The other day as I was putting yet another MIDI drum kick on beats 1 & 3 it struck me that I keep doing this exact same task over and over. So I started thinking about building a small library of MIDI drum part elements. For example, suppose I have 3 different MIDI Parts (I know a very tiny library)
- Kick on 1 & 3
- Snare on 2 & 4
- Hats on 8ths with accents
If I stack these on the Lanes of an Instrument Track I can hear the different drums all playing. When satisfied with the beat I can Bounce MIDI and it is all in a single Part. The idea here isn’t to get a finished nuanced drum part. Instead it’s to facilitate the construction of basic rhythms for further refinement.
Similar things could be done for pitched instrument’s rhythms (although probably no need for Lane stacking). For example a MIDI Part with 4 quarter notes all on C3 could be used to create a bass-line by just changing the notes’ pitches (Metagrid I’m thinking of you here).
First I’m wondering if anyone does this or similar, what have you learned is useful & not? And for other folks what are you thoughts about how to best do this or if it even seems useful.
Additional thoughts/concerns:
For this to work there needs to be a library with enough of these elemental Parts to construct something useful. But if the library gets too big trying to find a desired element could be more time consuming than just writing the notes the old fashioned way. I wonder where that balance is?
Would it make more sense to access this library of Parts using Windows Explorer or Media Bay?