As of Cubase Pro 14.0, implementation of Patterns appears to be focused on using them for drums, especially together with the new Drum Machine on a Drum Track.
That’s great, but there’s no practical reason - and DAWs like Studio One or Logic Pro offer that - to not also use Patterns for melodic elements. From my experience that works very well for bass- and acid-lines, especially with step probability, various step sizes, lane lengths and playback directions per lane (all available right now in Cubase’s Pattern Editor).
But practical use of Patterns for MIDI tracks presents several problems:
It’s difficult to add Pattern to MIDI track, unless from the start one decides a Pattern is a primary type of event. Otherwise, one needs to go to MIDI / Open Pattern Editor and then drag & drop the pattern onto the Track, which is very unintuitive. Also, there’s no conversion of existing MIDI Part → Pattern.
When Pattern is already created, deciding which pitches one wants to use is cumbersome as each lane has to be manually added and its pitch selected from big list. And by default they’re ordered from low to high (confusing!). Ideally there should be a normal piano roll visible with lanes corresponding to keys, with an option to hide keys & lanes with unused pitches, when Patterns are used on a MIDI track. Or perhaps a “Learn” function could be included, that would add a lane for key(s) pressed on a MIDI keyboard?
There’s no option to tie / glue / connect steps, e.g. with a 1/16th grid, there’s no way to tie 4 consecutive steps to create a quarter note. The lane can be converted to 1/4 grid, but then all steps have to be quarters and all need to start on quarter measure, which removes a lot of flexibility.
The notes in Pattern don’t follow Chord Track, like normal MIDI Parts do, even if relevant options are selected in Inspector. Also, Pattern cannot be dragged onto Chord Track to detect key & scale, like it works for MIDI Parts.
[BUG] - dragging a VST Instrument onto existing Drum Track crashes Cubase 100% of the time (at least on the latest macOS), so that should be addressed.
It would be fantastic to see those already in v14.x
Well it happens 100% of the time when adding Drum Track, followed by drag & drop of Retrologue - or Padshop, or Serum, or PhasePlant, or Repro, etc. - onto it.
Some great tips in this thread.
But to the OP point I think they should just implement a arpeggio version in a similar manner.
However, some features I could use right away for drum tracks that could be useful also for melodic parts.
re-arranging the pads (or reverse order)
save setups for easy recall of different instrument setups (without reloading whole track).. Probably there may be ways to do this already.
proper pitch support in Parameter lane (in semi-tones not friggin 1-127 values)
Is it just me, or is step input via MIDI not possible in the pattern editor? I can’t seem to find a way to input notes other than clicking them in with the mouse.
