Working With Pads V4 in Groove Agent SE

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Working With Pads V4 in Groove Agent SE

hello everybody Andrew Blake from thedigital audiom manual.com today we'regoing to move on to the fourth video aswe continue discussing working with thepads and groove agent se but before westart I want to remind you that there'sa link below to the content navigationguide which is an easy to navigate webpage with links to all the content onthis channel and besides that in thenear future I'm going to begin addingtips and other bits of information thatwill only be available there if you'reworking with programs like wavelab orqbase plugins or the cable guys shaperbox and many many other projects thatare in the works then I know you'regoing to find just like I have that thisis an invaluable study Aid and the otherthing I want to make sure you understandis that this is not a simple PDF this isa constantly updated page that has anyinformation that is new or anytimevideos are changed really anythingupdated and once you have it you willalways have the latest informationconstantly updated so if you haven'tgotten it already go to the link belowclick on it and save it to your yourfavorites it's my gift to you okay solet's get started we're going to startout talking about pattern pads so we'vealready noticed that we have these twogroups of tabs up here pattern andinstruments up on the upper left hereand the difference is that you know theinstruments are one sound basically thesamples and the patterns play a bunch ofinstruments all together or sometimesthey can play just one instrument but insome kind of pattern but either way theydon't just hit one time another thingwe've talked about and notice is thatwhen a pattern is playing it has like alittle clock thing ticking away on ityou can see it and it also has a counterthere that's showing the number of Beatsticking away that's one thing whenyou're playing the pads just notice thatbecause that's going to come up later assomething that's important so let's usethis kit to start with this time aroundgo up to your as usual that load panelbutton go up to your kits hit thatselect content set and look forsomething that says the groove agent SEkits click on that and then look downyour list and your results try to findthe one that says drum and base kit onedouble click on that you know and thenhit a pattern just to make sure you gotsome sound so let's completely clearthese pads out and have a clean slateright click on any one of these pads andthere's an option towards the bottomthat says reset all the pads just goahead and do that and all your pads justgo to a clear nothing happening slateyou should still see the bead agent uphere in the rack area but your pads willno longer do anything so now go over tothe load panel on the right and movethrough your tabs till you come to theone that says Styles click on yourStyles and go up to the top of the listand before you do anything there makesure you have these buttons pressed onthe bottom go down to the little playerwe've been talking about and make surethat the second to the last button thatstands for autop playay is pressed andthis Loop playback button is pressed soin other words the two buttons on theend should be lit up check your vimemake sure your VI's not too loud therethe level back over to your pattern areahit one of the patterns I'm going to hitthe one that's the second row up thefirst first one on the left so it hasthe focus with the yellow bar go over onyour right and just hit one of thesepatterns I'm going to hit the first onehere and it should start playing somekind of pattern you can go down to thenextone it'll play a pattern each one ofthem will be a pattern let's just staysimple for a minute hit the very firstone one way to get this onto thatpattern is just double click it once Idouble click it you'll see that thepattern over here on the left it hassome information written on it let's goand hit the next pattern go down toanother pattern in your list I'll justgo to the next one in the in the bunchdouble click that and you can see it litup that pattern as well let's fill outthe rest ofthese and you can use whatever ones youwant but I'm just going to keep goingthrough each one ofthem hit the last one hit one more overhere on theright so you can see all four of thesepatterns now I have information writtenon on the left here now I'm going to hitthis stop button down on the right tostop this sound from happening you cannow go back and hit thesepatterns and you can play thosepatterns that's how you load patterns invery[Music]simple there's other ways we're going totalk about that in a minute but this isone way just double click them in thelist and they load right up move off theStyles go over to the midi one this miditab up here on top in our load panel andclick any one of these and once youclick on one instead of double cck itout take it and drag it over to one ofyour pads you're going to see adifferent like set of icons here just goahead and drop it on there take anotherone take it over dragit take another one over and drag itfill them all out so you got four ofthem I'm just kind of going through abunch of[Music]these and then again come over here andstop this player if the playerscontinues to play and then try those outclick them on your[Music]pads so there you go there's two ways toload things like that in summary withthese both on the Styles and on thismidi tab you can either click them anddrag them onto these pads or you canjust double click them and have a padselected either way it's going to loadthem into these pads we haven't talkedabout this Midi player yet but be awareyou can also drag patterns right underthese things if I grab a patter patternhere and I drag it over this little spotup in this area it loads it into thisand these are in turn already assignedto pad so this pad will now play thisthere are literally so many ways to dragand drop patterns onto Groove agent youcan even go to Q base's Media Bay youpress F5 and bring up the media Bay gointo this area that selects media typesand select the MIDI files you can thenaudition any of these youwant all kinds of