Combining the SQ-64's powerful sequencer with the ARP 2600m by Kabuki

Liven Up Your Drum Loops, Part 2

By John Walden

If you want to breathe new life into your drum loop library, Cubase has the tools. You just need the know‑how! This is the second part of a three-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 3.

Last month, in the first part of this short series on getting more mileage out of your audio drum loops, we looked at cataloguing a loop collection in Cubase's Mediabay, slicing it using the Sample Editor and then exploiting these sliced sounds via Groove Agent One (GAO). This time, we'll run through ways to use Beat Designer to exploit sliced loops in GAO.

Beat It

The Beat Designer window has been resized to show all 32 steps used in the current pattern.

As its name suggests, Beat Designer is a tool for creating drum patterns. It can be inserted as a MIDI plug‑in on a track that's sending MIDI to GAO. Much as I like the Cubase Drum Editor, pattern‑based drum programming can often be quicker, more intuitive and allow easier experimentation. The patterns themselves are created in the central grid, where beats can be added to trigger specific drum sounds at particular positions in the pattern. Beat Designer can hold 48 patterns, organised into 12 banks of four, and selected via the mini‑keyboard‑style buttons at the bottom of the window or triggered via MIDI. Pattern Banks can be saved and then re‑used in other projects.

Names On The Map

By default, Beat Designer shows eight drum lanes, with sounds that default to GM mapping (for example, kick drum on C1, snare on D1, closed hi‑hat on F#1, and so on). When your GAO drum sounds are based on slices from a drum loop, this GM mapping is unlikely to match your GAO pads. GAO allows you to change the MIDI note associated with a particular pad but, unfortunately, this is not the best strategy, because it means that the MIDI loop created by GAO no longer triggers the original loop correctly.

There are a couple of simple ways to improve matters. First, you could create a Drum Map (see the screen shot, opposite). You'll find more detail on this back in SOS February 2009, but essentially this maps input notes ('I-notes') to output notes ('O-notes') that drive your drum module. With only three or four GAO slices/pads to configure, the process takes only a couple of minutes.

Equally as quick, another approach involves putting a second copy of your best hit for each drum sound onto the appropriate pad to fit the GM convention. However, to retain the maximum flexibility, it's also worth going back a step: make sure that when you first drag and drop your sliced loop from the Audio Part Editor to GAO, you drop it in one of the higher pad groups, well away from the key MIDI notes used for the GM drum mapping between C1 and B2. If you then re‑open your sliced loop in the Audio Part Editor you can perform a second drag‑and‑drop operation for just the best slices onto the appropriate pads to match the GM convention (the most common ones are in group two of the GAO pads). You then have access to the MIDI trigger loop (based on notes in the higher octaves) and the key individual slices. Of course, it would be easier if you could just copy a pad to another pad in GAO but, for some reason, you can't do that (only swap or move samples from one pad to another). There's something small for a Steinberg GAO programmer to work on!

In The Bank

In this Drum Map, only three O‑Notes needed adjustment to use the best kick, snare and hi‑hat slices to map correctly between Beat Designer and the sliced loop in GAO.

Basic pattern creation in Beat Designer is a doddle, but two settings are worth checking before starting; the number of steps, and the step resolution. Both of these are located at the top left and, together, they dictate how long (in beats and bars) your patterns will be. For example, if you set the number of steps to 32 and the step resolution to 1/16, you end up with patterns that are two bars in length, with 16 steps in each bar. Usefully, the Beat Designer window can be resized, and if your screen real‑estate allows, it's well worth making it wide enough to show all the steps in a pattern, to avoid the tedium and confusion of scrolling while you're programming.

The best way to quickly create some patterns is to generate a basic starting pattern, copy it a few times, and then create variations using each of those copies. The drop‑down Pattern Functions menu (the downwards-pointing arrow-head located at top left) includes Copy Pattern and Paste Pattern options, so this is easy to do. Patterns can be triggered via the buttons located centre‑bottom of the window or from MIDI notes. To ensure that the MIDI note data intended as pattern‑change information is correctly interpreted, make sure the Jump button (top right) is lit. By default, Beat Designer waits until the next bar when changing patterns, but if you also engage the Now button, changes become instantaneous.

Creative Tools

The Pattern Function menu allows patterns to be copied and pasted within the Beat Designer pattern bank or pasted into the Project window as MIDI parts.

