Please give Drum Machine the ability to increase Polyphony of sample play

Cubase
1

Unless I have completely missed it (and, believe me: I have searched far and wide-both within the program and throughout the internet) I don’t see any way to set Drum Machine to allow it to play multiples of the samples loaded onto ONE PAD (Note: I am NOT referring to polyphony between DIFFERENT samples, which Drum Machine already has the ability to do).

Why is this important, you may ask? Well, for one: getting your cymbal work to sound realistic ABSOLUTELY requires this. If you hit 4 16th notes on a real Ride, for example, at say 90 BPM, that Ride will “play” first the 1st, then the 2nd, then the 3rd and then the 4th 16th note, with each new 16th note adding its attack to the already sustained note of the previous hit, and so on and so forth.

The way Drum Machine is currently set up: if you hit a Ride once, at say a high velocity, and then immediately hit it again, but this time at a low velocity, you will easily hear the problem: the 2nd hit will immediately mute and choke out the 1st hit, rather than adding its attack to the 1st hits sustain, and then increasing the overall sustain of the final sound.

This is completely unrealistic and very jarring.

I want to generally compliment Steinberg for Drum Machine: a good-even very good-addition to Cubase. But I want to also assure them: there are some Beat Makers and Producers out there who need and appreciate the sound of a realistic Cymbal. We’re not ALL out here making Trap Music. Heck: a LOT of Boom Bap can make use of a realistic cymbal sound.

And then, of course: there’s those of us who would just like to use Drum Machine for non-Urban-based music. Rock, Country, some Pop, even Jazz-they’d ALL need a realistic-sounding cymbal.

Why cut those people off from being interested in Drum Machine?

So: please implement this. Thank you.

2 Likes
2

I just encountered this myself and seeing that this post is from many months ago, I assume there isn’t a workaround. From a dev perspective, I wonder why the polyrhythm stuff in the editor tab was given higher priority than this. I’d much rather see polyphony and choke group in the initial offering. Doing so would provide the baseline functionality any drum machine needs, and also gives Steinberg more ammo to sell future updates. Instead, the current update is less enticing to anyone who wants to use a ride cymbal, and it makes future updates feel kinda weird because they end up adding basic stuff that should already be there. Priorities, man. I mean, if the polyrhythm interval duration is shorter than the sample length, what’s the point of using polyrhythm in the first place? A similar problem also happens when increasing the repeat count. By not providing the baseline functionality first, multiple problems are created that couldn’t have existed otherwise. I dunno, maybe there was a good reason to do it like this, but certainly seems strange from an outside perspective.

Edit: I just wanted to add that there are indeed valid reasons for something like this, including tech debt, office politics, conflicting managerial decisions (usually this :wink:), etc., etc. I’m not mad at Steinberg for adding awesome new features even in the slightest.

3

Whenever I run into limitations in Drum Machine I use Groove Agent SE instead.