included minifiles that are already in qbase if youlike any of those you can grab them anddrag those onto a pad as well once weget going and actually start creatingsome of patterns of our own which we cando right in Cubase you can then actuallytake those patterns and drag them rightup onto a pad I'm going to go up tothese pads again I'm going to say selectall pads I'm going to right click andsay remove the patterns and then observethis option you can actually go choosemultiple files at once so like if I goback over to this midi area I'm going totake these ones that say Be Alivethere's basically like eight of theseI'm going to hold shift at the bottom ofthem select all those at once I'm goingto grab them with my mouse and drag themon to one of thepads and instead of going to where thetwo things were I'm going to go down towhere it shows the three little blocksand let go and it fills every one of thepads with those patterns so now I haveeight patterns is already set to go andjust like we did with the instrumentsyou can right click on these and you getthe context menu which we've alreadyseen and done a few things but feel freeto look at all the other options we'llkind of go through these as they come upbut your usual things you can renamethem set the color change the triggernotes various things like that as wellas hitting in one of these pads andgoing to the option that says select allthe pads and as we did remove thepatterns that kind of thing you can justas easily select a pad hit contr a onyour keyboard and hit delete and you canclear them right out that way as wellsometimes as you're messing with padsyou may do a few things and you want toload some presets but you don't wantthose things overwritten on the grooveagent se you have a couple of optionswhen you look down at the instrumentside there's a little pad lock here andif you hit the pad lock you have theoption to lock the colors or lock theoutputs so those aren't affected then ifyou know you load a preset into it youhave some options as far as copying andmoving pads if you want to movesomething you just click it drag it tothe other pad that you want it move toand that's it on the other hand if youwant to copy it meaning you keep theoriginal where it's at but still make aduplicate somewhere hold your ALT keyand do the same thing click it and dragit to the new location and then youfinally have options if you want to domore than one pad like if I hit this andhold shift hit this pad so I have fourdifferent pads and right click on it Ican do one of two things I can eithercut the pads or copy the pads if I cutthe pads now they're on from theoriginal then if I go to the next set ofpads and I hit paste pads it willactually paste all four of those pads onthe next pads if I've created you knowmy own patterns here maybe set up my owncolors or did my own intros or who knowswhat any number of things I've donemyself here or made variations on anexisting kit I can then go up onto therack of the agent itself and right clickand there's an option to save thepattern Group which opens up a specialplace in the Steinberg folder to savepattern groups then I can recall thosegroups any way I want later when you'rereloading a kit if I go up here and Isay load the pattern group it will onlyload over empty patterns it won't loadover patterns that already have thingson them so let's begin looking at What'scalled the agent page it's called theagent page because there's a buttonright here that says agent it's overthis middle section of the groove agentand in this agent page you have thestyle player and you have the Midiplayer the Midi player which we haven'treally looked at yet allows us to kindof alter and change one pattern doing anumber of things which we're going tolook at on the other hand the styleplayer which we've kind of basicallylooked at allows us to change a numberof different patterns and things on thepad like we said there's intros andfills and any number of things all ofthis happens once you select a pad nowonce you've selected a pad it reallydepends on whether you've already gotsomething in it or if you're gettingready to put something in it either waythe pad P has to be turned on so if youhave a pattern in it already this buttonup here on the middle on the right isalready basically going to be always litbecause there's something happening sothat pad's going to be on on the otherhand if I turn that off I hit thatbutton and this is what you get with anempty pad it shows the pad is kind ofoff so you always have to start byeither turning the pad on or making surethe pad is on before you can make anychanges in the middle here let's have acloser look at this Midi player which isbelow the agent Style and then click onmidi also going back up in the middleand to the right where it shows that padon and off next to that there's a littlebutton that shows the pad settings ifyou click on that you get some extrastuff down below for this discussionlet's leave that on first one we want tolook at at the top of the little boxhere as we move from the left in we havean option that says drop the midipattern here to import it into the userlibrary and what does all that mean wellthe first thing to understand is ifwe're dealing with MIDI files again ifwe go over to our load panel to the tabthat says midi click on any of thesethat are in this list I'll just click onthis one that says chill outkit the minute we click on any ofthese they are playing through the beadagent up here in the rack and you cansee the actual LED plays shows the levelbeing played and if I take one of thesepatterns and I drag it up to this drop Mpattern here button it's going to loadit onto this pattern that I've gothighlighted over here with the f Focusthat's fairly obvious at this pointbecause that's kind of what we've beendoing what's not so obvious is when itsays drop it here to import it into theuser Library so they're telling us acouple of things are going to happen ifwe start using this little button numberone if we drag a pattern up to thispoint it is going to load it onto thepad we'll be able to play it it's alsoputting it into the user library nowwhat is the user Library well let'sinvestigate