Yamaha XGWorks - Potential BB Drum Editor?

BeatBuddy General
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I recently downloaded XGWorks as I used to use it years ago with some old Yamaha gear I had and thought I’d take another look to see what it could do. It has a MIDI drum editor, so I loaded up a MIDI drum pattern file to play around with.
It was easy to move notes around and adjust not only the individual note volume, but also the volumes of groups of selected notes. I haven’t dug into it too far, but thought I put it here for others as a possible alternative the BB editor. Hey’ it’s free so what would you have to lose trying it!! :crazy_face:
There’s good documentation in the PDF ‘Help’ file accessed from within the program.

Extract the RAR file to a temporary folder where the exe install file will be located. Windows only.
http://www.xg-central.com/archive/software/XG-Works_307E.rar

In this screenshot I have a group of Hi-Hats selected which I can change the volume of as a group. Individual notes can also be selected using CTRL + mouse click which is useful to adjust several notes not adjacent to each other. Adjustment is done by grabbing/dragging the square in the lower box that shows note velocities. I think there’s a lot more that can be tweaked that I haven’t explored yet.

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Right clicking the instrument names brings up a menu with ‘Properties’ where different Yamaha XG kit names can be selected. I think this is pulled from an ‘ini’ text file in the programs directory. I’m not sure yet if this ‘ini’ file can be edited to align with BB drum kits/instruments, but inclined to think it’s doable. I started to play with this idea, but need to explore it more.

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2 Likes
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Hey what an excellent idea. I remember liking the XG Works layout and features. Yo that software must be 20 years old, is it working on your Windows? Are you using Win10? I’ll try to resurrect this on my desktop as well. Even at having to transfer files back and forth between XG and BBM the work flow should be faster than in BBM alone.

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Working on a Win7 Pro 64bit machine. Haven’t loaded it onto my Win10 PC yet.

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Thanks for the heads up MarkF48. :grinning:

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Really nice idea! I had an QY100 back in the day and missed about with this. Is there any software that can export a few bars of a entire midi drum song into its own midi - to become an intro, verse1, bridge, chorus or outro - possibly by setting the loop or start/finish bars?The software I’ve used (now using Guitar Pro 7.5) requires me to delete all the unwanted bars. This takes a while. Cheers :slight_smile:

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I use Cubase for most of my midi editing and then break the song parts up just by highlighting what I want and exporting them to BB Manager.

On a side note I notice the BB Manager software has gone open source so maybe here’s an expert out there who could bring it up to scratch. I’ve always felt this was the biggest let down of the BB. The manager could be so much more but unfortunately is missing even the most basic features like copy & paste etc. To have a fully functional editor would raise the BB up even higher.