While there are exceptions, they’re largely ‘one-shot’ sounds, for which the note-off time is irrelevant you might have two MIDI notes triggering a kick drum, one lasting a tiny fraction of a second, the other lasting three seconds - while the two look very different on a piano roll, they’ll both trigger exactly the same sound. For one thing, drums and percussion behave in a different way to most sounds. But if you’re playing drums, a piano roll isn’t the best representation of what’s going on.

A New Viewīy default, if you click on a MIDI clip in the main project window, it will open in a fairly conventional-looking piano-roll editor - which should be familiar to anyone who’s used any DAW software before. Of course, most things aren’t set up by default in the way I like them, so in this month’s column I thought I’d take you through some customisations that I find make drum programming easier.

Actually, though, Reaper’s MIDI editor can be set up to work in a similar way, and while not everything can be replicated, it boasts some very useful features for composing and tweaking MIDI drum parts. Having grown accustomed to using Cubase’s excellent MIDI Drum Editor through many years (decades, even!) of use, I found that I missed it when I started using Reaper. Reaper’s MIDI Editor can be customised to make programming your drum parts easier. 1: A MIDI drum loop copied from EZdrummer to a Reaper track and viewed in the default piano roll editor.

Mt power drum kit reaper