Beat Designer includes a few tools that make it easy to do some creative experimentation with your patterns. For example, while you have some control over the velocity of a step depending on the vertical position that you click in the lane when you create it (higher velocities at the top), if you click and hold on a step and then drag vertically, you can set an exact velocity (the velocity is displayed as you move the mouse). In addition, if you hold the Shift key while dragging vertically, this will adjust the relative velocity of all the active steps in that lane — which is useful if you need to adjust the overall balance of a single drum without losing any dynamics you might already have programmed. Finally, on the velocity front, if you hold down Alt (PC) or Option (Mac), click on a step and drag up or down to change its velocity, but then also drag left or right while moving up or down, you can create velocity ramps. This is great for programming things like snare rolls that build in level towards the end of a bar.

Experimenting with the timing of the beats for particular drum sounds can also provide some useful variations. If you want to move the positions of beats in a particular lane, this can be done in whole‑step divisions by holding the Shift key down and dragging left or right. If you want a slightly more subtle positional shift, the horizontal Offset sliders (located to the right of the lanes), can be adjusted to either push or drag the beats in a lane relative to the absolute grid. These sorts of shifts can really change the feel of a pattern and are worth experimenting with.

For a somewhat more unpredictable result (well, musically unpredictable at least), holding the Alt/Option key and dragging over a lane will 'invert' it — existing steps are removed, empty steps have a beat created. It is, of course, also possible to copy an entire lane: hold down Alt/Option and then click and drag in the name column on the left of the window. This is useful for doubling things like kick drums, so you can trigger two different kick-drum slices to add some bottom‑end beef.

In this example, a velocity ramp is being added to a snare roll (the middle of the three populated lanes). Note that three of the snare beats also have flams added (indicated by the small dots), while both the snare and hi‑hat (lowest populated lane) have had both some timing offset adjustment and type 2 swing added.

Clicking right at the base of an existing step button allows a flam to be added (a tiny dot appears at the bottom of the step button. If you continue to click, this cycles through single, double and triple flams, before returning to no flams again. The small set of controls located at the bottom left of the window allow the positions of the flam relative to the beat grid, and the relative velocity of the three flams, to be set. These settings operate at the pattern level, so you can create different flam effects for each pattern.

Finally, if you want to add a little swing to particular lanes, you can chose between two settings using the very small slash‑like switches located next to the Offset sliders to the right of each lane. By default, all lanes use setting 1 and, also by default, this is set to zero swing. The amount of type 1 and type 2 swing can be set using the two horizontal sliders located at bottom right. Again, these operate in a pattern‑based fashion, so there's plenty of flexibility here.

MIDI Matters

When creating drum parts from scratch, I prefer the pattern‑based approach of Beat Designer to using a MIDI editor, but your own mileage may vary. If you do create some Beat Designer patterns and have a hankering to edit them further with the MIDI or Drum Editor, patterns can be exported to your project by dragging and dropping from the pattern buttons to a MIDI track or via the drop‑down Pattern Functions menu we used earlier for copying patterns. Either way, if you want the actual MIDI data, make sure you turn off the Jump button before exporting. If you don't, the MIDI part created will simply contain a single MIDI note for triggering the pattern in Beat Designer.

And Finally…

In the final part of this series, we'll turn our attention to the new and improved Loopmash and see what tricks that has up its sleeve for… well… mashing loops.   

Read Part 1 and Part 3.   

Published October 2011

Pitchblack X Tuner Series Overview

Liven Up Your Drum Loops, Part 1

By John Walden

If you want to breathe new life into your drum loop library, Cubase has the tools. You just need the know‑how! This is the first part of a three-part series. Read Part 2 and Part 3.

LThe MediaBay provides the best way to catalogue your audio loops for use in Cubase projects.ots of musicians use commercial loop libraries, and in particular drum loops, as a key part of their creative process. Usefully, Cubase 6 provides a variety of ways to help you get a little extra mileage from your existing audio loop collection. There are some obvious items in this toolbox — Groove Agent ONE, Beat Designer and LoopMash, to name just a few. Each has something to offer in its own right, but making them work together opens things up even further.

There's too much ground to cover in a single article, so I'll start this month by looking at how to prepare your loops to make them easier to access in Cubase, and at what Groove Agent ONE can bring to the party. I'll look at some related tricks and techniques in later issues. The emphasis here will remain firmly on drum loops, but do bear in mind that many of the principles can be applied to other material.

