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| quote: | Originally posted by evo8
If you change the colour at the top of your midi editor in cubase from "velocity" to "pitch", the notes will change colour as you go up the scale - i find this helps a little bit when your trying to see which note corresponds to what channel in Battery, rather than having all notes the same colour, can get messy seeing what note is playing a hat or snare etc....... |
Great tip! Thanks. Now if only there was some way to use pitch and velocity coloring simultaneously...
I started with Reason as well, and fell in love with Redrum for building complex beats. Switching to Cubase, I had the same issue as you, OP. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. But there are tons of options you can explore.
For starters, you should check out FXpansion's GURU, a combination sampler/loop player/step sequencer VST, and more. It's not yet as robust a sampler as Battery, but it goes far beyond Battery in terms of functionality. There's a free demo available. I love it, but still find the way it handles patterns and states to be a little awkward, and missing (?) functions like copying pattern to track. But the underlying concept is fantastic, and when it gets a bit more refined, I think this will be THE percussion and loop plugin to go to, period.
What I ended up doing instead was getting an M-Audio Trigger Finger, which you can get bundled with Battery 3 and its excellent huge sample library. It's much more intuitive to program drums by hitting pads than even a MIDI keyboard, IMO. Working with Cubase's drum editor still isn't ideal, but on the plus side I've found myself putting more expression and nuance into my drum tracks with this thing. And of course it's far more fun having a tactile experience with drums than using a mouse to program them. :P
Once GURU is a little older and more robust, I think I'll be switching to it for all drum programming. For now it works well for playing fills, self-made loops, background percussion etc. etc. Has excellent swing features too, and you can do panning/FX/pitch/etc. all right in its sequencer. Definitely keep your eye on this.
And of course as others above mentioned, you always have the option of setting up a step sequencer VST and hooking it into Battery. I don't know much about plugins in this area but it's something I'll be investigating too in this little quest to find a more tolerable and intuitive way to program drums in Cubase.
GL!
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, you can only see 1 drum at a time in redrum if your using the actual redrum itself and not looking at in the step sequencer, which can be a pain...
