Learn how to use Drum Maps in Steinberg Cubase

There are loads of ways to generate drum and percussion sounds in the studio these days – we’re spoilt for choice with all sorts of beat-making methods. However, whether it’s external hardware, plug-in software, or synthesised or sampled drum sounds (or a mixture of the two), nearly all of these drum-sound sources have one thing in common: drum ‘kits’ are stored as patches in which each drum sound is assigned to, and therefore triggered by, a specific MIDI note.

The problem is that there is no common template or specification that governs the specific mapping of drum sounds to note numbers. Where one drum patch or sample bank may assign a kick drum to note C1, another may have a tambourine assigned to that note. This can be a problem for producers when they want to experiment to hear how a rhythm part will sound through different drum-kit banks and/or instruments – the different sounds associated with each note can be comically different.

A similar issue exists if you’re playing drum parts using a controller, because different instruments and sound banks may require you to learn different key layouts, or to reprogram your pad controller. Cubase solves both of these problems with Drum Maps.

Input and output notes

At their most basic, Drum Maps associate a drum-instrument name with a MIDI note, and it is these names that are displayed in the Drum Editor’s instrument list. You can define these names directly from within the Drum Editor (just double-click on an instrument name to edit it), or you can do so from the Drum Map Setup panel.

The notes that you associate names with – shown in the Drum Map’s Pitch column – are just the notes that Cubase uses internally to represent different drum-hit events. The actual notes that create these events and that are sent when these events are triggered, can be different to this internal representation. This is all done via the I-Note and O-Note columns of the Drum Map – they can be a bit confusing, so pay attention to the following!

The I-Note – or Input Note – defines the incoming MIDI note that will create a drum-hit event on a given row of the Drum Editor. So, for example, if you name pitch E1 as ‘Snare Drum’, but assign its I-Note as F1, then any incoming F1 notes will be translated internally to E1 and be recorded as a hit on the Snare Drum row.

Similarly, the O-Note – or Output Note – defines the outgoing MIDI note that will be sent by a Drum Editor row. Continuing our example, if the snare-drum instrument defines note A3 as its O-Note, then all the hits for the snare drum will be sent as A3 note messages, even though they’re stored in Cubase as E1 notes; incoming F1 notes will be translated into outgoing A3 notes, too.

The practical upshot of this is that by spending time configuring Drum Maps, you can save yourself from learning different key or pad layouts for different sound banks. Also, you can make it easy to swap between sound banks and sound sources without making your cool groove sound like a stack of chimney pots falling on a hi-hat.

Output routing and scoring

There are times when you may wish to use multiple sound sources for the playback of a rhythm part – main kit parts from a sampler, say, with some analogue bleeps and bloops from a synth. In these scenarios, you can split your rhythm part across multiple MIDI tracks, but this is cumbersome compared to working on a single part within a single Drum Editor window.

Drum Maps provide a solution to this, too, as they allow each row to have its own independent MIDI routing, as defined by the Channel and Output columns of the map. When these are set to Any and Track, respectively, it’s the source MIDI track that defines the MIDI routing, but any other settings will cause the outgoing MIDI note to be directed to the specified MIDI channel and/or destination.

Drum Map rows have a fourth note value associated with them, shown in the Display column. This defines the pitch that will be used to represent a row’s drum-hit events when viewed in the Score Editor. Also related to scoring are the Head Symbol setting, which determines the note head symbol that a row’s drum hits will use in scores, and the Voices column, which groups drum instruments for common handling of rests and stem direction.

Creating drum maps

To practise building a Drum Map from scratch, we’re going to use a multi-sampled acoustic kit in Groove Agent SE. Groove Agent follows GM mapping to a certain extent, but diverges for things like hi-hats: Groove Agent has something like 20 different notes dedicated to hi-hats, whereas GM only has three. If you don’t have Groove Agent, then something like Superior Drummer or BFD will work nicely for this walkthrough.