The Calvary comes to the rescue, thanks John! It’s been a great education to work through this one, but at this point I’ll learn more (and save lotsa time) in studying your canonical version.
Seems like that Simon Phillips kit must be popular, it’s pretty darn good.
We’d like to add some jazz kits to Dorico by default, but I don’t think it’ll be these Simon Phillips ones, so I thought it was worth creating all the files people would need if they have bought that expansion kit themselves. Let me know if you spot any weirdness - is it late on a Friday here…
BTW @_derBertram and @FredGUnn John’s template answers the question I was getting at (it was hard to follow I know).
Dorico by default has Ride Cymbal (Low) & Ride Cymbal (High) but this kit has three, so yes you need to define a distinct new ride cymbal (Medium) to distinguish it so the routing comes across. Otherwise it looks good, what I was zeroing in on anyway.
When setting up, the two main steps are to load the playback template by dragging onto hub, then loading the kit in the New Instrument dialog.
One thing maybe, unless I missed it there’s instructions about using the Percussion maps (Jazz and Jazz Brush) but not instructions to load them.
Personally, I am a lot more interested in the patterns than the kits, but I may be in the minority with that. And in particular, I’m more interested in patterns as they might be shown to the drummer, as opposed to all the extra strokes that a drummer might add on their own.
To make the patterns sound human, it may be necessary to do something more like what Band-in-a-Box does, automatically inserting different fills and beats at key points in the cadence.
Carefully comparing, I’m using “Mid Swing Brush” pad Main 2 and this note
Plays in Dorico as a crash (and you can see it labeled as such), but I don’t hear a Crash in the pad at all.Watching the pad it’s not using Crash (C#2) but C3 Hi-hat (pedal). Will look into it more, but it appears to be a mismatch?
Edit: Hm, not reproducing this in a fresh project, still investigating …
To import a pattern into Dorico, you have to first define the kit and the percussion map, otherwise Dorico doesn’t know where to put the pattern. None of it is really standardized, even sometimes within the same product, so there are lots of kits and maps to be defined if you want to import MIDI. You can always just trigger a sample though and forget about importing.
I am able to drag patterns from GA Phillips or from Addictive Drums, and they come across decently. Perhaps that is because the patterns mostly adhere to GM. I’m not trying to do any complex patterns because I am mostly interested in showing the drummer the most basic beats for the song style.
The Phillips package has decent patterns for some of the more common stuff, but there are surely at least 30 fundamental beat patterns any drummer should be able to use as a starting point. It would be nice to have all of that in one place that is easy to access.
As far as triggering patterns, it looks to me like GA is EXTREMELY limited in this regard. In the Simon package, only one bank of pattern pads is used, and that is only 16? pattern fragments. You can select a few more to assign to the various pads, but it doesn’t seem very expansive. I don’t see enough in the patterns to make it sound like a real drummer playing real fills with reasonable variety. Maybe I am missing an important dimension here.
Style builder. Make more pattern pad variations. Plus in full GA a diamond drum editor to build that way.
It isn’t clear how I can create and save dozens or hundreds of these variations and make them available to Dorico for MIDI triggering – and have them available to all my projects.
It all seems cluttered and convoluted. I am accustomed to folder structures with lots of loops. This seems a lot more confusing. Perhaps GA is not the best tool for the job I would like to accomplish.
I haven’t tried yet, but I presume you can trigger band in a box in a similar way? If that’s what you’re looking for/used to?
You can do that too. A couple of different ways to make and organize patterns in GA. Can also drag and drop midi files on pads from the OS explorer.
Can drag patterns out of GA to tracks/staves in many hosts as well.
Soak up the user manual.
I am not aware of that capability. What I meant to say that if I really want something that seems like a human playing the drums with variations that make sense throughout a cadence, I can take MIDI out of BIAB and insert it on by Dorico drum track. I am not aware of any way to send MIDI triggers to BIAB. BIAB is not really a VST per se. They do have a VST package, but it is really just a way to get an instance of BIAB showing inside the DAW, and it facilitates dragging MIDI from a BIAB composition onto DAW MIDI tracks (or I guess audio tracks too if that is what you want.)
That same process can be used for piano, bass and drums if one is looking for somewhat realistic human playing.
In GASE, the patterns can also be adjusted in intensity and complexity and saved (also automated with CC’s in Dorico).
Go to the EDIT-TAB in GASE.
