I was not aware that Cubase could capture Drum Maps from external VSTi... will have to check, but just FYI, the majority of Motif XF kits follow the GM Map, so it should not be an issue for the majority of the kits.

The Create Drum Map from Instrument feature of Cubase worked for me when I used it with the Groove Agent SE4 VST that comes with Cubase 8.5 Pro.

Looking at the drum maps in the Motif XF Data List document (starting on page 13), I see many differences between them. So while they all may be consistent with the GM Map, there's also plenty of information in addition to that map.

Anyway, please let me know what you find out about the capabilities of the Montage.

Looking at the drum maps in the Montage Data List document, I see that, as is the case with the Motif XF, many of them have plenty of additional information in addition to the standard GM Map.

Given that Yamaha already has all of this information on their computers, it seems to me that it wouldn't be very difficult for them to produce an XML file for each drum Performance so that we could easily import an accurate drum map into Cubase instead of having to type it all in ourselves.

Or, if there were some way to enable Montage Connect to do that?

It didn't take long to hack up a quick script to produce an XML file that Cubase seems to like. Scoring items are ignored - that's a whole other level and I'm not sure the general audience cares about the scoring feature when it comes to using the maps.

Most drums run from C0 to C6, so the script assumes this when coming up with the note order.

Let me know if the attached works for you as an example test.

In order to create an xml - I just use PDF (normal reader) to copy a table which has the general format:

[Note] [Wave Number] [Wave Name]

Then I paste this into a spreadsheet (excel, or any open office free spreadsheet with basic formula support)

Since the spreadsheet already has the formulas to delete the wave number - it produces a list of the format:

[Note] [Wave Name]

Then I just cut/paste this into a text file (called "any name I care to set it to.txt"). Then I run the script with the options:

myscript "any name I care to set it to.txt" "drum performance name"

Where "drum performance name" is "Schlager Weapon 1" for the attached.

It's fast without a lot of typing it could be further automated using other tools that are there.

Takes well under a minute per drum kit to do this manually (with script assist).

Slightly improved script and some random DRMs.

Very cool. What did you write the script in? Are you planning to make the script available?

At the moment, I only need the drum map for Real Drums Kit. If you felt like making that one and uploading it, I'd be grateful.

This is what the script spit out.

The script is written in dos batch (CMD) since it was quick.

I have a javascript version also about 2/3 completed - working on other things and not much time for this at the moment.

I feel like there's enough talent here that you'll probably see something from someone else that does this.

Other things have used C, Python, or whatever happens to be on top of the pile that's handy at the time. There's no lack of options to parse text and generate text.

Thank you so much. That's really helpful.

Lately my choice for things like this has been Python. But I'm glad you did this in whatever language you chose.

The "Real Drums" drum map produced some odd behavior in Cubase's Beat Designer. I could never figure out exactly how this happened, but occasionally the names of many of the drum notes would disappear, and the name popup menu would become very small.

I decided to write some Python code to modify this drum map so that for each note, the DisplayNote matched the INote and the ONote. I did this and it seemed to fix the problem. At this point, I was far enough along understanding how to do XML in Python, that I decided to go the rest of the way and write code to create a drum map starting with text from the Montage Data List PDF.

I just uploaded the code I wrote along with instructions to this thread.

Yeah - it's pretty simple stuff pushing data from one thing to another. I didn't do any real testing with the script output before since I wasn't using a drum map on a daily basis. My QA testing was limited to "does the list look OK after loading?". With limited conditions on the testing.

Glad you could run with this and evolve the solution to something that works better for you (and the community).