that and to investigate thatI'm going to draw you back over over toyour load panel and we're going to goover to the tab that says the browserand we're going to kind of revisit someof the things we talked about way backwhen we talked about managing our filesand I emphasize this stuff becauseknowing where your files are in Grooveagent is just very critical take it fromsomeone that had a lot of frustrationwith that I've had projects so manyprojects where I created things inGroove agent and opened them up sixmonths later only to find error messagestelling me that the patterns don't existor the sounds don't exist so the betterhandle you have on where things arebeing stored the less likely you aregoing to be in that position with thatin mind if we look up to the all mediaat the top here and back when we talkedabout you know managing your files andall those lessons we said we couldrightclick on any of these and there' bean option here that says collapse thetree I'm going to go ahead and do thatI'm going to collapse the tree and whatthat gives me is a real basic view ofall my media and for me it gives me justbasically three things my computer VSTsound and user contentand this is what I want to draw you tothat Steinberg has already created afolder called user content so withoutyou doing anything or creating foldersyourself Steinberg has already put aplace in here for the things that you'regoing to be creating as you go if youcreate midi patterns or various otherthings the groove agent already has inplace some basic folders where thingsare going to go so let's explore thatreal quick because it's good to get ahandle on it so we're going to go tothis user content click on it and nowdown in the results area you you couldsee four different folders created downhere one says midi files one sayspercussive files one says style filesand then the vst3 presets and I wouldtell you to go ahead because I'vealready done it I would go ahead andwhile you have this user contenthighlighted go ahead and do it likewe've done before where you go up to thetop hit the plus button and it allowsyou to create a preset favorite herethis little screen should open up withuser content on it just say okay thenyou always have access quick access touser using your down arrow and thengoing to the user content whenever youwant it later that's a very valuablething to just have but moving on withuser content highlighted and I go downinto this bottom area where the MIDIfiles are and I'm going to double clickon the MIDI files and for me that bringsup another folder called user and if Iclick on that guy couple times it opensup and basically shows me nothing cuzthis point I have no files in my userfolder and if you've been using GrooveAG you may have some things here you maynot have created any kind of files andthere may be nothing here to see but nowwith that in mind watch this when I goback to the midi file tab up here and Iclick on one of these MIDI files and I'mgoing to click it and drag it up intothis little icon what you're talkingabout and it changes a picture to whereyou can drop something I'm going to justdrop it a few things have now occurrednumber one it actually made the pad comealive it turned it on like we're talkingabout it filled in the pad over herewith the informationsometimes on my system I can't justclick the pad I have to come over andmake sure I've stopped the auto playerfirst but now when I hit thispad I can play thepattern and now observe this if we goback to the browser and now if I look inthat user folder that pattern that Ijust dragged is also in my user folderand as I continue to drag more thingsonto this icon whether it's from Grooveagent or whether it's patterns I createin my project myself Groove agent willautomatically fill the user folder forme with these kits so they're all thereand I can use them as I need them nowbefore we go further let's do a quickreview where this user folder is if Iright click on this user folder I havean option that says show and explore andwhen I click on that it opens up for mein that file in the user in the Explorerand where that originates is in mydocuments Steinberg and we talked aboutthat early on with managing a files thatSteinberg has created in your documentsalready this Steinberg folder whetheryou know it or not and in that Steinbergfolder they've created a Groove agentfolder and now they're putting thosekind of presets that we're creating intothis user folder that is created allthat being said to just remind you thatif at some point you ever changecomputers or you're backing up yourfiles or any number of things you'redefinitely going to want to back up thisSteinberg folder from your documentsbecause over time not only your grooveagent but many other things that youprobably have from Steinberg or otherproducts are throwing the presets rightinto that folder and you're going towant to make sure you don't ever losethat folder and that may be somethingthat not may not be completely obviousor easily overlooked when you're backingup other bits of information so be awarethere's a Steinberg folder in yourdocuments all right it's going to wrapit up for today as always if you haven'talready be sure to grab your copy of thedigital audio manual content navigationguide from the link below this video thefaster better way to learn and reviewpick pick it up look it over all thedifferent topics that are gathered thereand then you two can get started on yourpath through a better way to learn allthis stuff as we go a little deeperworking on the pads talked about thepattern pads and the styles of the padsmidi patterns to the pads multiple filesto pads talked about how to delete padinfo some of the extra lock options forthe colors the outputs how to copy andmove pads how to save and load patterngroups on the agent page we looked atthe style the Midi player turning thepads on and off did some examples of howto import into the user Library lookedat the user content then We examined theSteinberg folder in the my documents wewill continue to move through all thesedifferent features and functions workingwith Groove agent SE as always great tohave you guys here and I'll see you onthe next[Music]video