🔥 Cubase 11 Tutorial - BEGINNERS Lesson 1 - Getting Started 🔥

hey everybody welcome to this cubase beginners tutorial i am john merritt from born to produce and you guys are going to learn to use cubase by actually following along and making a track yourselves from nothing right through to the final mixdown and master you can follow along in cubase elements artist or pro and you can use any version of cubase from cubase 9.5 and upwards so i'm going to play a quick sample of the track that you're going to make and then we're going to get right into it [Music] so this is going to be loads of fun and the first four lessons are completely free which is enough to get you started in cubase so let's get on with it so this is the steinberg hub that you see when you load up cubase and this is where you can choose what projects you want to load or if you want to start with a blank project which is what we're going to do and you also have news on the left hand side which will tell you some useful info like when a new update for cubase is available so we're going to go to prompt for projects location it should be ticked automatically and then we're going to go create empty so we just have to choose the location for our project i'm going to stick mine on the desktop just because it's nice and easy to get to you can put yours wherever you want i'm going to create a new folder call it btp cubase beginners and then go into it and just click select folder so we won't go into sound card or project settings here the standard settings should be absolutely fine so this is the project window and this is where you spend like 95 of your time in cubase which makes using it actually really simple at least once you know where everything is but don't worry that's what you're going to learn as you progress through the course so in the middle of the projects window is where you bring in and arrange all of the elements of your tracks which you'll see in just a second around the outside of the window you have three zones which you can show or hide by clicking these little buttons up here which are the hide or show zone buttons now we'll be learning more about the zones as we go through but first of all i want to focus on this right hand zone so i'm just going to hide the lower zone for now so this zone is where you find sort of media to bring into your projects whether that is the built in cubase samples or samples from your computer in order to understand this better let's bring in our first bit of media a kick drum and you'll start to see what i'm talking about so in the right hand zone make sure you're in the media tab now cubase does come with many of its own sample packs which you can actually get to by clicking loops and samples and you'll see all the ones that come with cubase now we're going to use some of these later in the tutorial but for now we're going to press the home button and i'm going to click on file browser so we can bring on our own samples so if you guys watching this on youtube if you have not yet bought the course you will find a link to the audio samples needed to complete the first four lessons below in the description so to find the work files on your computer first obviously download them i've just put mine on the desktop here so to extract the zip we just double click it now i'm using winrar on the pc but this will be the same if you haven't got winrar or you're using on a mac and then you'll see the cubase tutorial there we're just going to click and drag it out this has all the work files inside it so i can close that now so back in cubase remember in the media tab we're going to go to file browser and then we just need to navigate to wherever we put our work files now for ease of use i put mine on the desktop so i'm just going to expand that as you can see i've got the tutorial files here which include the work files let's just expand that and then go into the work files and then we've got our audio folder so click on that and we've got this strange little problem in cubase just because i'm on a slightly smaller screen here so at the moment it's not showing the files in this particular folder all we need to do it's just a little glitch all we need to do is come up to where our cursor turns into this little double headed vertical arrow and just click and then the files will appear so if you've got the same problem just do that so at the moment when i click a sample it's not automatically playing we want it to auto play so we just need to select or highlight this little button down here and then when we click a sample it will automatically play and we can hear what it actually sounds like so as i mentioned we are going to start with our kick so there's a couple of ways we can get this into our projects the first way is you can just click and drag it into your project and just drop it anywhere and cubase will automatically create an audio track but we're going to do a bit of a different way we're going to actually right click the sample and we're going to click create sampler track so as you can see this has created a new track called kick 01 and it's opened up the lower zone and it's showing us the sampler control tab as you can see here so before we go any further at all i just want to color the track in a bit just because this is sort of boring gray color so i'm going to hold alt or option on my keyboard and just click the little colored area and it brings up a color palette and we're just going to select a color let's just pick yellow for drums for now just so we can keep everything neat and tidy throughout this project so the sampler control shows us that the kick sample is loaded into it now we can change that at any time we like just by clicking and dragging in another sample and it will then play the snare i do want to keep the kick though so i'm just going to drag the