Media Mogul

Before you can do any manipulation of your loops, you have to get them into Cubase, and for loops (drum or otherwise) probably the most efficient route is through the MediaBay. We covered this process back in the August 2008 issue of SOS and it's changed only a little since then, so before I hear cries of 'Grandma' and 'suck eggs', I'll suggest that interested readers can take a look at that piece as a quick refresher. Essentially, you just need to let the MediaBay scan your hard‑drive folders containing audio loops, so that it can catalogue them and log their original length and tempo information. If you have a lot of loops, this would be a good time to cook dinner...

As shown in the screenshot above, once they have been catalogued, loops can be browsed or searched using a combination of filters (for example, a tempo range). They can then be auditioned in the MediaBay, and if you like what you hear, you just drag and drop them straight into the Project window.

Slice, Slice, Baby

A single two‑bar audio loop shown (top to bottom) in its original form, sliced as an Audio Part, triggered via MIDI using GAO and as an edited version of the MIDI part, to create a different loop. All four tracks would adjust to accommodate any changes to the project tempo.

When dropping loops into the Project window, you can put them onto an existing audio track, but if you drop them on an empty spot in the Project window, a new track will be automatically created. By default, the loop will be tempo‑matched to fit the Project tempo and, provided the Musical Timebase button is engaged in the Track list, the loop will be automatically adjusted to accommodate any subsequent Project tempo change — all of which is very neat.

The next step is to slice the loop into individual drum hits, along the lines of Propellerhead's ReCycled REX files. Leaving aside actual REX files for a minute, if you drop a WAV or AIFF audio loop, a standard audio event is created. This needs to be opened in the Sample Editor to start the slicing process. Select the Sample Editor's Hitpoints tab and then adjust the Threshold setting. Hitpoints will be automatically created, and for most drum loops it's usually fairly easy to catch all the main transients. If required, hitpoints can be manually adjusted, added or deleted: clicking on the Edit Hitpoints button makes them editable.

One click of the Create Slices button and the audio between each hitpoint is turned into a slice. Note, however, that you might get a warning message asking you to disable Musical mode for this audio before the slices can be created. The Sample Editor will then close, and an audio part — essentially a series of audio events (one for each drum 'slice') glued together — will appear in your project, replacing the original audio event.

Getting Groovy

The Sample Editor hitpoint system can be used to slice your drum loop into individual beats.

The cataloguing and slicing processes outlined above are an essential pre‑requisite for the first of our more creative loop manipulations. Groove Agent One (GAO) is very respectable as a sample‑based drum tool, supplied, as it is, with a broad palette of drum samples suitable for various genres. However, with your favourite drum loop sliced and ready to go, GAO also becomes a very useful loop manipulation tool. There are two key possibilities here.

First, and most simply, if your drum loop audio part is opened in the Audio Part Editor, individual slices can be dragged and dropped onto one of the GAO drum pads. You might, for example, take the best kick, snare and hi‑hat slice from your audio loop, drop these onto three empty GAO pads and then use a MIDI track to trigger these pads to create a new loop, or to add extra beats over the top of the existing audio loop. Either way, you get additional loop variations but based upon the same drum sounds as your original loop.

Second, and a little more complex, if you select all the slices in the Audio Part Editor and then drag and drop to an empty GAO pad, the slices will be mapped across a series of pads, starting with the one you dropped onto (to keep things as straightforward as possible, make sure you have a suitable series of empty pads before you drop!). When you perform this multiple drag and drop, GAO also does some MIDI magic and creates a MIDI loop suitable to retrigger the original loop with all the samples played in sequence. In GAO's Exchange pane, the double‑headed arrow button should light up. If you then drag and drop back from this button to the Project window, the MIDI loop can be placed on an existing MIDI track or used to create a new MIDI track. Either way, if that MIDI track is then routed back to GAO, the MIDI loop will trigger the appropriate pads in sequence to recreate the original performance of the audio loop.

Not only does this MIDI triggering allow you greater flexibility in terms of tempo adjustment than audio time‑stretching, but you now have a fully editable MIDI loop that you can copy and edit to create endless variations on your original audio loop. This is extremely useful if you perhaps find one or two really cool loops but need to create some fills, a couple of extra variations, a breakdown part and a suitable ending to make a complete arrangement. These can all be built using MIDI and based on the original sounds in your audio loop(s).

Vexed By REX

Groove Agent ONE, with a sliced loop mapped across its pads. For such a simple-looking VSTi, GAO offers a surprising amount of functionality for working with drum loops.