Revisiting with a bit more time to lay in a few basic ‘concepts’.
Consider that GA is more about experimenting and hearing in real time. It can be helpful, or even inspirational to use it to quickly set up grooves. You wouldn’t worry about scoring these out in a traditional ‘through composed’ format so it shows up on the score as a ‘proper trap set stave’ until some of the very last stages of project completion. Even then, you might elect to ‘mute’ the actual drum stave (I.E. Establish the ‘visible trap set stave’ to use a general MIDI kit in HSSE as an ‘option’ for someone that might import your Score Project and not have GA installed), and just use the ‘patterns’ (triggered from say, a hidden piano stave for yourself).
In general, you keep up with pattern groups as part of your Kit Preset in GA itself. Each group can hold 128 patterns! Kits and Pattern Groups can be managed somewhat independently, but it’s often nice to just save the ‘entire thing’, as this allows you to ALSO keep up with ‘mixing styles, effect chains, and other variations’ along with the pattern sets.
First, I recommend forgetting the host (Dorico in this case) and just playing with Groove Agent itself for a bit. You could even do it in stand-alone mode.
Next, keep in mind that GA itself is meant to be a ‘building tool’. Kits, Patterns, and Style Agents can be added through ‘content packs’.
The various Cubase Hosts that ship with Groove Agent SE can come with different amounts and ranges of content packs, and one can also purchase Expansion Content. There is also a more advanced version of GA that also ships with a lot more kits, patterns, and styles.
Be aware that with GA, at this time, there are two basic categories of ‘kit’. Acoustic Agent Kits are somewhat locked down and include fancy animated macro screens for the kits,
some preset mixer tab options,
and quite often a style builder engine.
Acoustic Agent kit pattern groups can also use traditional MIDI patterns that can be bagged and tagged (rating/searching/filtering) via the media browser, and they can also be drug in from the Steinberg Media Bay (Nuendo/Cubase feature for bagging and tagging any and all content you like…MIDI, samples, you name it), OS File Explorer, as well as through various ‘importing’ methods.
In many hosts, users can select and then drag and drop MIDI events right into the MIDI pattern manager. I.E. In Cubase, use the range tool to select some portion of a MIDI track from inside the drum diamond editor; then drag the events right into the pattern. (I haven’t tried this with Dorico yet, but it might be possible to select through composed bars and simply ‘drag them in’).
The Full version of Groove Agent also includes a special diamond drum editor for working with traditional MIDI grooves.
Advantages of Acoustic Agent kits include ‘uniformity’. You know that the entire kit was sampled in the same place, by the same player, using the same sticks and technique, same mics, etc. Macro screens can make things easier to find, see, and use. Styles can be ‘dialed in’ to a ‘pattern pad’ quickly and easily. It only takes a few seconds to build a fresh intro, groove variation, fill, or ending. Acoustic Agent kits can also use traditional MIDI loop patterns. One disadvantage to Acoustic Agent kits is that you cannot simply drag new samples onto empty pads to ‘add’ to a kit. You cannot ‘delete or change’ the various instrument pads (kit pieces). They’re pretty much locked in…thus, if you need to mix and match elements of various Acoustic Agent kits, you’d need more than one instance of GA SE, or to use the full version GA that allows loading up to 4 kits at the same time (set them to independent channels, or mute/remap things into a single seamless kit).
While you cannot ‘change/add/remove’ instrument pads for an Acoustic Agent Kit, you CAN ‘remap’ the trigger events for pads at will. You can ‘mute/solo’ individual pads easily.
Beat Agent Kits are fully unlocked kits of which the user can add/delete/edit individual instrument pads. You can build an entire kit from top to bottom. Drag samples onto pads and tune the sound/behavior into a matching kit. These kits do NOT benefit from macro screens. Instead, you get a general set of ‘building tools’ where one can work with the waveforms directly.
Instead of getting a fancy macro screen, Beat Agent Kits use standard UI elements for the mixer tab, and the user can build very powerful and versatile routing and mixing arrangements.
Beat Agent Kits do NOT get a ‘Style Building’ engine, as at this time, users cannot build these special style engines (they require heavy scripting and special resource files, and unlike HALion 7, there is no ‘user’ kit for this level of building in Groove Agent at present); however, one can still work with MIDI based patterns as shown above for Acoustic Agents.
