I’m struggling to find the best way to record my TR-8S, knowing that I have mainly 3 ways to do this:
TR-8S as USB audio interface in my DAW, where i can capture midi & audio from all tracks
TR-8S: just record the audio via my audio interface, i personally like to have Kick & Snare in assignable / separate output and all the rest in the main stereo out, so that’s 4 inputs / audo tracks. But of course then no midi to change things later.
TR-8S as a VST via the cubase external instrument feature, here i have the midi & can have my 4 outputs (stereo L&R, kick & snare).
By the way,
There is no VST version of Roland TR Editor, that would have been fantastic. how you guys go about that? Do you use it in parallel of your DAW to control the TR-8S that is then recorded?
Midi Remote: Do you guys have mapped your TR-8S in the new Midi remote cubase feature? Any benefit of doing so?
I use your option 3 (TR-8S via External Instrument) - it gives me the best of both the audio and MIDI worlds, as you describe. Works like a charm!
I have as link to the TR Editor on my desktop, so if I need to go in and edit something, it’s just one click away. I only use that to do stuff like rename patches etc., I don’t use it to record parameter changes while a song is playing (not sure that that would actually work).
I’d also love to hear from others how they’re integrating their TR-8S (which is such a great drum machine!), I’m sure I can learn a thing or two!
Ok so after some tryial & error, it now works pretty close to what i had in mind.
I’m on Mac, so i use aggregated device where i put my UAD x8 + the TR-8S 14 inputs.
I use Cubase external instrument which allows me to:
List item: record the midi
List item: playback the midi
List item: record the 14 audio tracks, that you need to route to a group channel and then create audio tracks where you set-up the input as the correspding group channel, so it’s a lot of tracks, that i hide after the set-up.
List item: cubase can do midi latency compensation, as it’s an external instrument
Here is what it looks like, without hiding anything:
