Groove Agent 4 ... is it time to give up Jamstix 3?

Thanks for all the helpful comments in this thread. What I’m looking to see if I can do is use Groove Agent SE4 (GASE4) as the drum sound for my Jamstix 3-generated MIDI drum tracks.

One thing I found out … there are a lot of acoustic kits included in the Cubase 7.5 version of Groove Agent SE4, even though there is no Acoustic Agent per se. They are in the Groove Agent 1 folder, as well as the GASE4 Alan Morgan sub-folder, accessed from the Media Bay search.

Also found out … you can replace the samples with your own external ones, and save them as pre-sets. So you can build your own kits in GASE4.


What I haven’t found out how to do is to replace the samples with ones from within Groove Agent SE4. That would be nice, as all the internal samples seem to have a common kind of processing, not matched by external samples. That actually seems like a significant draw back to me. For example … the kit I might like in GASE4 doesn’t happen to have 3 levels of high hat opening that are being played by my Jamstix drummer. I can grab the samples from elsewhere and load them onto an empty pad in GASE4 so they play when the MIDI track tells them to. But they will sound completely different than the “processed” sounds on the other pads. When I tried that with a couple of drum samples, they stuck out like a sore thumb. Maybe I can match the processing before I load them on the pad, but that is more work than i want to do, if I even can. Maybe there’s another way I’ll find out about!

I’m pretty close to just pulling the trigger on EZ Drummer 2 (which is reported to have mix and match between kits). Since I have Jamstix to generate my MIDI drumming, EZD2 is definitely more than I need, but the ability to pull a drum from one kit and put it in another seems like something I really need, afaik at this point, and it’s not a bank breaker at around $150. But I’ll give GASE4 a little more time to see if I can work through this last bit - trying to get drums from one kit in GASE4 into another … I’d sure like to stay “native” to Cubase, and avoid spending potentially unecessary $$ besides.

More to come, maybe!

Thanks for that. I’m wondering about Jamstix’s snare “bounce” however - it gets its own unique MIDI key assignment, so I wonder if that one at least is “triggered natively” … ?

Thanks for that detailed explanation, very helpful!

How did you find the mapping went between JS and Battery? In making my first drum key today I realized Jamstix has so many articulations for each instrument, and I’m not referring to velocity, but rather entirely different sounds (for example, “Snare” has articulations for “Center” , “Offset”, “Sidestick”, “Bounce”, and “Rimshot”, and in some kits, also “Brushed Mute” and “Mute”).

I am in the market for a drum VSTi just to get better samples, but I’m wondering if I will just have to accept the fact that I will lose “resolution”, meaning some of the Jamstix sounds, when I play them through Battery or EZ Drummer 2 etc., just because they are not as complete and detailed as Jamstix.

Any thoughts much appreciated - thanks!