Few questions from a newbie

Cubase
1

Hello everyone
I am newbie here and this is my first post. Basically i have switched from FLS / LMMS into Cubase AI 8 recently. ( due to purchase of UR22). It’s like from driving a car suddenly i have to be plane pilot.
I saw few videos but i feel completely lost. Therefore for now i have a couple of questions (more to come i guess)

1.How do i make beats on cubase? It seems that i don’t have groove agent or grove station. At least i cannot find it in plugin manager. Is it the only way to make some drum pattern in cubase AI ?
2.I have plenty of my own drum sounds (kicks, hit hats etc). How do i import them to create a beat/drums pattern?
3.Perviously i made dozen of audio clips . Now i want to import them into cubase into one track. I figured out how to import audio. However i tried to assemble them together into one track. It’s endless work of zooming in/out to combine them into track and see if they are correctly placed. Nonetheless there are still tiny gaps between them. Is there easier way to do this rather than manual way. I know that there isn’t easy way of doing anything but i didn’t know that it will be that time consuming comparing to gold wave or audacity . In those editors i just copy and paste clip after clip and it automatically place audio in the end of the other(without hole or silence between them).

Looking forward to your response :confused:
Thanks

2

Hello Polkor,

  1. AI is the smallest (bundle) Version of cubase. It is very limited. I’m not really shure what’s included and what is missing (I’m using Cubase Pro), but I guess groove agent and beat designer are not included. You just have Halion Sonic SE in stock, to load some drum sounds or you can use third party plugins. Just create an instrument track load your plugin with your desired drum sound and create, record or import some midi grooves / beats.

  2. You need a drum sample player plugin like groove agent or battery etc. for this. You can upgrade your AI version to cubase elements, which includes groove agent SE.

  3. Do you have the grid activated? With the activated grid your clips will snap automatically to the next grid position, which you can change to bars, beats or quantize value. Also there are 2 functions to close gaps automatically (crossfades, timestretch). But I guess they are also not included in the AI version. Take a look in the audio / extended menu.

3

could you recommend anything freewhich can replace groove agent /beat designer?

4

Groove Agent SE 4 is really fast and useful. Elements will give you overall more freedom than AI, but I would recommend you to upgrade to it even if it was just for GASE4.

The upgrade is just 50 bucks and it cuts a whole 100 bucks off the full price of either Cubase Artist or Cubase Pro if you decide to upgrade to them in the future.