Create Drum Parts in Cubase with Groove Agent

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Will and thanks so much for joining me in this course where we're going to be looking at how we can demystify the features and functions. Inside groove agent, I'm going to be focusing on Groove Agent SE, which is the free version that comes with Cubase. So you don't have to upgrade in order to follow these lessons. I've been using Cubase for well over ten years in my own studio and then doing my own productions and sound design at home in my home studio. And groove agent has been a tool which at times has provided me with a lot of powerful features. And I eventually got to a point where I wanted to really understand the application deeply and all of the lessons that I learned, I'm sinking into this course so that you can follow along and you can understand how to basically turn it into an automatic drummer. Use its pattern and instrument features, understand a little bit more about the differences between Beat Agents and acoustic agents. So I'm really glad you joined me in this course and I look forward to seeing you in the upcoming lessons. Let's get started. 2. Getting Perspective: Let's start off by looking at groove agent and understanding what it is. So over here on my Media tab, I am going into VST instruments and I'm going to drag groove agent over here. We can look at its interface. Now, these lessons are going to be focused on Groove Agent SE 5. So this is a somewhat stripped down version that comes with Cubase. I'm running Cubase pro tem 0.5 here. But don't let that deceive you into thinking that groove agent is kind of a throwaway plug-in. It's a fantastic plug-in. And if you've used battery, then you are in for a treat groove agent does a lot of that stuff, even in the SE version. So the full version does have some additional features that are nice, like the ability to load multiple kits. And there's a few other features that are particularly handy, but honestly there's a whole bunch of great stuff you can do with groove agent, and that's the purpose. So first of all, you're probably used to this regular drum pad, 16 pad kind of MPC looking, setting right? And groove agent is going to allow you to assign both one shots to pads as well as patterns to pads and we'll get into that. But groove agent is more than just an MPC. In terms of being able to just fire off drum samples. It can also be pretty smart and quick. As a tool for slicing, say a whole drum loop into a variety of samples and mapping them to pads. We can do that quickly and we'll go over that later on. You can customize the patterns and the different loops that are going to be played by it. You have the ability to basically use it as an automatic drummer. Doing automatic fills, all that sort of stuff. So it's really awesome. If we open up this other pain here, we can navigate through our different drums and we're going to be getting into that in the next lesson where we talk about the interface and gets node a bit more. But rest assured that groove agent is loaded with features that you're going to benefit from, especially if you're trying to do rapid music production. So let's move forward into the next lesson and start telling you about the interface. 3. Fun with Drum Patterns: So here we are with Groove Agent. And let's just look at the interface a little bit. In the upper area here, I'm going to zoom in just a little bit. All right, in this area you're going to be able to choose different settings, load, different kits, that sort of thing, right? Kinda just like if you're Cubase user, then this is where you load your presets. Below that, you'll see when we load a kit that this kinda loads up these four slots here in the middle. With the SE version, you can only use the first kip slot, but if you had the full version, you can actually load up to four kids simultaneously. When a kid is actually loaded, it'll have samples that are assigned to the pads and also patterns that are assigned. So that's basically what you're going to worry working with most of the time. The option to open up this navigator panel over here is also going to allow you to just find what you're looking for, I guess, from whatever libraries you already have installed. Okay, so in the next lesson, we are going to be talking about finding and saving different kits. But let's just take a simple example here to start with. I'll guess I'll just take this kit and we'll just double-click it and we can see that it loads up over here. It's actually loading the samples and here we are. So now we've got, right, you've got samples that are loaded in. And here we've actually got patterns. And if I click and hold down, then I get a whole pattern. Now you can customize a lot about these pads, about these hits. You can do editing of an individual pad, for example, in this sample editor. But the interface gives you a lot of flexibility as well when it comes to saving your own presets and then reloading and reusing those out. I am going to talk a little later about how we can use this to quickly slice up a drum loop and make a drum machine. But in the next lesson, we want to start by just making sure you really understand how to find what you're looking for and how you can save your own versions of these drum kits because that pretty quickly becomes something you need to do. That'll be in the next lesson. 