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As a former drummer who has done tons of work in MIDI, my approach here is as follows:

  1. Create 1 track containing all notes. The primary purpose here is to address the "realism" aspect you've identified.
  2. Duplicate the track; one per instrument (or by group if that makes sense.... e.g. kick, snare, HH, Cymbals, toms is usually a decent start). Be sure to "unlink" clips.
  3. For each duplicated track, isolate the instrument by selecting only that MIDI note (click-drag) on the piano key and now invert the selection. Once all "other" notes have been selected, delete them.
  4. Now you have multiple tracks, one per instrument (or group) which can be better mixed (assuming your signal routing is setup to support it).

The process above is meant to essentially "get things going" in order to support mocking a mixing scenario which feels like mixing a kit using multiple mics. From there, I'll admit adding new fills, etc, is less elegant but that's the tradeoff we've bought into by separating across tracks. Of course, this all assumes you want to mix/process in Qtractor itself. Depending on your instrument, you may choose to just do it in the plugin itself. If so, you'd avoid all this "splitting across multiple tracks" stuff and just keep your data within the single track. I've found it more powerful to split though since, for example, we can start doing things like throwing the Calf Transient Designer onto only the snare in order to boost the attack, etc.

TIP: It may even be handy to keep the original "consolidated" track around for reference purposes and just mute it. Whatever works.

Random Thought: If anything, I may have just identified an area for a new feature which would eliminate the manual splitting. Some kind of "Split into multiple new tracks by note" thing? Like an unpacker of sorts.