Of course, this ability to slice and generate MIDI-controlled playback is, essentially, Steinberg's equivalent to the Propellerhead ReCycle/REX functionality, and if you drag and drop a REX file from MediaBay it automatically appears as a pre‑sliced Audio Part. However, rather surprisingly (surprising to me, anyway), you can't then drag these slices from the Audio Part Editor to GAO. At least, I've never been able to do that — so if you have more success with it than me, please let me know!

There is a very simple workaround, though. Having dropped your REX file into the project, select it and then choose Audio/Bounce Selection. This will create an 'unsliced' version of the audio loop, which you can process as described above for WAV and AIFF files. This is a minor additional chore but works well — although it is best to change the project tempo to something close to the loop's original recording tempo prior to executing the Bounce Selection command, as this reduces the likelihood of creating unwanted audio artifacts. Once the Bounce Selection is done, you can re‑set the project tempo.

Special Agent

Of course, having got the sounds from the loop into GAO, as well as rearranging the loop you can also tweak the sounds for each pad, using GAO's tuning, waveform and filter editing options. Finally, with the sounds in GAO and the loop controlled via MIDI, drum replacement also becomes an easy option — so if you want to take the feel of an electronic hip‑hop drum loop but play it with an arena‑style acoustic rock kit, the choice is yours.

While GAO has plenty to offer when it comes to squeezing extra mileage out of your drum-loop collection, as mentioned at the start of this column, it is not the only useful tool in the Cubase box. In the next part of this series, amongst other things, we will take a closer look at what Beat Designer can offer. Until then… happy looping! 

Read Part 2 and Part 3.   

Published September 2011

ARP 2600m Masterclass with David Mash / Part 7: 2600 Audio Processor

Using Outboard Gear

By Matt Houghton

1: Cubase's External FX plug-ins are specified in the VST Connections Window.

I've compared a lot of analogue modelling plug-ins with equivalent outboard gear recently, and while there's no doubt that some software is capable of great results, and offers superb value for money, it's plain to me that there's still a place for decent outboard in a studio. For example, even the best models from the likes of Waves, Softube and UA seem to me to be incapable of replicating precisely the complex behaviour of gear that uses audio transformers, particularly in the case of compressors and limiters that the user deliberately pushes hard for effect.

Back in SOS May 2010, I wrote an article (/sos/may10/articles/hybrid.htm) about so-called 'hybrid studios' which combine software and outboard gear, and that's well worth a read if you're new to the idea of using hardware with a computer recording system. As I explained in that article, different DAWs offer different advantages and disadvantages when working with outboard gear. Arguably, Cubase has more features dedicated to this purpose than most DAWs, but it also has some frustrating idiosyncrasies. In this article, then, I'll explore how best to integrate your preamps and outboard effects and processors in your Cubase projects, for both recording and mixing applications.

Outboard In

2: Creating a new External FX plug-in and associated MIDI Device.

Let's start with hooking up your gear and establishing the routing in Cubase. You'll need a multi-I/O audio interface — one with enough inputs and outputs to hook up your outboard and still have sufficient I/O left over to connect your microphones, other input sources, and speakers.

Connect the inputs and outputs of each piece of outboard to outputs and inputs on your interface. In Cubase, go to Devices/VST Connections and select the External FX tab. There are no External FX listed until you create one by clicking on the '+' symbol. Then name the new External FX with a description of the processor in question, and choose whether it's to be a mono or stereo unit. Finally, assign the I/O from the audio interface to which you've hooked up your gear. Next time you go to select an insert plug-in, your gear will be available in the drop-down list under Steinberg/External Plug-ins. You can't reassign the external plug-ins to another folder, as you can with conventional VST effects.

Obviously, you can only use one instance of each External FX plug-in. Frustratingly, though, if you have a stereo/dual mono compressor, you have to choose whether you're going to use it as stereo plug-in, or as two separate mono plug-ins: you can't assign the physical I/O to more than one external plug-in, so you don't have the option of creating both. Or rather, you could create two different versions, but you'll have to redefine the I/O settings each time you want to use the plug-in. There's no option in Cubase to use two mono plug-ins in parallel on a single stereo channel.

MIDI Control

3: You might sometimes need to specify a negative latency, in which case you'll need to create a manual offset in the track's Inspector window. If you then remove the plug-in, remember to change this back to zero!