4. Managing Your Kits: All right, So in the last lesson we found this gem kid here and we just installed it using the Navigator. We started by looking at kids and there's other tabs here like instruments. You can actually choose individual instruments that you want to use. His rock and pop, the elegant alan Morgan signature drums that kinda studio recordings also got some different options here we'll see what this sounds like. This is ambient kit. Now I'm actually loading that into this pad rather than the entire kit. Let's see what this crash sounds like. Alright, so I can kinda go through here and I can basically customize this kid. Said, I don't really want that. I'm going to turn that into a Tom. Right. Now. Of course, I had installed or I had loaded up an electronic kit. So it's not surprising that it sounds pretty electric. But now I've got something that's kind of mixing some more organic drum sounds with some electronic drum sounds. If I wanted to save this kid, There's a couple of ways that I can do it. So first of all, I can save a pre-set up here just by clicking on this little square diamond shape here. And I can say Save Preset, right? And then I can change this to wills. I like that. So now I could load up a preset that I had just made. Let's say I'm going to just search for wills. Are there it is right there. Okay. So that's one way you can do it, saving it as a preset. You can also right-click on your drum slot. And you can say Save kit, right? So if I save kit, it's going to, it's going to overwrite it. Although there are constraints with some of the copyright materials, sometimes saving a kid doesn't work that simply, but you can always say bucket as, you know, my own kits, I'm going to call this wills. I'm going to append, prepend that to the name of the kit, use the same attributes. What I can see here is my kit that I just saved. But what if you want to export this and share it with someone else or you want to move it on another computer and other Cubase installation, maybe archive it with a project. You can right-click and instead of save kit can choose Export kit with samples. This is going to give you more like a regular file dialogue where you can choose a location and file name. So I'm gonna save it to my desktop. And I'm going to call it have the same name. And there you go. So it says 16 samples are protected and cannot be exported. The preset references the original files. So what that means is that on my computer with the preset, I've customized it. However, I'm not permitted to share 16 and the samples because they have copyright protections. However, if I was using my own sample, if I wanted to do that, I could actually create a new kingdom and say Remove kit. And I'm just going to sum, I'm starting basically with blank. I'm going to select instrument here. And I'm going to find that Amen break here. And I am going to drag it onto this first PAD. Okay? Alright, so that's my, that's my own sample. It's not protected by the constraints of my software here. And in a later lesson in this section, I'm actually going to slice this loop up. But for right now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to save, Let's see, I'll go here and I will export this kit with samples to my desktop. And I'm going to call it. Good. Alright? And then I'm going to hit Save, and that's saved and we can load that up next time when we get to the lesson on slicing a bloops. So that's how you can find and save these different things. If you're having a hard time finding any of your kids, you know that you've got them installed over here. Under loop libraries, loops and samples. You see that you have some stuff, but it's not turning up in your in your groove agent. Maybe you're not also seeing it in your media bay. Right? Then what do you want to make sure you're doing? Is that you're looking under the right categories and subcategories. So styles isn't going to get you there. What you really want to look for, You might want to load up the media Bay, hit filter reset buttons for both the attributes and the main search bar. And then you want to look under the subcategory. You want to look under right here. There's drums. Drums set. Okay? And then under drum set, you'll see a bunch of the kits that are available. So the thing is that there's not, that there are no acoustic guitar, drum sets obviously. Or accordion jump says. So when you are looking through the medium of a kind of environment, sometimes it appears there are no drums, but that's because they're all already tagged and you have to be looking under drum set. Or in the case of category what's called drum and perk for drums and percussion over here, right? So that's where you'll also find a lot of those drums. So that covers finding and saving. In the next lesson, we're going to talk a little more about patterns. 5. Assembling Drum Parts: So let's start talking about patterns. Okay, I'm going to go in here into my media, into my VST instruments drag groove agent over here. And I'm going to go ahead and just kinda load a basic kit. So let's see, I'll just grab one here that's selected. All right? And that gives me some patterns, right? That is pop kit, 01:00 AM beat 1. That's what we're talking about. All right, so I can change this up a little bit by going to the style. And now if I play, I don't hear anything that is because we don't actually have a style loaded here. So we need to load a style before this whole style editor works properly, right? So we have this pop kit one AM, we can actually go over here to styles. All right, and let's look for pop. These are some style options that we've got here. And listen. All right, I'm going to actually choose something different. Let's go. And then I want to just grab something here. I want to grab anything here with this sticks icon next to it, correlates to style. So those are colleague Style presets, right? So if I come over here, I'm gonna grab beat one. And I'm going to Option or Alt, drag it to copy it onto another pattern and do the same thing a few times. Okay? So this is my main beep. But this one, I want to turn it into an intro. And I want this to have a specific style. So I'm going into my styles here. And let's see, I'll choose the kit. And I'm going to drag this