I know all about Ctrl+D and Alt + drag. There are two use cases were I find these functions awkward:
Working with, say, a swung hat pattern in a two bar loop, I get the 2nd beat in the first bar right, say, and I want to copy the first and second beats together to the 3rd and 4th beats and then copy all the hats from bar one to bar two exactly without affecting any of the other drum hits for now.
I want to copy this two bar hat pattern to a new two bar loop without any of the other drum hits present in the original pattern.
In these cases Ctrl + D doesn’t place the copies in the correct spot and with Alt + drag makes it difficult to position correctly, especially when swung (off grid) hits are involved. What I want to do is select a range of bars, beats or sub-divisions of beats for one drum voice including all hits and duplicate that into an exactly equal new range with all the hits in exactly the same place as the original.
I seem to see folk do this all the time in Ableton, but I can’t find anything on how to do this in Cubase. Can you?
The Drum Editor duplicates the MIDI Notes the exactly same way, as the Key Editor. It means the new duplicate starts at the end of the last note of the original. It’s not based on the grid at all (even not in the Key Editor). The disadvantage of Drum Editor in this case is, you don’t see the Note length graphically.
So the solution would be to extend one of the Note Length so, it matches the grid and your needs.
When I need to do stuff like that I just open the drum Part in the Key Ed (no need to even close the Drum Editor) do the duplication where I can see everything and then hop back to the Drum Editor.
Each of the 4 MIDI Editors have different strengths & weaknesses. But you can use all of them simultaneously, so often the easiest thing is to use an alternative editor whose tools better match the specific task at hand.
Another alternative is to make sure that your Drum/MIDI Part on the Project page is exactly the length you want, duplicate the Part and then Glue them all into a single Part. If the initial Part was open in the Drum Ed while doing this you’d see it expand in the Editor when they got glued.
Oh thanks for the info. I’d missed that one (in my own defense 90% of the drums parts I write are internal to BFD3 so I don’t focus on the Drum Ed much).
Yes, but the important part “grid relative” was not addressed in the OP. It’s NOT difficult to position duplicates correctly if grid relative is enabled. It keeps them at their position relative to the grid.