You don't need to use MIDI with external processors and effects at all, but some units, particularly reverbs and delays, are automatable to some degree via MIDI. There's provision for creating a dedicated MIDI device (screen 2) when you specify an external effect in Cubase, as there is when creating an external instrument plug-in. You just click on 'Associate MIDI Device' when you create an effect. Despite the terminology used, the MIDI device you create doesn't really seem to be 'associated' with the effect, and you'll need to create a dedicated MIDI track where you can select the device. While I'd love to see the ability to program automation data from the audio channel, it's still very useful to be able to create the external MIDI device when specifying your effect's I/O.

Globalism

External FX and instruments are classed by Cubase as 'global', which means they're loaded for every project. The audio I/O for recording and playback, on the other hand, are 'local' settings, stored with each project. That makes sense in theory, but it doesn't work in practice! If you select an input or output for recording or playback that's already occupied by an external effect, the effect will lose its I/O settings, and they'll require resetting manually. Any I/O that are already in use are highlighted in the drop-down list when selecting, but it's still easy to overwrite your 'global' external effects. For example, I've had this happen when opening someone else's project where they'd used the same audio interface as me, but had defined the I/O differently.

Both External FX and External Instruments (another topic) can be saved as 'favourites', for future recall, but these presets only store the name and the latency (see later), and not the I/O settings! That's potentially a lot of resetting if you have several pieces of gear, so when you define External FX, it's a good idea to take a screen grab of the I/O settings you used.

Another consequence of this overriding of I/O settings is that you'll have to decide in advance whether to hook any preamps or channel strips up as insert effects, or simply to your input channels. That could cause confusion if you want the option to use them both as recording front ends and as insert processors. I'd recommend treating them as insert effects. When recording, you simply insert the plug-in on the relevant input channel (not the audio channel you're recording onto, as the signal will be monitored but not recorded). You can then unload the plug-in and load it again later where required in the mix.

When I shared my concerns about the limitations of External FX routing, Steinberg agreed the situation wasn't ideal, and said they'd rationalise the External FX system in a future update (probably in Cubase 7).

Latency Compensation

4: Once created, to use an External FX plug-ins, click on the desired insert slot and go to the Steinberg/External FX submenu. Any external plug-ins already in use will be greyed out and unselectable.

With everything hooked up, you'll need Cubase to compensate for the latency introduced by the round-trip from Cubase, through your audio interface and gear, and back via the interface into Cubase. Most outboard won't introduce significant latency, because it's designed to operate in real time, and all-analogue gear will introduce no latency at all. However, your interface's converters and any USB or Firewire connection inevitably introduce a small delay, and if you don't compensate for that there can be audible problems. If you're performing parallel compression on a vocal part, for example, with a dry part remaining in Cubase and a copy running out through your compressor, latency will manifest itself as a phasey smearing of the sound. Similarly, a small delay on drum overheads in relation to the snare or kick could cause nasty-sounding phasing that robs your drums of impact and sucks the life out of your sound.

With standard VST plug-ins, Cubase's automatic plug-in delay compensation deals with this very neatly: the plug-in declares its latency to Cubase, and Cubase introduces the necessary offsets to compensate. With External FX, Cubase has no way of knowing what the round-trip latency is unless you tell it. There are two ways to do this... or rather there should be!

First, there's a slider with which you can specify the delay manually. That's easy if you know what the latency is, but otherwise you'll need something to measure the latency (the free NAT sampler that comes with Acustica Audio's Nebula, for example), or to use your ears to line things up as best you can. I know it sounds silly, but it is possible for an interface to report a negative latency, and Cubase's External FX can't cope with this: in this case, you'll instead have to enter a track offset in the Inspector, as shown in screen 3 — and if you remove the external plug-in you'll have to set it back to zero.

The second approach is an automatic 'ping' facility, which suffers from a bug on my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 system. It may apply on other OS as well, but I've not had chance to test that. This is supposed to fire a sound out through your interface and your bypassed gear and back, so that Cubase can measure the round-trip latency and compensate for it. You should then be able to take the effect out of bypass and use it. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all on my system (Cubase fires the signal out, but the compensation remains set to zero), and it still can't compensate for negative latency. Again, I've mentioned this to Steinberg, who recognise that there's a bug, and have said they'll fix it in an update during the current product cycle.  

Published December 2011

ARP 2600m Masterclass with David Mash / Part 6: MODCVVibrato