i am an architect

Spent some time Sunday afternoon trying to improve my writing of drum parts in Cubase; it actually requires intense concentration otherwise you get lost in a sea of little red diamonds. Above the drum score just reads 4/4 6/4 4/4 6/4 ad infinitum and is no help whatsoever.

On top of that I found an infuriating little device called The Dr Liebezeit drum machine and through trial and error i managed to integrate it into Cubase with relatively few problems. It can only run two sounds at a time (i left it on the default of two clicking sounds) and you program a sequence of up to 32 beats by simply turning each beat on or off.



(click to enlarge and add colour)

This, however, is where the sanity ends. First i noticed that there is no way of setting a tempo on the drum machine, instead, it takes its cue from the tempo of the cubase click track. This is not such a big deal but there seems to be no way of lining it up with the cubase beat. In short, it plays at the correct speed, but starts at random and 9 out of 10 times is out of sync.

So, you have two choices; either keep restarting it until it lines up by chance, or make a lengthy recording of the Dr Liebezeit sound, which can then be inserted as audio and lined up relatively easily. Despite the romance of the former, I settled on the latter.

Then I listened to Efterklang and realised it was all futile.