Creating and Editing Drum Racks in Cubase 7

drum rack

Drum Rack is a device that hosts the many components of a sampled drum sound, such as its signal path, filters, effects and so on. This makes it a great choice for building drum machines. It also gives you a way to treat each drum sound as its own MIDI instrument.

It has a large selection of devices and is designed for use with many different types of drums and cymbals. It is also a great solution for gigging as it saves floor space and eliminates the need for cymbal stands.

Adding a Drum Rack

When creating a new project, you can populate a drum rack with any sounds from your library or from the Live devices tab. You can add as many MIDI channels as you have cells loaded. Those MIDI tracks will then be routed to the output of the Drum Rack.

You can also group a Drum Rack patch to create a new MIDI track that will have the entire device chain attached. To do this, drag a drum rack patch from its sub-folder to an empty MIDI track in the Mixer.

Then, you can edit the devices inside that new MIDI track just as you would any other drum rack. You can adjust volume, pan and send level of each device in the Drum Rack’s chain by clicking on its title bar, and you can also change the MIDI assignment for each device by selecting the relevant chain from the chain list and choosing the Edit MIDI button.

Using Macros

Drum Rack has a variety of macro controls to help you quickly control the parameters of effects and instruments. You can map a macro to any knob in the Effects view or to any knob in the Mixer, and you can also use a macro to set an envelope or pitch for a device.

Macro editing is quick and intuitive, thanks to the Map To All Siblings feature. Simply select a chain from the Chain list, then right-click(Win) / CTRL-click(Mac) on any of the titles in the chain’s device view to reveal the macro menu. You can then map a parameter to any of the macro knobs, or to one of the macro buttons in the macro menu.

Pads and Simplers are easy to fill with MIDI patterns, or even individual samples. A pad overview to the left shifts the set of visible pads up or down in groups of 16.

This is a very useful way of getting the most out of a pad or a Simpler’s MIDI content, as it allows you to easily fill a pad with multiple selections of sounds. In addition to dragging and dropping, you can also Hot-Swap a selected pad with another pad. This lets you fill a pad quickly with a single drag and drop operation, which is much faster than browsing the Device View for a device to select from.

You can also re-arrange and position each Simpler in a pad, and you can drag chains from one pad to another. When you do, all of the Simplers and chains that are mapped to this pad will be shifted up or down in groups of 16 as well.