Creating Drum Patterns/Beats with Beat Designer

[High Five]

Create Drum Patterns (i.e., beats or loops) Using Beat Designer and Groove Agent One

If you want to create your own drum patterns using Beat Designer in Cubase 5, try the following steps:

1. Open New Project (I used the Empty template)

2. Click on Devices and scroll to VST Instruments and left click (or press the F11 key on you computer keyboard)

3. Right click on VST Instruments channel 1 where is says “no instrument”

4. Scroll to Drum – Groove Agent ONE and right click

5. Click “Create” when prompted with the question “Do you want to create a MIDI track assigned to plug-in “Groove Agent ONE”. This will create a MIDI track and open Groove Agent ONE

6. Right Click on the little grey cube in the upper left hand corner of Groove Agent ONE, scroll to Load Preset and right click (It would have been more intuitive if the designers had of created two buttons for “Load Preset or Load Sounds” and “Save Preset”, but I digress)

7. The Search and Viewer pane opens with a list of drum kits (at least it does for me). If you click on Categories at the bottom of the pane, you will notice that the list of drum kits is a part of the Drum&Perc category of the media pool (at least that what I think it is)

8. Click on one of the drum kits and it will load into Groove Agent ONE. You can sample the sounds on the pads of Groove Agent ONE by using your mouse. Apparently, you can also use a MIDI controller if you have a drum map set up, but I haven’t done this yet

9. Right click on the little line and box icon of the MIDI Inserts section of the Groove Agent ONE inspector to “Show Active Inserts”

10. Right click next to the little arrow in the first insert section MIDI Inserts to “Select Effect Type”. A menu will open. Scroll down to Beat Designer and right click. The Beat Designer will open! This is getting exciting!!

11. If you right click on the little grey speaker icons next to the names of some of the drum sounds in Beat Designer, you will notice that they trigger some of the sounds that you loaded into Groove Agent ONE. If you right click on the names of the drum sounds, a menu will open which allows you to choose any of the sounds you loaded into Groove Agent ONE, but it is not intuitive, so you’ll have to figure it out. Also, there are only 8 Beat Designer “tracks” or drum sounds available, despite the fact that Groove Agent ONE has 16 pads for each drum kit, but I’ll tackle that some other time

12. Set your preferred tempo for the Groove Agent ONE MIDI track. The default, as we all know, is 120, so lets just stick with that for now

13. Press play on the Transport Panel and you will notice that a little blue light starts tracking near the top of Beat Designer!!!

14. Start clicking on the ‘instrument lanes’ to create your beat. I won’t get into all the features of Beat Designer, as I haven’t explored them all. You should start to hear the individual beats for each of the drum sounds

15. Once you are happy with your beat (i.e., drum pattern/loop), press stop on the Transport Panel and return the track cursor to the start of the Groove Agent ONE MIDI track

16. Drag and drop your new beat into the MIDI track by right clicking on the light grey thingy at the middle bottom of Beat Designer. This is explained on page 97 of the Plug-In Reference Manual, under the section ‘Converting Patterns Into MIDI Parts’. Note, you can’t just press Record on the Transport Panel and record the beat (although that would make a lot of sense. Nope, you have to drag and drop the beat into the MIDI track)

17. Deactivate Beat Designer in the Inspector by right clicking on the “Activate Insert” button (the light blue square button with the “knob” inside it). You need to deactivate Beat Designer to listen to your beat in the Groove Agent One without also listening to beat “in” Beat Designer at the same time

18. Click play on the Transport Panel and there’s your beat!

Comments:

It is also possible to assign each drum sound to a different Groove Agent ONE MIDI ‘sub-track’ in the project window, although I haven’t explored how this works after you drag and drop your beat into the MIDI track.

It is also possible to take a drum loop, slice it and assign the slices to different pads in Groove Agent ONE and then use Beat Designer to create a beat using those sounds. This would be useful if you don’t like the kits that come with Cubase 5.

I am assuming that it is possible to assign individual sounds from the Media Pool to each pad in Groove Agent ONE and then save the preset as your own, customized drum kit?

Cubase 5 still leaves something to be desired in regards to labeling, i.e., see my comment in #6 above and the difficulty I had indicating what icons to click on (i.e., little line and box icon)

The step-by-step instructions above should be included in the Cubase reference manuals. We’re musicians, not computer programmers!

Having Beat Designer as a ‘MIDI Insert’ seems odd to me. Groove Agent ONE and Beat Designer should really be combined into a single VST unit.

I would like to know why Beat Designer only has 8 ‘instrument lanes’ when Groove Agent ONE has 16 pads or sounds available for each drum kit.

The following tutorial on You Tube was useful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kzmCZVKSKg

Please let me know if you have found this helpful.

[WhiteShadows]

Very helpful.

Thanks so much
WS

[Tenebrous]

[nathanh]

"10. Right click next to the little arrow in the first insert section MIDI Inserts to “Select Effect Type”. A menu will open. Scroll down to Beat Designer and right click. The Beat Designer will open! This is getting exciting!! "

I had you up till this point. Unfortunately, Beat Designer is not one of the effects I have access to in my installation of Cubase 5. Maybe the installer put it in the wrong place? I have the other add in's like Reverence and Roomworks, so it's not like I didn't install the plug ins.....

What's the name of the dll? Maybe I can search and manually move it?

[nathanh]

Got it working! I re-installed the VST sounds collection using the "repair" feature and now it appears correctly. Awesome.

[Allan Johnson]

[Buster]