Screen 4: Unlike with a real drum kit, GA SE4 lets you control just how much of each kit piece is picked up in the overhead and room mics. The only ‘catch’ is that these virtual room mics are only available for the Acoustic Agent for our ‘stacking’ example, you’d need to add suitable reverb to the Beat Agent drums if you want them to sound like they’re in the same room as the Acoustic Agent kit. You can, therefore, reduce the amount of kick appearing in the ambience mics to keep the kick sounding fairly dry relative to the rest of the kit without resorting to high-pass filtering, which can affect the phase relationship between the mics. You can adjust the faders, of course, but you actually have more control than when recording a real kit, as you can also adjust the amount of each individual drum/cymbal picked up by the overhead and room mics - via a pair of rotary knobs on the Edit screen for each kit piece (Screen 4). The rest of the channels in the Acoustic Agent mixer represent the close mics, with a much drier sound.
Thankfully, GA SE4’s Acoustic Agent is no slouch either! The Mixer tab of the Acoustic Agent shows stereo channels for both overhead and room mics (Screen 3). Screen 3: The Acoustic Agent’s Mixer includes both overhead and room mic channels.When mixing acoustic drums, a key decision is how much ‘room’ you blend into the mix, and SD3 offers endless options.
The Beat Agent editing options and the channel faders for each GA SE4 instance allow you to control the balance of your stacked sounds. Any C1 notes will trigger all your ‘stacked’ kick drum samples as the other Beat Agent Instrument pads are empty, other notes will effectively be ignored. Finally, copy your Acoustic Agent track’s MIDI part to the Beat Agent track. In the second instance, activate the Use Hardware Controller mapping switch (the small e-drum icon, bottom-right beneath the bottom row of pads), then right-click a pad to change its MIDI note (multiple pads can be set to the same note). Screen 2: Setting the same trigger note for all your ‘stacked’ sounds makes it easy to layer them on playback.For ease of triggering, ensure the kick samples in both GA SE4 instances are triggered by the same MIDI note (C1 is the Acoustic Agent default for kicks, as shown in Screen 2). Right-clicking on each pad allows you to rename them too. The default order of the velocity layers is determined by the sample file names, but you can reorder the layers for a pad using the Edit page. Here, I dropped them on the top third of the pad so that Beat Agent would arrange the samples as velocity layers (up to eight layers are allowed per pad). In doing this, be careful exactly where on the pad (top, middle or bottom) you drop the sample, as each position forces Beat Agent to handle the incoming samples in a certain way. For Screen 1 above, I dropped a set of seven acoustic kick samples on the C1 Instrument pad.
When you create the second instance, it should default to an empty Beat Agent (if it doesn’t, right-click the Beat Agent icon and select ‘Remove Kit’ from the menu), and you can drag and drop samples from almost anywhere onto the Instrument pads. However, the Beat Agent does allow this, so a simple workaround is to run a Beat Agent GA SE4 instance alongside the main Acoustic Agent one. Unfortunately, the Acoustic Agent doesn’t let you drop samples on to an empty Instrument pad (I suspect there’s a technical reason for this, related to the way this Agent handles room/overhead mics). Let’s assume we want to layer two kick instruments, a multi-velocity acoustic kick and an electronic sub-kick, over an Acoustic Agent kit. GA SE4 can do this too, albeit with less ease and elegance. Stack AttackĪmongst the SD3 features is a very neat ‘stacking’ system, which allows you to combine, for example, multiple snare or kick samples.
In this column, then, I’ll consider how well GA SE4 can do three things that really impressed me about SD3: its ability to stack sounds options for adding room ambience to a drum mix and its workflow for generating a complete drum track. Screen 1: The Beat Agent makes building multi-sample Instrument pads easy - here I’m dragging and dropping a set of velocity-based kick drum samples.Ĭan Cubase’s Groove Agent SE4 take care of all your virtual drummer needs?īack in SOS October 2017, I reviewed Toontrack’s Superior Drummer 3 (SD3), and diving into that wonderful instrument got me wondering just how capable Cubase’s bundled Groove Agent SE4 (I’ll call it GA SE4) might prove in comparison.
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