Here's how I do beats with midi: 1. create 1 aux track for the input of the midi instrument. use a send from the track to a bus you're not using (I start at 15-16 and work my way down so I know how many buses I have left over). 2. Create several midi tracks, all with identical volume, patch, instrument and midi channels. 3. Create the same amount of audio tracks with all of their inputs pointing to the aux send you setup in part 1. 4. Use each midi track for a seperate drum hit, 1 for snares, 1 for kicks etc... 5. once you've finished programming you're midi beats, mute all but the first midi track, record enable the first audio track from part 3 and print that drum hit to audio. 6. keep repeating this with each midi track till you've got each drum hit recorded as a seperate audio track. 7. Now you can start panning and adding effects to each drum kit sound individually because they're all audio. You can time correct them too by dragging the regions around, midi is next to useless for drum programming because it slops too much. 8. Once you've got the beats sounding exactly as you want them, bounce all the the audio tracks with your beats on to 1 stereo pair. Now you've got perfectly sample accurate beats all mixed down and ready to use in you're tune and you've had loads more control of how the beats sound that simply using midi alone. Obviously if you decided you wanted to change the beats later on it would be quite time consuming but if you think you'll need to do that, just bounce each of the audio tracks down to print the effects and panning to audio and then you'll only need to redo the part with the changed rather than editing every drum hit from scratch again. The only the time I use midi for beats is if I need control over the velocity of each drum hit, once I've got that right, I work completely in audio.