Hi guys i have a quick question about making drum tracks in Cubase. So I’ve got ez drummer and I’m aware of the click and drag method of making a drum track. But sometimes you want to make your own drum beats. Now here’s where my question comes in. How do you guys make your own drum midi beats? Do you individually click them in or do you use your midi keyboard/pc keyboard and do it that way and quantisize it and edit. My point being… God damn this can be a extremely long proccess that could take hours and hours. Is there an easier way?
Hi,
the easiest way is to record it via any MIDI hardware (MIDI keyboard or MIDI drum pads, or MIDI drum set). Then you will get the life feeling, not quantized groove. You can quantize it later on a little, but not to 100%. Use iterative Quantize, here.
Or you can draw it by pencil, but it’s realy very dificult to create great beat this way. You realy have to know rules, to know, which note should be early, which note should be late, ell velocities, etc.
I would realy recommend to record it. It’s much more musician, and even faster.
Get Jamstix 
+1
(And once you get a Jamstix to Groove Agent SE4 mapping put together, please post here )
Hmmmm just as i thought haha damn. That drumstix program Looks not to bad actually
I use Cubase’s Beat Designer MIDI plugin to program patterns and Native Instruments Battery 3 as the drum sampler. You can use Beat Designer with any drum sampler, though, including Groove Agent SE.
Beat Designer has such a streamlined interface that it looks more simplistic than it really is. But you can do a whole lot with it once you learn how it works, and how it integrates with Cubase drum maps, etc.
EDIT: Before I started using Beat Designer, I played all my rhythms by hand on my MIDI controller keyboard. Still do that now and then when I want a more natural groove. I like it better than playing on pads. Cubase’s MIDI support is so deep, you can manipulate the MIDI data any way you want after you’ve tracked out your beats.
Bit of a steep learning curve with Jamstix but worth the trouble…no more hunting around for midi files…you’ll get frustrated but just stick with it…
If you are familiar with EZ Drummer…EZ Drummer 2 has some nice features to create beats pretty quick. This tutorial was helpful for me.
