I recently invested in the Area 33 kit for Superior Drummer 3.0 from Toontrack. I’m using Cubase 14 so the first order of business is getting a drum map together for the kit.

If you want to grab a copy of the drum map I’ll make it available for download at the bottom of this post.

Creating a Drum Map

If you want to create a drum map from scratch it’s pretty straight forward, if a little tedious. Firstly, you can find the mapping of input notes to “articulations” in Superior Drummer 3.0 by loading the kit in question and going to “Settings > Midi In/E-Drums…”.

Figure 1 – Articulation names mapped to input keys in Superior Drummer

This note and articulation information is useful for creating the Cubase drum map because it shows you appropriate names for each input key. We’ll take those names and add them to the drum map when we create it. I found it convenient to add this information to an Excel spreadsheet so I can easily copy them into the drum map later. This part is a pain.

I am assuming you have added a Track Instrument in Cubase so there will be a track for the drums already. Close Superior Drummer, select the drum track and look at the inspector. Find the section relating to drum maps.

Figure 2 – Drum map section in the Cubase inspector

Click the dropdown and choose “Drum Map Setup…”.  Then click the “+” icon or right-click and select “New Map”.

You should now have a blank drum map. It’s now time to copy the articulations we pulled from Superior Drummer into the drum map. This is also a pain.

Figure 3 – Adding the articulation names to each note 

Once done, right-click on the map name, choose “Save…” and export your map for use in other projects. All you need to do is right-click and select “Load…” to make a drum map available in a project. Just make sure the drum map is selected in the dropdown list back in the inspector.

Downloads

You can skip the above and simply click the link at the bottom of the page to download a Cubase drum map for the Toontrack Superior Drummer Area 33 full kit. By all means grab it and try it but do so at your own risk blah, blah, blah…

The drum map is in a Zip file so extract it before use.

In exchange, if you find it useful why not help me out and give this video a view and maybe even a like!