The best way.... not so easy:

Use Pattern Sequencer to record a single bar of your quarter notes. To make this accurate, use the click to hear the beat whilst recording, and set quantisation to quarter notes, and play along for the recording of one bar.

Then go in and do a Job edit, where you manually quantise it, because the live quantisation isn't always perfect. It's close, but not always spot on. It seems to mod by degrees.

Now export this as an arpeggio.

This is where I can't help you with step by steps,... of the top of my head, because Yamaha has seen fit to make the most convoluted possible way of making arpeggios, and how they play back... to. It is truly ridiculous how bad this is, and how they haven't thought to include a step sequencer to do exactly what you're wanting, and to make arpeggios.

Perhaps Jason can add the details of how to turn this into an arp (there's lots of ways) and how to make it play back (there's lots of ways).

But, at the very least, this makes it portable with the Part, once you set it up and save it as a Single Part Performance, you can import it into any new or old Performances and the Arp with the drum will come in with it... so you can just activate it with a note press, hopefully.... so long as you've jumped through the myriad of hoops to make this just so.

p.s. -- maybe it doesn't have to be a Part, it could be an Arp. Just looking for the simplest/quickest way to get where I'm going.

1) Pick your drum kit: [CATEGORY SEARCH] to bring up some single-Part drum kit. I chose "Real Drum Kit" - the bass drum sound I used was MIDI note C1

2) Record a user arp: [PERFORMANCE] (HOME) then press the RECORD button (I say home first because some menus don't shortcut to the recording screen - but home does). Once in the record screen, press the "MIDI" tab if it isn't selected already. I changed the time signature to 1/4 to make things easy - I only need to record a single quarter note to fill a measure. Note that if you have a count-in of say 2 measures then a time signature of 1/4 only gives you 2 quarter notes of count-in. Just be aware. I also changed record quantize to ON and quantize to the nearest quarter note. There's an "ARP Record" button that was on. It was already set this way and worked out for me. That's the setup. Now press the PLAY button to start recording.

3) After the count-in, press a single quarter note (MIDI note C1 for that bass drum sound), then press the STOP button.

4) After the recording is done, I set "Loop" to ON. This song as-is can now be used with the play/stop button to start and stop a 4-on-the-floor bass drum assuming you have this drum kit loaded into Part 1. You can press the PLAY button to make sure you're getting what you want.

5) If you want to make this respond to keys, convert the song you just recorded into an ARP: touch the "Song Name" near the top of the screen. A popup menu shows "User Arp" as the last option. Touch that. The 3rd box at the top is the Arp's Name. Touch that and name it something you can search for. I called mine "Quarter". You can elaborate more. Under convert type, I changed this to "Fixed" so no matter what the ARP trigger note is - the original C1 (bass drum) note will be "played" by the arpeggiator. Then press "Store As User Arp". Now there's an ARP named "Quarter" (or whatever you named it) you can select as the individual arpeggio for your drum kit. You can setup ARP hold to ON and use this ARP. Whenever you press a trigger note (defined by arpeggio limits) - the bass drum will start the quarter note pattern.

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Note that there's an alternative way to use built-in ARPs. But you'll have to "mess around" with lots of things to conform to the ARP and search for the right one. So rather than deal with that - the more simple route is to create your own (song for the play/stop method or ARP for the key-triggered).

Also, metronome might have been a way but I don't see that we can setup our metronome sound in a custom way. None of the 10 pre-canned sounds are bass drums.

Thanks, Jason (and Andrew), this should give me a great start!

Jason, after a couple of false starts, I finally almost got it. I now have it so then, when I hit Play, I get a single bass drum hit. But once I enable Loop, the Play button only gets me silence. 🙁

Where did you enable loop? I ask because there's the ARP loop (not correct) or the song file loop (correct). The song file settings are part of the old performance recorder (MIDI) section.

If you named your song file then you may want to find it and load the song file to be sure it's there. You'll want to create a Song+Perf link or associate the song to a performance using live set.

I'll double check things on this end once I have my board plugged back into the studio.