In Drum Mode you can use it to scatter hits around for a bit of a Cuban beat, or perhaps it's better used as a way of adding fills and ratchet-style repeats. Fill With Notes lets you throw notes into a clip and is a great way to generate melodies.

You can do a similar thing with the Fill With Notes command, which you get to by right-clicking a hit. This is great for adding hi-hats, rolls or other continuous bits of percussion. One useful tip when placing hits is that you can click and drag to the right to paint hits in on every point of the grid. The Fill With Notes command lets you insert fast note runs, regardless of what divisions the grid is set to. This feels like an oversight, because you have the same colourised velocity stalks that you can edit individually in the controller lanes, and I think it would be a useful feature. With regular notes you click to place and then drag up and down to change the velocity, whereas drum hits always take on the default velocity as set in the Inspector panel. Unlike the piano roll view, you can't change the velocity as you place a hit. You can untick the Audition Notes box in the inspector panel on the left to turn that off. Every time you place a hit you'll hear the drum sound, which can get annoying if you are building up a pattern while playback is looping. The grid is usually dictated by the quantise settings, but you can turn off snap completely if you want to go a bit more freeform. Rather than a pen tool like you have in the piano roll you have a rather cute little drumstick as a mouse pointer to enter drum hits. You don't have to play live of course you can enter notes by hand and Studio One has some tools to help us forge those patterns. You can use your MIDI keyboard or pad controller, MIDI drum kit or any appropriate device, the point being, this is just MIDI being displayed slightly differently to help us more easily write drum tracks. You record drum clips into the timeline in the same way you would any other MIDI part and, in fact, the data gets displayed in the clip as if it was a melodic part. This is the simple triggering of a one-shot sound. You're not worried about note lengths like in the piano roll, or even gate lengths like in the Pattern Editor. The idea of the drum editor is that it offers a tight grid of trigger-based sequencing. You can also change the order of the notes, so you can group drum sounds or hide the ones you don't want to use. A General MIDI drum map is available by default, but you can import custom ones for other drum machines or plug-ins you may own. If you're using a third-party instrument then you can name the notes yourself, or load a drum map script from the little drop-down menu at the top. If you load up the PreSonus Impact instrument the stack will pull in all the notes available from Impact pads, complete with names and colours. As you record drum tracks you can have that stack reduce down to show only the notes that were played, keeping the focus tight on what's important. In Drum View, the piano gets replaced by a stack of named notes that go up in pitch as you go down, which seems strange, but this stack is highly adaptable. Hit the drum icon and we're ready for some percussive action. The piano roll (visible when you select Melodic Mode) and Drum Mode can be switched between via the two little buttons above the vertical piano keys. You can open the Music Editor by double-clicking any MIDI clip or using the Edit button at the bottom right. This month, and in our last workshop in Studio One 4 before version 5 arrives, I thought we'd explore the drum editor and see how it compares to its piano roll companion.ĭrum Mode is the alternative view in what Studio One calls the Music Editor. In SOS September issue we looked at Studio One's piano roll and reminded ourselves of its sublime usefulness. Studio One makes working with MIDI drums a breeze. Drum View shows the name of a note along the left-hand side in place of the piano roll, while hits are shown as triangles with a velocity indicator stalk along the bottom.

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