Loading/Saving Kits and Patterns
Note, you can load/save ‘pattern groups’ independently of ‘drum kits’ (Right click one of these areas, and also via various options/tools in the media browser).
You can toggle on/off the ability to load kits without any ‘patterns’ that might be part of a kit preset.
You can also drag styles or MIDI right onto a pattern pad from the Media Browser pane.
Triggering Pattern Sets
Different work flows and hosts can benefit from a variety of methods for triggering a pattern.
I.E. while auditioning and building a pattern pad, toggle mode is great, as the groove will cycle over and over until you change or stop it. For some hosts, ‘holding’ the trigger event out might be more cumbersome and finicky than simply using ‘one shot’ or ‘toggling’ pads. So GA gives you ‘options’.
For each pattern pad you have some options on how a pad behaves.
In ‘Hold’ mode, you must ‘hold’ the pad down…the pattern plays until the trigger event is off. In ‘One Shot’ mode, trigger a pad one time and it plays one time through and stops. In Toggle mode, touch a pad and it repeats indefinitely until you trigger it again, or trigger a ‘different pad’.
Building pattern sets
Styles are included with Groove Agent content packs. Styles Will Be Tied to a specific drum kit (as in, it might sound funny if you load a Style meant for a specific kit into a different kit that is mapped out differently. It can still be used, but you might need to ‘remap some of the instrument pads’)!
At this time we users cannot build these ‘style engines’ ourselves, but the concept on how they’re designed is fairly simple. Each style is based on a single ‘main groove’. There may also be a number of ‘intro, fill, and ending’ variations with a given style.
For each setting on the ‘dial’, you can pull in various degrees of ‘complexity’ and ‘intensity’.
This thing allows you to generate variations quickly. Start with a ‘style’ that you can select from the browser. (Styles tab, and filters can help you search/filter. Can also rate and tag styles further)
You simply select a pattern pad, choose a ‘style’ from the browser .
Use the dial, buttons, and matrix to ‘dial in’ an intro, groove, fill, or ending. Once you have what you want, go to a new pad and do it again.
At some point you might wish to drag the results of these ‘Style Patterns’ onto a stave in the Score. If your host cannot accept drag and drop in this way, you can also drag it to the desktop, to a system directory in the GA ‘right pane’ Media Browser, or into a file explorer of your OS and a MIDI file will be generated of the style’s results at that location.
I haven’t gotten a chance to experiment here yet, but chances are good one might want to experiment with the various swing/quantize settings as you try things (for cleaning ‘looking’ results on the page. I.E. Maybe it should ‘sound’ like it swings, but LOOK like straight 8ths.
Working with MIDI Patterns
MIDI grooves can be drug right into Pattern Pads. It’s possible to access them from anywhere on your system in a variety of ways.
Media Browser also allows you to track files in the Database. Add tags such as star rating, tempo, style, other keywords, and more.
Drag and drop from your OSes native file Explorer.
Through the Media Bay of some hosts like Nuendo, Cubase, and possibly even more.
This is all I have time for right now, but with a fresh new outlook and a small amount of practice I think you’ll find that GA is a pretty well designed groove and kit hosting tool. It’s not very hard to use once you grasp where things are. It’s pretty powerful and can be quite inspirational to play with.
Again, in the beginning I wouldn’t worry too much about connecting this instrument to Dorico. That process can zap all the fun out of it! It can also be quite misleading trying to make Dorico talk to a plugin that one doesn’t even understand yet!
When it comes to triggering these ‘patterns’ in Dorico…forget drum maps! You don’t need a percussion map, nor expression map at all to trigger these!
Set GA so the pattern pads are triggered over a different channel from the ‘instrument pads’.
Use a very simple instrument stave…perhaps piano to trigger the pads. Perhaps toggle or one shot mode would be easiest to deal with (don’t have to worry about note length/value then…just a note of any value to start/stop/change pads).
Wow, exhaustive post, very useful. Personally I hate dealing with DAW stuff, I’m all about notation, so Dorico opening this up is getting me into drum kits for the first time, really enjoying getting into this, but I’ll stay away from the ‘old way’ of doing drum kits thank you 
There’s two Simon Phillips kits, the Jazz Drums discussed here and another more general kit Studio Drums, that one is a full set with all the toms, drums and cymbals you could want. Maybe a good choice if you want to make up your own patterns and get into it deeper. I’ll wait for a sale an pick that one up too. Request to @John_at_Steinberg if you could do maps for the SP Studio kit also.
