it to.

I just did a quick search and found these videos… maybe they will further help you… (btw, the marker track is called the Arranger Track, apparently lol. Sorry for the confusion)

Automating Tempo Track - - YouTube

Arranger Markers - - YouTube

Hope it helps. :smiley: