Hi Paul, over the last 30 years I have programmed hundreds of songs much like you do, however that process got much easier once I invested in an Akai MPC 60. Today I have the MPC X and it is the best of the best when it comes to exactly what you are doing. Establishing tempos and rhythms takes literally minutes. MPC's are incredibly proficient for building extremely detailed tracks (fast).

Chris - interesting. What does it do that speeds it up?

Basically it’s extremity intuitive from how easy it is to import your drums, insert samples, kits, sequences, lay down drums tracks, tempos “tight or very relaxed feels” set bars and add, merge remove etc everything.
They loop and seamlessly punch in,
Have 2 ins and 4 out midi lanes. you can record into them as well.

Then you can mix or export to your fav DAW.
It’s the most essential part of my studio.

I looked for MPC x videos that aren’t targeted to hip hop but couldn't find one. The problem watching MPC videos, mass users are using it for dead sounding music.
if you can see past the hip hop users doing lame drum beats, I doubt you’d ever regret owning one.

This video give a brief explanation

Sadly, most people making music don't like rock so I can't find one video that comes close to what it can do. Its unbelievable how peoples taste has changed.
Anyway... I found some history that might be of interest. https://www.vox.com…

I used an MPC to play live and in studio all through the 80's and 90's. All for pop and rock. Its a controller, sampler, sequencer, midi router...

I've watched the video, but I'm a tad confused - why would I want to use one instead of Cubase - I'd really struggle? Probably great for a beginner not interested in computers - a friend of mine would love it because he hates computers. It's a nice one stop product though.

paulears, post: 463654, member: 47782 wrote: I've watched the video, but I'm a tad confused - why would I want to use one instead of Cubase - I'd really struggle? Probably great for a beginner not interested in computers - a friend of mine would love it because he hates computers. It's a nice one stop product though.

No, its far from a beginners. Very complex and blows all DAW out of the water when it comes to laying down rhythms and simplifying speed, especially for composing. I would use something like this for controlling and arranging large movie productions, especially if I had racks of midi equipment. As an example, Samplitude, Pro Tools, Cubase etc would never track and deal with Midi like an MPC does. ;)
You say it takes you a while to establish the tempos. MPX X, you'd never have this trouble. MPC's are the king when it comes to drum programming and sequencing.
But of course its all what you are used to.

I must have missed this - if you want to take a well known track and build a tempo map from it, how do you do it? For me - this takes the most time, before you can hit record and stick anything down. How does it do ralls, pushes and pulls against the beat? The track I'm doing at present (not that the damn show will actually happen!) changes tempo 4 times - gradually speeds up, then pulls back and has a really fast up tempo section in a different time signature. Doe the Akai have some kind of tempo track?

Are you importing the actual older songs and then reproducing them?

to control tempo speeds, you can use the MPC as a master for cubase.

• use a control knob to adjust the speed in real time
• Program relaxed feels
• Use a cv controller

I personally wouldn’t regress to poor timing today, I would improve it by still keeping the natural tempo like you are attempting but would find a common speed that often still fits. I’ve literally programmed hundreds of songs that sounded like the tempos were all over the nap but still found the flow and managed to sequence it to most anything.
MPC are king at that. They often are used in live performances, running a sequence with live drummers.

Samplitude remix section uses volume peaks (or what ever part of a time line you want to follow a song very well too. Super fast as well.

I’d recommend checking out the MPC at your local dealer and talk to someone that actually know a lot about them. I’m certain you would be amazed if you get the right person to help you. They really are the best of the best.

I use the MPC to master Sequences

No sorry - you misunderstand. I am producing show tracks from all kinds of popular music - so I recreate the entire song, track by track - either real instruments or sample/synth based. There is also a click, so the way I do it is bring in the original track, create a tempo map that follows the real tempo of the song, so that the bar lines all line up with the click - this is essential - but very rarely will the song be recorded originally to a metronome. It might start at 72bpm, then speed up to the chorus which comes in at 78, then it drops back for the next verse, but maybe does it at 70, then the next chorus comes in at 79. This is very time consuming, and while Cubase can do this automatically, it works better with repetitive dance music where there's a clear beat. Until you have the click following the original very closely, you can't copy and paste, or quantise. Drums show up tempo errors far too easily - so it can take ages to get this far, and that's before you start adding real instruments and BVs. I think Samplitude's tempo tracking is like cubase's - as in it's not very good with flowing music, and 60's and 70's music was far from stable. The Carpenters, for example - tempo is wildly all over the place. I was hoping somebody does similar stuff and has a better workflow I could pinch. I don't think the Akai is quite the right tool for this.

No sorry - you misunderstand. I am producing show tracks from all kinds of popular music - so I recreate the entire song, track by track - either real instruments or sample/synth based.

yup, this is what I did for years and what I thought you meant. I didn’t need as extreme measures but it would definitely do it for you. The Akai simplifies tempo related far superior to a standard DAW.

it sounds like you have a fun gig though! Keep us informed over your progress. I’d love to hear if you find better methods.
Cheers!

paulears, post: 463662, member: 47782 wrote: No sorry - you misunderstand. I am producing show tracks from all kinds of popular music - so I recreate the entire song, track by track - either real instruments or sample/synth based. There is also a click, so the way I do it is bring in the original track, create a tempo map that follows the real tempo of the song, so that the bar lines all line up with the click - this is essential - but very rarely will the song be recorded originally to a metronome. It might start at 72bpm, then speed up to the chorus which comes in at 78, then it drops back for the next verse, but maybe does it at 70, then the next chorus comes in at 79. This is very time consuming, and while Cubase can do this automatically, it works better with repetitive dance music where there's a clear beat. Until you have the click following the original very closely, you can't copy and paste, or quantise. Drums show up tempo errors far too easily - so it can take ages to get this far, and that's before you start adding real instruments and BVs. I think Samplitude's tempo tracking is like cubase's - as in it's not very good with flowing music, and 60's and 70's music was far from stable. The Carpenters, for example - tempo is wildly all over the place. I was hoping somebody does similar stuff and has a better workflow I could pinch. I don't think the Akai is quite the right tool for this.

Ive not done this yet but my approach would be to use M/S and extraction plugs to try and extract the drum track, then just re-trigger it. Ive amassed a set of tools for this purpose but haven't gotten the system up yet. Toontracks new superior version can extract individual drums and resample them individually from a stereo drum track, turning them into multitrack and re triggered. Vocal canceling plugs can help clean up the drum track on the master song, so can izotope re-balance. Drummagog even has hi hat tracking to re sample the hat even while the drummer opens and closes it.

Doing this might help you skip the tempo map entirely.

Other than that the tempo tracking in samplitude pro x3 looked quite good in the demo, and theirs always tab to transient. Samplitude, drumagog, and slate all have audio to midi capability.

The automated tools arent perfect but are pretty good, tho still generally require tweaking.

Hang on - so you're thinking about taking the drum track and then regenerating it so it can retrigger a new one? I'd never thought of that. I'd still need the temp track sorting because I need all the other tracks to be aligned to something I could edit to - I've got quite a few old cubase projects where I just used it like a tape deck - so free running and doing anything with these is always a real pain.

The auto tempo feature works quite well with finding a tempo where it stays relatively constant, but it does ralls very poorly, and very often you can do them better by eye, as long as you can find the pickup temp first beat.

Maybe people don't do accurate cover versions any more, and just don't need to develop little tricks?

now that K mentioned it, i remembered i actually did something similar to that once. a friend of mine asked me to archive /restore /repair /remix all his old tapes to digital. once the track was loaded into the daw i eq'd it with overlapping hi and lo pass and a sharp narrow peak so that the kick or the snare stuck out. it didn't matter what it sounded like because i only used it to trigger a snare or kick sample. you might get a few false triggers but all you need to do is cut them out. if you did that then all you would need to do is to make your tempo map from the triggered impulses.

That could actually work for me - a two step process. Take the original track and find the kick and/or snare. Filter that and the use the auto feature to make the tempo track. I might give this a try?

hope it works for you.

Kurt Foster, post: 463681, member: 7836 wrote: now that K mentioned it, i remembered i actually did something similar to that once. a friend of mine asked me to archive /restore /repair /remix all his old tapes to digital. once the track was loaded into the daw i eq'd it with overlapping hi and lo pass and a sharp narrow peak so that the kick or the snare stuck out. it didn't matter what it sounded like because i only used it to trigger a snare or kick sample. you might get a few false triggers but all you need to do is cut them out. if you did that then all you would need to do is to make your tempo map from the triggered impulses.

Yes exactly. The idea is to use the source track(s) as a trigger. Basically to exatract tempo, velocity, and hamonic information from audio. Essentially audio to midi conversion.

My original purpose was to have a simlified way to replace peoples sounds on their mulittracks or masters with better versions. Ie, a stock moog sound with a good aftermarket one.

Its cool with covers cuz sometimes there is info on the original recording, so you can use samples of the stuff they used, like if a drummer used a black beauty snare, you can use the black buety in bfd 3. Or some vintage synth.

Or with my old blues rock band, i want to double the svt mic'd track with a clean synth bass for modern low end. Instead of playing it on a keyboard or mousing in the notes. i theorized i could use audio to midi to extract the performance.

paulears, post: 463682, member: 47782 wrote: That could actually work for me - a two step process. Take the original track and find the kick and/or snare. Filter that and the use the auto feature to make the tempo track. I might give this a try?

Yes exactly, let the drums be the tempo map.

Please let me know how you fare, ive not tried this method in practice yet, just in theory.

With a template of gates and tracks setup, it could be possible to import a song, and replace the sonics in minutes.

Failed! Well actually it didn't really fail but the bass seems to blur the kick, and the snare is twitchy too. It works fine with a four on the floor clean drum track. Cubase can follow the rhythm really well, but try it on some big band jazz and it makes lots of mistakes as the drums have too many off beat thumps and bangs. Cleaning it up would take as long as the few bars at a time matching the waveform peaks to the grid lines and then stretching or shrinking the temp - which moves the waveform. Good call though and for some music works pretty well. Waveform peak matching seems to still win.

As I'm not busy this week, I've been finding clean vocal stems on youtube, then putting the original vocals to my recreations as sort of practice - these clips are often problem ones with the tempos of the piece changing quite a bit, so hence the tempo track being really important. I've found some Elton John , Celine Dion, Peter Gabriel and a few others so far.

Tools like waves center, izotope rebalance, and eventide physion, should help you isolate the center channel. They also make vocal canceling programs. M/S eq should help too.

If the bass is hitting at the same time as the kick then it shouldn't blur things from a timimg perspective.

What did you do to clear up/isolate the center channel?

try collapsing the to tracks mono first. then filter and eq. don' be afraid to overlap your filters. then gate. setting the threshold on the gate should help to eliminate a lot of the spurious hits. a gate with additional filters like a Drawmer 201 works best.
do 2 passes. kick and snare. so it's 4 step process. :LOL:

Kurt Foster, post: 463693, member: 7836 wrote: try collapsing the to tracks mono first. then filter. then gate. setting the threshold on the gate should help to eliminate a lot of the spurious hits. a gate with filters like a Drawmer 202 or 404 works best.

Good call on the mono, i was literally just going to post about gating.

If you duplicate the track, you can set a steep LPF around 40-100hz to try and filter out all the bass notes to related to the kick drum fundamental.

I would expect a bit of trial and error and setup at first, but once the template and tools are setup it should get pretty quick.

Depending on the DAW, you can even setup a macro to duplicate the track to all the various "utility" tracks with the various gates and plugs setup. This way you can do all those dupes with a single keystroke.

Depends so much on the tracks. If you have Cubase try it with some 60s and 70s stuff. If you do the same with 80s synth pop it’s pretty accurate because the tempo is pretty constant the free running stuff from before just doesn’t track that well. I’m sticking with the waveform visual method and the peaks usually are the kick and snare. I think it’s the lack of transients on the bass guitars of hat period that blur the kick drum

the track i worked on there was no kick to speak of. it was a cassette of a band in a bar off the pa. it needed more snare so i triggered an alesis module through a drawmer ds404.

if you flick the key listen switch you can hear what the filters are doing so you can really dial in on what you want.

paulears, post: 463696, member: 47782 wrote: Depends so much on the tracks. If you have Cubase try it with some 60s and 70s stuff. If you do the same with 80s synth pop it’s pretty accurate because the tempo is pretty constant the free running stuff from before just doesn’t track that well. I’m sticking with the waveform visual method and the peaks usually are the kick and snare. I think it’s the lack of transients on the bass guitars of hat period that blur the kick drum

I don't have cubase right now. When i can ill give it a try with samplitude and see what works.

You should be able to use tab to transient to lessen the amount of visual work.

Samplitude lets you tap in tempo markers in real time, so you can tap out all the kicks and and snares and then manually adjust.

Either of these should be pretty fast.

I'm a little confused now - I wanted to go past tempo mapping but I get the impression many people have not actually needed to do this very much, and while the ideas here are great and mostoly sound, they're not very practical? My method is quite simple but a bit time consuming and these solutions do seem MORE complicated than what I currently do - and as manual adjustment is very simple and works well, I'm a bit surprised I'm the only one who does this for my tracks. I really figured everyone producing tracks would have discovered this and there would be tons of two click solutions.

If you have the time, I'd urge people to try making a DAW follow the tempo of a 60s/70s track. If I get a chance today, I'll dig up a couple you could have a listen to that caused me more trouble than normal.

OK - I found this one, The carpenters - Superstar. The manual tempo map has a peak of nearly 90, and wobbles around, with a rall on the end.

Then I started a new project and cubase worked out the tempo. I then played the piano track, and the note are early in some places and late in others where the tempo mapping fails. This is the snag.

paulears, post: 463699, member: 47782 wrote: I'm a little confused now - I wanted to go past tempo mapping but I get the impression many people have not actually needed to do this very much, and while the ideas here are great and mostoly sound, they're not very practical? My method is quite simple but a bit time consuming and these solutions do seem MORE complicated than what I currently do - and as manual adjustment is very simple and works well, I'm a bit surprised I'm the only one who does this for my tracks. I really figured everyone producing tracks would have discovered this and there would be tons of two click solutions.

If you have the time, I'd urge people to try making a DAW follow the tempo of a 60s/70s track. If I get a chance today, I'll dig up a couple you could have a listen to that caused me more trouble than normal.

The difference is once you get the gates, and triggers and eqs ect all setup and routed, you can save it as a template. Then its a matter of drag and drop and and some tweaks.

One way is alot of setup once, the other is manual work each and every time.

Gates, multiband compressors, mid side, expanders, transient, and waves center (which is a volume knob for the center of a stereo track) are all tools available that can help isolate elements of a stereo track.

Im all for elbow grease, but if a tool gets me most of the way faster, im in.

If you can isolate the snare and kick, auto tempo mapping should get you 90% there.

paulears, post: 463701, member: 47782 wrote: OK - I found this one, The carpenters - Superstar. The manual tempo map has a peak of nearly 90, and wobbles around, with a rall on the end.

Then I started a new project and cubase worked out the tempo. I then played the piano track, and the note are early in some places and late in others where the tempo mapping fails. This is the snag.

Can't you just manually adjust the tempo markers where its wrong?

I don't use cubase so i dunno how it works in that daw. Is cubase just making an average tempo instead if following the transients verbatim?

What type of audio to midi tools does cubase have?

If you gate / exapand the kick and snare you should be able to use melodyne to make it midi, then make the tempo map off that.

Or just bounce the gated tracks to new tracks and have the cubase tempo mapper map off that.

Are you defining the tempo based on quarter notes, 8ths, the down beat, first beat of the measure, every hit?

This is interesting because you could yeild different results, despite being 100% accurate at a given resolution.

In samplitude you can just tap a tempo marker in realtime, so this might be faster, than stopping playback and making a manual tempo change. Then you can likely just snap the markers to transient so your dead on. Or use the markers you made in realtime to identify the transients, and just tab to transient laying markers at the beats.

Have you used tab to transient?

Given all the available tools and techniques i can't imagine it should take more than 15-20 min for an average song, once a method is sussed out.

I could see where it could get complicated if your programming in time signatures too, but beat markers should be fairly quick.

Samplitude Pro X : Tempo Mapping

Kraznet's Samplitude Tutorials

Samplitude Pro X now includes a dedicated Tempo track and this tutorial shows you how to use it. Here's the Introduction: Sometimes you may need to work on an audio recording which has not been recorded to click track. Problems can arise when this song doesn't conform to a Tempo map. For example: midi parts or tempo-based effects will not synchronise because the audio doesn't recognise the current Tempo grid. In this situation it will be necessary to create a Tempo map based on the varying Tempo of the project. If time signature changes are included this will provide an extra challenge. This tutorial will provide you with necessary information to facilitate Tempo and time signature mapping with Samplitude Pro X.

audiokid, post: 463730, member: 1 wrote: Samplitude Pro X : Tempo Mapping

Kraznet's Samplitude Tutorials

Samplitude Pro X now includes a dedicated Tempo track and this tutorial shows you how to use it. Here's the Introduction: Sometimes you may need to work on an audio recording which has not been recorded to click track. Problems can arise when this song doesn't conform to a Tempo map. For example: midi parts or tempo-based effects will not synchronise because the audio doesn't recognise the current Tempo grid. In this situation it will be necessary to create a Tempo map based on the varying Tempo of the project. If time signature changes are included this will provide an extra challenge. This tutorial will provide you with necessary information to facilitate Tempo and time signature mapping with Samplitude Pro X.

This is the exact video i had in mind. He has another one where he uses melodyne to turn a live bass part into midi, and doubles it with synth.

With these tools and a stereo song, it just becomes a matter of isolating the drums/rythmic elements enough to accurately detect the transients. Izotope makes this easier with master rebalance. And music rebalance. Brilliant tools!

Just found this free pluggin. Looks like a perfect companion after using music rebalance to get rid of vocals and bass.

https://www.voxengo.com/product/msed/

From voxengo site:

Applications

• Mid-side encoder
• Mid-side decoder
• Mid-side stereo widener
• Stereo channels swapper
• 180-degree channel phase flipper
• Stereo correlation and balance meter
• Unique “plasma” vector scope

MSED is a professional audio encoder-decoder AAX, AudioUnit and VST plugin for mid-side processing which is able to encode (split) the incoming stereo signal into two components: mid-side pair, and vice versa: decode mid-side signal pair into stereo signal.

MSED is also able to work in the “inline” mode with the ability to adjust mid and side channels’ gain and panning without the need of using two plugin instances in sequence.

MSED can be used to flip the phase of the mid and side channels by 180 degrees, and swap the stereo channels, and to extract the mid or side channel.

MSED features the “plasma” vector scope, stereo correlation and balance meters which make it easier to monitor the stereo information present in the audio signal.

Features & Compatibility
User Reviews & Opinions

• Mid-side encoder and decoder
• Inline mode
• “Plasma” vector scope
• Stereo correlation and balance meters
• Input channel swapping
• 180-degree phase flipping
• Mid-side panning
• Preset manager
• Undo/redo history
• A/B comparisons
• Contextual hint messages
• All sample rates support
• Zero processing latency
• User interface color schemes
• Resizable user interface
• Retina and HighDPI support

Well if you look at the Cubase auto derived tempo map you’ll see a forest of bpm changes because this song has fairly strict but flowing drum tempo but the other instruments and voice flat around the 4/4 beat and come early or late so it takes longer to edit the Cubase tempo map than my manual version in the other picture. In the two screen image it shows how the old process of copy and paste falls over because the ends of bars overlap. I played a verse and no way can that be lifted and pasted into the next one. I guess the answer is that manual is still the quickest way. I just hoped somebody else apart from me was doing this. Clearly not which is a surprise. I'm grateful for the attempts but, my existing system works really well - but I kind of hoped somewhere would be a really nice hidden get around to speed it up a bit. I n' even consider changing cubase guys - I'm totally happy with it.

If you look at the double screenshot you'll see the auto tempo map has identified high numbers of changes - my system usually hits the start of each bar and then worst case, every quarter note - cubase auto mapping sometimes does even more - but so many are in the wrong place!

paulears, post: 463733, member: 47782 wrote: Well if you look at the Cubase auto derived tempo map you’ll see a forest of bpm changes because this song has fairly strict but flowing drum tempo but the other instruments and voice flat around the 4/4 beat and come early or late so it takes longer to edit the Cubase tempo map than my manual version in the other picture. In the two screen image it shows how the old process of copy and paste falls over because the ends of bars overlap. I played a verse and no way can that be lifted and pasted into the next one. I guess the answer is that manual is still the quickest way. I just hoped somebody else apart from me was doing this. Clearly not which is a surprise. I'm grateful for the attempts but, my existing system works really well - but I kind of hoped somewhere would be a really nice hidden get around to speed it up a bit. I n' even consider changing cubase guys - I'm totally happy with it.

If you look at the double screenshot you'll see the auto tempo map has identified high numbers of changes - my system usually hits the start of each bar and then worst case, every quarter note - cubase auto mapping sometimes does even more - but so many are in the wrong place!

That's why I use the MPC. It makes manual drum programming with feel very easy.

I don't do anything for drums apart from play them on the keyboard. I've got an electronic kit, but bashing the keys works ok for me - I just do them in layers because I'm not a good drummer - kick/snare, then hats/cymbals usually. If the song is keys based, I'll do piano once the tempo track has been done. My piano skills are self-taught. I usually have to do left and right hand separately if its hard, and if it's very hard - my collaborator Grant, comes in and plays it properly. He's a proper pianist, so prefers sheet music if I can get it, or he'll have to spend time working it out, and he's a bit of a perfectionist so we do need to edit, and that is why the tempo track accuracy is critical. Then I'll do the bass - that's usually the easiest. Guitar - either real, as in chord picking or strumming, but while I'm fine at acoustic solos, I'm pretty poor at electric guitar solos and wailey playing. If I have to play a distorted solo, especially the really well known ones, then I often record in short phrases then glue them all together. Saxes I have to play, with the comping again because none of the sampled saxes I have sound right in most songs. They're fine for big band style stuff, but they lack the sound of a real sax playing quiet or throaty. Strings from Kontakt in the main - Spitfire being my favourite.

Piano sounds - Pianoteq my favourite and I've a few nice electric sounds. My weak area is synths - because I've so many to choose from I can never find the right one. This is pretty much my standard way of working ........ at the moment.

paulears, post: 463733, member: 47782 wrote: Well if you look at the Cubase auto derived tempo map you’ll see a forest of bpm changes because this song has fairly strict but flowing drum tempo but the other instruments and voice flat around the 4/4 beat and come early or late so it takes longer to edit the Cubase tempo map than my manual version in the other picture.

Doesn't rx7 and the voxengo pluggin eliminate this problem.?

With the pluggins setup in a template it should make the process of extraction virtually completely automated.

With melodyne, you can extract the bass, guitar, and piano tracks midi info, so you pretty much have a midi-fied version of the entire project.

Superior drummer can extract and re-trigger an entire kit in one shot from a stereo drum track.

To each their own, i just don't see how manually starting from scratch each time is an efficient method when there are tools that literally extract the performance and do the heavy lifting.

Generally Speaking

Programming drums on keyboards is extremely slow and usually much more obvious that its a drum machine.
The tactile approach on MPC’s is second to none. If you are wanting to reproduce old songs that sound real, and speed up your workflow, I personally wouldn’t be trying to do it on a keyboard. DAWs and keyboards are awesome for music but really slow and unrealistic in comparison to a dedicated percussions controller like MPC’s. The software, pads and hardware controls go way beyond any DAW.

Using a dedicated outboard drum machine that handles all the sequencing gives your DAW more ability to run smoother as well.
If you are looking for faster ways that should improve your drum workflow, I wouldn’t be using a DAW and cubase. I would only use keyboard drum programming for really basic drum programming.

Not trying to convince others, just sharing some personal tricks I’ve been doing for decades.
Fun thread.

Why would I want to go outside for something as simple as reproducing drums. I don’t get it at all? Maybe I don’t understand how you’d do it? As it is a 3 minute track takes me probably 12 mins to get the basic drums in then adding the fills and other bits maybe half an hour or so once the tempo track is accurate.
Can you explain how you’d copy that carpenters drum playing in an external unit?
I’m playing the tracks not trying to lift them from the original. Just using my ears usually.

paulears, post: 463739, member: 47782 wrote: Why would I want to go outside for something as simple as reproducing drums.

Good question

There are two kinds of drum programming.

1. real sounding and convincing

2. electronic sounding and less convincing its is a real drummer
   Both are winners in the right style of music
   If your goal is simple drums, then my methods are overkill and expensive. The MPC is a highly sophisticated dedicated drum machine, sequencer and midi controller.
   

   paulears, post: 463739, member: 47782 wrote: Why would I want to go outside for something as simple as reproducing drums.

   Programming drums on keyboards is slow and usually much more obvious > its a drum machine. If you are wanting to up your game, the MPC is how you could do that. There is a reason MPC's have been the game changer in drum programming for 39 years and counting. Until you've actually become familiar with an MPC , you cannot possibly know how awesome they are. This is why I am sharing what I know about drum programming and sequencing. I have made a very good living programming. I couldn't have done it at the same level with just a DAW. A lot of engineers don't tell what they do with them because we like keeping this stuff under the radar.
   Being said, if you've been using Cubase and keyboards to play drums your whole career, you are without question missing out on what I would call, a game changer.

   paulears, post: 463739, member: 47782 wrote: As it is a 3 minute track takes me probably 12 mins to get the basic drums in then adding the fills and other bits maybe half an hour or so once the tempo track is accurate.

   Sounds about right to lay basics kick and snare down, but I would expect the rest of the dynamic fills, hi hats and more complicated stuff that produces feel, keyboard programming still sounds like a drum machine, not real drums. MPC's are king at drum programming. They have multiple time saving ways to create realistic expressions. You can use an MPC as a controller > stand alone or ITB. It will slave or master. It can use DAW plugins or its own. It acts as a midi interface which reduces or eliminates freezing and overall CPU off your tracking DAW, thus speeding up your entire sequencing workflow.

   paulears, post: 463739, member: 47782 wrote: Can you explain how you’d copy that carpenters drum playing in an external unit?

   If I was doing this to make money (not a hobby), I wouldn't copy the drums, I would usually use professional drum samples or to be more authentic to the original sounding kit, I'd sample the individual Carpenters drums (snares, kick, hats et), and assign them to pads, then play it all on the MPC, not on a keyboard connected to the DAW. The DAW is slower and less responsive to say the least. Especially when things start to get complicated.
   When it comes to serious drum programming, MIDI interfacing and sequencing are on the MPC. Not always but usually, I slave my DAW to the MPC. Why? MPC is a superior clock (SMPTE, MTC etc) and sequencer to any DAW. You can punch and loop complicated midi all day long, reducing, if not completely eliminating freezing a DAW.
   Break songs into sections and work loops until its perfect. Piece sections together very quickly. MPC and DAW make a beautiful team.

   paulears, post: 463739, member: 47782 wrote: I’m playing the tracks not trying to lift them from the original. Just using my ears usually.

   Exactly what I'm taking about. Rarely do I ever "lift" or copy someone else's playing. I play all my drums just as I was a drummer. The pads on the MPC are outstanding. My drum kit is an MPC, not a keyboard. Which make playing drums and arranging sequences fast and very proficient.

   IMHO, professional drummers should also own an MPC. It should be part of their arsenal.

I'm more confused now than I was before? I want to recreate exactly what the drummer played, with a kit that sounds as close to the original as I can get - I've got a few 60s kits in Kontakt and they sound very, very close to the original. If the drummer played a conventional kick/snare/hats pattern but pushed the kick on beat 3 of every 4th bar, I can do that perfectly well and tweak to taste in the drum editor. I still don't get - really sorry - why I'd want to use the MPC - I never want to create new drum tracks, either with patterns, loops or pre-recs - I just want the drums to play as the original drummer played them, and Cubase does this fine. I use the keys because frankly, using drum pads didn't improve things and the pads on one of the keyboards is actually worse. Once you set the keyboard up so the velocity sensitivity is a bit expanded at the top so not everything is loud that works.

I just don't get the point in the MPC at all - Groove Agent is pretty decent sounding and the Kontakt drums all again sound fine. I don't get the quest to wipe out the DAW - mine doesn't freeze or play up. I often do cycle through a couple of bars to build up the trickier bits to copy, and then use the drum editor to shift the hits till they match the original track's timing. All this in Cubase - no faffing around with a separate device. I totally accept I'm not a drummer and would really struggle to invent some of the patterns I hear being played, but to duplicate them in cubase is a dexterity task, not really something that excellent pads, or a really good electronic kit would make easier?

Last thing - why does keyboard programming, as in tapping rhythms on the keys, have to be less convincing, or less 'real'? The MIDI timing in Cubase (and MIDI in general to be honest) is accurate enough for what I need.

I think I've missed something vital 'cus I just don't see any benefit of going out of Cubase for me. Perhaps if I was a real drummer I'd be dissatisfied with cubase's ability with drums, but my drummer colleagues seem pretty happy with it, and a couple have bundles of cash for toys that have limited impact, so hence my confusion.