into my styles and see what this sounds like that That's my intro. There's four different interests that I could choose from. All right, so I like that one, right? I like that intro. I'm going to right-click and I'm going to rename this pad to intro. Okay, I'm actually just going to move it up there. All right, Then I've got my regular beat. So I got my intro and my regular beat. Want to come up with kinda like a slightly different beat here for the chorus. So I'm gonna go to Style. I'm going to grab this same style that I used for the intro, except I'm going to switch the main B. Alright, so I'm going to move that up there and I'm going to call that alt just for alternate beat as opposed to my beat one. And I want to have an altro so. Let me go to style here. Grab this lotus style and change it to ending. Okay. Try different. All right, that's a bit more of an altro, so I'm going to rename that altro. Okay, so using the styles and using this pattern control after loading a style I can choose between intros and fills and that sort of stuff. You can also even create. Let's see if I copy this down here. Got this regular beat right? I can go to my styles here. And I am going to look for, say, I'll grab this style. And I'm going to do a main beat. But I'm going to turn on auto fill. And I want autofill to come in every eight bars, let's say. And I can choose my settings right here. I'll zoom in so you can see what I'm doing. So I'm going to enable autofill every eight bars, right? And I can decide which of these fills I want to include. So every time, Let's see, and I don't know what these sound like exactly, but I don't want to use fills 35, six, or seven. Okay, so what's going to happen then is, as this plays, I'm going to get an auto fill every eight bars. And we can see that up on the timer around the eight bars here. There you go. That was a fill. So in that way, you can actually wind up creating pretty nuanced performances. So maybe I'll go ahead and I'll just copy that every year and rename that. All right, so we've got some basic parts. We got an intro, we've got our main bead Gum alternate beat, and we've got an altro. So how do we bring this into our project? Well, there's a couple different ways. One is we can just grab the pad and we can drag it up here. There we go. We could just grab this may be bringing that up there. And then we can alternate be bringing that up here and then bring altro up here. And so what we wind up having is a system to our two bar intro. There we go. Okay, and then we come up against our next switch and bar 6. Right? Now if we skip ahead, we can hear the switch, the altro. There we go. So in that way we can use the pattern and style controls of groove agent to basically drag and drop different styles onto different kits. And then into our project to create entire drum tracks, even with things like auto fills. Another thing we can do is use what's called auto complexity, which will change. For example, let's take this. Here. We'll just play it. And I'm going to drag around this complexity control here. Intensity complexity. Fred. But I can enable auto complexity, let's say auto. Now we can see that the complexity is changing every single bar. So we might want to just replace that here. We're gonna go up here and I'm going to put a new one in there. So there we've got auto complexity. There's gonna be a lot of variation in that. Just going to sound more human. And I've been able to put that all together using nothing but the built-in tools and the built-in styles and presets of Groove Agent SE. So that's pretty awesome. Now, in the next lesson, I am going to start going back to the Amen break sample. We're going to load that kid up and slice it into a kip. 6. Slicing Your Own Kit: So I can go ahead and I can find that Amen break VST preset. I can drag it in here onto my kit and it's going to load up like that. And then my instrument here, I've got this whole sample and you can see got a whole drum track here, right? So what if I want to slice this up across my pets? Well, the first thing is make sure that you drag your, your loop onto the first lower left pad. That way as you add slices, it will populate the pads after it, right? So what you wanna do basically is go up here to the top and I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see this got different options. We want to go to slice, okay? Then we're going to go create slices. So it's made some, some hitpoints which we can adjust if we wanted to do that, I'm gonna go ahead and create slices. All right, now if we use the Alt key or Option key and we highlight ones that we don't want, right? You can also use the same Alter option to create new slices. You can actually click on the gap to hear what that sounds like. Now you have a couple of choices. You'll see that all of these slices have automatically been populated. So if I like the way this is laid out, that's fine. But I may want to change it up a bit. So I can go ahead and I can modify these hit points or these sort of transient indicators. I can also delete certain pieces if I want. I can just delete them or I can drag them around like that so that that winds up being blank. I can find where like that. You can just set that to be my second. All right, so in that way you can actually have quite a lot of control over the kit you wind up with and you spend some time customizing it. Now, the nice thing about styles is that they are independent of kits. So if you load in your own audio sample and you cut it up, and then you bring one of these styles in here, you get pretty much a limitless collection of beats, right? So the whole thing winds up giving you a lot of flexibility with styles independently from the kits and the sounds and the ability to quickly slice advocate. Now in the next lesson, I'm actually going to