kick back in and replace it we have a keyboard down the bottom which if i click it you can hear it's playing the kick at different pitches and the important thing to remember here is that when you press the c3 that's this blue highlighted key the kick will be played at its natural pitch if you press any other key it's either going to be pitched down or it's going to be pitched up so there are quite a few more functions to the sampler control and especially since cubase 11 we've got these extra bits down here which we'll be looking into in more detail later on but for now let's just get our beats into the project window so to get actually playing in the project we need to use midi to trigger it i'm just going to scroll to the beginning of our projects and it's not complicated we just need to hold alt or option on a mac and you'll see that my cursor turns into a little draw tool and i'm just going to click and draw one sort of block of midi now a couple of things here we're a bit sort of zoomed out at the moment so let's zoom in a bit to bar five which is where we want our midi segment if you've put it on a different bar you can always just drag it to bar five so we're all starting in the same place so to zoom in there's a few different ways you can use the slider down here so we can click and drag that to zoom in or we can just hover over it with our mouse wheel and just use that to zoom in or out or you can hold control or command on a mac and use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out wherever you like there are other ways we'll probably talk about those a bit later on so now we're zoomed in we can see we have the bar numbers here so that's bar five bar six and we want a four four beat which means we'll have a kick on every single beat in the bar so what i also want to do is change this up here from bar we're going to click on that change it to adapt to zoom and this just gives us more control depending on how far zoomed in or out we are so okay we've got a blank midi segment so in order to add notes to it we need to double click it and you'll see the editor appear in the lower zone again you can actually play the sample by pressing the keys on the bottom now just first of all i'm just gonna turn this kick down so just by clicking the kick in the projects window you can see we've got these sort of properties over here one of which is volume so i'm just going to click where the numbers are and just drag that down let's go down to about minus about minus nine is perfect now our kick is a little bit quieter and remember that if we want our kick to play its natural pitch we need to be pressing the c3 key so a couple more things here i'm just going to zoom in a bit vertically by using this vertical slider over here on the right hand side so you can see there we're just zooming in a bit to the keys scroll down a bit and then again if i hold alt or option on my keyboard it's going to change my cursor to a draw tool and i'm just going to draw in four kicks and you can see as i draw them in we're actually getting some information showing up here in our midi block [Music] so one on each beat i'm just going to zoom out a little bit there we go we can see we've got our first kick very nice one thing i will mention so it's important to set the level of the first item preferably the kick that you bring into your projects because as you add more and more elements to your projects the overall volume will get louder and you'll find that the volume of the project gets harder to manage so just a pro tip just set the volume of your kick down quite a bit and always use that to then match the volume of any elements that you add to your project okay so this is great but at the moment it's just sort of playing four beats and then it's carrying on and there's nothing there so what i want to do is actually set the loop region so you'll notice as i come up to the top of the timeline my cursor changes into a draw tool and i'm just going to click and drag it to set the loop region and then we need to activate the loop you can do that on the lower transport panel down here and just click the activate cycle button and you'll see it turns purple then when i play it it just loops around so we actually want to make this a bit longer so i'm just going to zoom out a bit so i'm holding ctrl or command and using my mouse wheel to scroll out and what i want to do is get eight bars of this kick so we can then make a melody to go over the top so there's a couple ways of copying something in cubase so i can hold the alt or option key and you'll get these little scissors tools but if i click and drag you'll see that i just basically copy the midi segment over so i can get four of those but i also can if i want to highlight well any number of them and then hit control or command plus d and it will duplicate them in a row as well so now we've got eight bars obviously our loop region is set so it's just looping the first set of bars now i can just drag the loop regions any size that i want but you also can go to where you want the right hand marker hold the alt or option key and then click to set that and you can do the same by holding ctrl or command and then clicking to set the left hand locator just so you know so in lesson three of this course you will be building on this kick drum pattern and making it into a sort of proper drum beat and learning how to edit in cubase but for now that's good enough that we can start working on the soul of this track the melody if this has been helpful to you please do like and subscribe for more great cubase tutorials thanks for watching guys and girls we'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Born To Produce

Views: 152,274

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Id: p93shlS-iII

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020