7

Chapter 23 Ultrabeat 341
Tutorial: Creating Drum Sounds in Ultrabeat
Now that you’re acquainted with all of Ultrabeat’s features, we’d like to offer you a few
specific sound creation tips in the following section. Please take the time to explore the
vast and complex possibilties available to you in Ultrabeat, using the following
programing tips as a starting point. You’ll discover that there is hardly a category of
electronic drum sound that Ultrabeat can’t create easily.
Before we jump into sound programming, we’ll briefly discuss how sounds are selected.
To select sounds, proceed as follows:
m
The 25 sounds of an Ultrabeat drum kit are mapped to the onscreen keyboard found
on the left hand side of the Plug-in window. The order of sounds on the keyboard
corresponds to notes on a connected MIDI keyboard, starting with C1 for the first
(bottom) sound. Clicking on the name of a sound selects it for editing. The sound’s
parameters are displayed to the right of the keyboard, and can be edited
Note: Make sure that the sound you’re playing via MIDI is also the one you’re
editing: you can recognize the selected sound by the frame that appears around its
name in assignment area. The corresponding key on the onscreen keyboard to the left
of the sound name turns blue when it receives appropriate MIDI information. Clicking
on these keys with the mouse will play the sounds directly in the Plug-in window.
In this example, drum voice 2 is being played (the blue key) while drum voice 4 is
selected (the red frame).
When the Voice Auto Select function is switched on, the sound played via MIDI is
selected for editing.
Time to move on to sound programming! First, we’ll analyze several classic electronic
drum sounds, and show you how you to accurately recreate them using the many
features available to you in Ultrabeat. We’ll also take a look at additional refinements
you can make.
Note: In Ultrabeat’s Settings folder, you will find a drum kit called Tutorial Kit. This drum
kit contains all drum sounds discussed in this tutorial. It also includes a drum sound
called “Default Tut(orial)”, which is a default set of “neutral” parameters that provide an
excellent starting point for many of the following examples.