build a more traditional kit with one shot. 7. Building Custom Kits: All right, So let's build another drum kit here, this time not from slices, and create another groove agent example to load that up. All right, but I actually want some one shots. So let's make sure we have that setup. I'm going to go into my media bay. Close out groove agent quickly here. And I want to find Let's just say it. I just want to find only audio files and I want to find kick, going to reset my other attributes. Okay, So we've gotta kick. Turn looping off. Okay, so let's go ahead. Open up groove agent. Open up my thing here and we're just going to drag that onto there. Right. Now I want to find a snare. Snare hit. It's not exactly what one. Crazy. All right, Well that'll do for this demo. Now want a high hat. So I'm going to choose high hub. Alright, so that's my closed hat voice. Alright, I'll use that. I've been out. Alright, so, so far I've got those are the samples that I've gotten together. I pulled them out of media Bay. It's just drag and drop onto these pads. Now, I can save this preset. If I wanted to save it as like wills one shots. And I'll just call this number one. There we go. Now that key, that kit is available for me to load later on. So that's how easy building a kit can be. You can of course export them samples provided that you own the samples. If you're using the built-in sounds, then you cannot do that exploiting. In the next lesson, I want to touch on troubleshooting because there are some unusual things that can happen in a certain circumstance where pattern pads interfere with hip pads. It really had me stymied the first time I ran into it. So I wanted to go over it in this course to help you troubleshoot as well. 8. My #1 Groove Agent Tip: All right, So welcome back. In this lesson I'm going to be showing you a little bit of troubleshooting advice based on my experience. So I've got this demo kit here. This is called timed explosives. And I've got this built-in pattern. And you can hear how you have a kind of an open hat sound that's happening. But if I just drag this up here into my project, go ahead and play it. Suddenly, it doesn't sound right? Doesn't have that open hi-hat sound anymore. And what heck is going on there? Well, what's going on is that one of the drum hits in this is also one of the drum hits in this pattern. So if we open up this midi, for example, what we see is that here the note B flat or a sharp 0, right? A sharp 0 right here happens to also be. And I'll zoom in here so you can see it happens to also be the midi note assigned to this pad. So that's going to be problematic because you'll see once I start playing it in the project that this pad keeps loading up. Basically we have one of the pitches inside the drum loop firing another pad. So what we wanna do is we want to click this little button down here. It says use pattern midi port for pattern pads. Okay, So we just enable that. Now we started with again. Sounds fine if we disable this, we get this weirdness, right? Let me loop that. I'm going to just select this and I'm going to go to loop, and I'm going to choose locators loop selection range. You can see that it's lighting up here. It's going to stop the minute I turn this Omni on. Right? So what that's doing basically is it's making it so that anything that's in the drum loop cannot send midi back into fire, different pads within either pattern. That is really a handy thing to know about. It's just kind of sitting down here all by its lonesome. And you might not know what that means, but that is what that is. For. That way, you can actually have different midi port for running patterns. Then you are using for the instrument pads gives you a little more flexibility and more, more ways to configure things. All right, In the next and final lesson, I'm just going to wrap up, review some of what we discussed, but more importantly, outline a project that you can undertake to really take ownership of everything that you ever learned in this section. So that's going to be coming up in the next and final lesson in this section. 9. Wrap-Up & Project: Now that you know more about the different kits, pattern management and how groove agent works. It's time to start consolidating that knowledge and using it for real-world applications. The project that I suggest getting started with is using a combination of Beat Agents and acoustic agents, maybe in different tracks because they don't always go well together. Try out different styles and put together a final drum part. So let's take that step-by-step. Let's say you load up an acoustic agent that'll come packaged with the style. You could even try loading different styles into the style editor for your patterns. Find a pattern for an intro, pattern for a verse, a chorus, and outro, and start putting it all together into one track. Within a Cubase project, you can do that by dragging, or you can do it by recording. If you're using beat agent, it's going to be somewhat similar, except they don't come packaged with styles. So you can load up styles from the style navigation and you can load them onto the style player, the style editor for a beat Agent kit. And in that way you can start building out an intro, the endings, the main beats, try using the autofill that was sorts of features to start compiling an entire drum part from beginning to end. In that way, you're going to get more familiar with how GRU Agent works, how it would work in your personal workflow with the styles of music that you work on. If you have any questions I invite you, please reach out to me. I'm more than happy to answer questions or even have discussions related to this course. You can message me or you can post in the discussion board. Thank you so much for joining me and I hope to see you in another one of my courses.