Groove Agent One and browsing for sounds

I am not finding substituting drum sounds in GAO as easy as I was hoping. For example, I am using the GM Kit but want to use the harsher CHH from the Heavy Kit without having to run a separate instance.

My search for a solution hereabouts led me to this thread from a chap who took the words right out of my mouth:

An early reply elaborates thus:

Actually, something does happen. The drag’n’drop takes place entirely within the target instance and it is a move, not a copy (I discovered this last night). I tried to drag the Heavy Kit CHH (F#1) to an empty pad on the GM instance, got the + sign on the icon, only to find that what had actually happened was that the GM CHH had moved from F#1 to the new pad, leaving silence in its wake. Moral: don’t try this at home!

Near the end there is a solution suggested (too long to quote): Mono to group Surround - Nuendo - Steinberg Forums

So why am I writing this? Well, I think there could doing with there being a more intuitive way of swapping drum sounds in this module so though I’d revive the discussion (although not the thread). I like the idea of being able to (say) right-click on a pad to bring up a panel allowing filtering and scrolling through sounds in the same way that we can currently scroll through FX presets to test them “live”. Having to locate samples in the MB and drag them to a pad involves the forebrain too much.

It’s disappointing that d’n’d between instances doesn’t work but improvements have been made to the GAO so maybe this will be added to the functionality at some stage.

I know, it’s free, so I don’t expect super-sophistication but it would turn “handy” into “nice” if it were easier to customise kits from the MB or other GAO instances and thus render buying a 3rd-party plugin less of a consideration.

In the meantime, all suggestions not involving money (or the manual) are very welcome.

If one could right click on a pad and audition sounds right there, GAO would often be all I need (well, maybe not the cymbals…)

Hi, NYC, hoped you’d join in again. :smiley:

I agree, I can get perfectly good kits out of this device. Ok, some of the sounds are a bit basic but so were the starting points for many of the great sounds that we have heard on records down the years. The magic happens in the engineering, it seems to me…

Here’s a little something. I’m not sure if it will solve your problem, but here’s how I do it.

All of the sounds from all of the drum kits are actually tagged in Media Bay. I use the top section of the Media Bay browser (the “Filter” section) to select just what I need, for example Drum&Perc → Snare Drum. You can then preview all the snare drums – you can use the up/down arrow keys to really fly through them. Then you can drag and drop one that sounds good onto the pad in question.

If you want to make sure you only get actual snare drums (and not EQ/FX settings that work with snare drums), you can change the lower half of the pane (i.e. the Results list) so it only shows audio files.

Alternatively you can just type “snare wave” into the results section instead of setting any filter criteria, and it will only give you snare drums that are .wav files, i.e. that are audio and not FX presets. This is what works for me most of the time and is the fastest, but text searches require understanding a little bit about how Media Bay works.

Dunno, that’s what I do…might be worth a try…?

Thanks for your suggestion but that’s pretty much where I am too. I don’t suppose that when you’re browsing you are able to play the drum sounds in context, are you? (short of tapping the rhythm out) but that’s what I think NYC and definitely me are missing.

Your pennyworth is appreciated, though. :slight_smile:

Nope the drum sounds won’t play in context…you can just get them to loop infinitely at a musically useless rate :wink: Only way to hear them in context is to commit to the drag and drop.

NI’s Battery does what you describe – right-clicking on a cell brings up a context menu. It’s not as quick and easy as GA1 though for basic things.