Yes, so adding to the overview above…
It’s possible to ‘learn’ a CC for the various controls in the style builder, and manipulate them in real time with a CC lane from a Dorico instrument stave; thus, removing the need to even make multiple fresh ‘pattern pads’.
Example: Right click the intensity value.
Learn CC
Send the CC you want to use from your MIDI controller.
Now you can ‘dial in/out’ more intensity via CC lane of an instrument
Yeah, I just have the Jazz set.
One of my favorite uses for GA for years now (in many hosts, including the ‘other’ Scoring engines), is building my own percussion and/or sound effect trees on the fly.
Need something odd ball like a Lion’s Roar (pulling rough rope through a box)? Someone slamming away on the break drum from a 57 chevy with an egg beater? That rain stick over in the corner? The iphone made sample of granny rocking on the porch? Whatever…
Just open an instance of GA, drag it on the pad, and boom.
Quick and easy way to trigger and process any sample you want.
Interesting, you mean it can be used as a kind of a sampler, and now we can do that in Dorico? So if you have some arbitrary wav’s, you can drag those into GA and off you go. That could be useful for expanding out the percussion possibilities without having to buy a ton of specialty VSTs. Do you suggest the full version of GA? I think that has more of the sampling stuff.
Yes and no.
GA does have tools to ‘make/record’ the samples but it might not work in Dorico (Dorico currently has no way to get audio ‘inputs’ on the mixing console and routed into a plugin); still, you can most definitely load any sample(s) you like onto a pad. You can get up to 16 velocity layers per pad I think (and it’s possible to do a little hack with a ‘silent sample’ and then link some pads together to get more velocity layers if you ‘really need’ that many.
There is a catch though. As I said before, those “Acoustic Agent” kits are locked in. You can’t just drag stuff to an empty pad in those kits.
What you CAN do however, is use a fresh instance of GA SE and trigger your custom kits from there.
On full Groove Agent 5…worth it to buy?
Here are the advantages…
You get MANY more ‘kits’. Both Acoustic Agent and Beat Agent Types. You’ll also get a small assortment of ‘marching and orchestral battery percussion’. Extended sets of ‘toys’. EDM/Synthy style kits. Scores of samples you can play around with in building custom kits. Loads of patterns and styles.
Full GA can load up to 4 kits at the same time. That makes it a bit easier to mix and match elements from those ‘locked Acoustic Agent Kits’. I.E. You want the Kick Drum from a Vintage Set, but you really like the snare from some other kit better. So, you could stack the two kits, mute the snare in one, solo it in the other, and done.
Also the extra kit slots make it a breeze to mix your ‘custom kits’ with the Acoustic Agent ones.
I.E. Stack an Acoustic Agent to my custom kit, set both to same channel. Just use higher or lower pads and leave the ones blank that would be ‘duplicated’ in the Acoustic Agent kit. So now I’ve simulated having my stuff in the same kit, on the same channel. Etc…
You can also set each of the 4 kits to different MIDI channels.
It has some kind of jam mode that does some kind of kit/pattern syncing stuff (build advanced patterns for multiple kits).
It has the Diamond Editor for building/editing MIDI patterns.
Possibly some more advanced features when it comes to editing samples/parameters. Access to more little things like ‘pitch modulation’.
I got it because I wanted the content (Also had full HALion, so could do really deep sampling and stuff in there already). Over in Cubase, using multiple instances of GA SE, and supplementing with the Cubase Diamond Editor was pretty dern close to full GA otherwise.
In a host like Dorico that doesn’t really have tools to quickly/easily/precisely build drum tracks, or if you simply enjoy building grooves and stuff in stand alone mode, the 4 kit slots and that built in diamond editor are indeed nice to have!
So really, I guess the best way to decide is have a look at the comparison chart, and grab the demo to see if you think it’s worth it.
OK @John_at_Steinberg next week take a look at this - elaboration of the glitch I saw above, reproducing it in a fresh project and double checking everything if I got it right
Here’s a brush pad - Main 2 in Mid Swing Brush
Drag to Dorico which is set up with the Jazz Brush map
Dragging Main 2 over this crash cymbal is not in the original pad, I think it should be a hi-hat looking at the pad playing (and by ear)
Here’s the project, except I’m using NP and Ivory for the other instruments
GASPIssue.dorico (2.0 MB)
There may be other glitches (if this is one), I just noticed this in particular
