🔥 Cubase 12 & 13 BEGINNER Tutorial (Lesson 1) Getting Started

hi guys i'm joe from bournemouth.com and if you have no idea how to use cubase and you want to learn how to record your own instruments and mix them together then this is the course for you [Music] in this tutorial we're going to make a full track together from start to finish with step-by-step guidance and here is a clip of the track that we'll make together if you stay to the very end yes [Music] [Music] won't make it right [Music] but even if you only stay for the free lessons here on youtube you'll still learn how to record an acoustic guitar an electric guitar a vocalist how to add keyboards with a virtual synth called halion and how to add drums in a virtual drum machine called groove agent both of these instruments come free with all versions of cubase so let's get started we've got a little bit of setting up to do first but then we'll be straight onto the drum beat so make sure you've started a new project and when you first load up cubase you typically get this screen this is called the hub and if for some reason it's not showing for you then come up to the top and click hub open hub on the left hand side you have things like the latest news or updates that kind of thing and on the right hand side you have some templates you can start your projects quickly with and all your recent projects are here as well as a beginner i highly recommend you do things from scratch that way you'll learn so much quicker so with that being said i want you to click create empty down here as we're going to start with a blank project all right the first thing we need to do is create a folder so go to your cubase projects folder on your hard drive usually under steinberg and then cubase projects and create a new folder so create folder here and type in what you want it to be and press return i've actually already got one set up so i'm just going to double click it here and i'm going to click select folder okay so this is cubase with a blank project so it's just a couple of settings we need to check before we get started the most important one is your sound card so go to studio at the top and studio setup and just make sure on this asio driver drop down you have your sound card selected my one is normally steinberg because i've got the ur 22 but for the sake of recording this tutorial i have to use voice meter but for your computer choose your sound interface or sound card here and if you don't have a dedicated sound card first of all i recommend one but if not just choose generic low latency azio driver and the other thing we want to check is project project setup and just check your on sample rate 44 100 hertz and bit depth of 24 bit we're going to be doing some recording of singers and guitarists that kind of thing and we want 24 bit depth i'm not going to go into the theory here because i want this tutorial to be very streamlined but if you do have an interest as to what sample rate is and what bit depth is just google it so very quick explanation of this window is this is the project window ranging from left to right and we're going to arrange our sounds here vertically and they will run from left to right you can press play on the transport bar and the timeline or the playhead will go from left to right you've got your tempo down here which is currently 120 in fact i might as well change this now because we're going to be working on a project which is 148 so double click type in 148 you can alternatively left click drag up and down to change the tempo as well but we're going to leave this on 148. you've got some zones around this main window as well you've got the left zone over here which will display information about the track when we have some you've got the right zone which is more your media base so all your loops and samples that come with cubase are all here as well you can also look at samples on your own computer by pressing file browser and you can drag and drop samples in from this zone for example here you can just drag and drop these samples into the project and have them play in your project we'll be getting into all of this later on you've also got a lower zone here by clicking this middle button here at the top this is the lower zone and we can change the view of this lower zone from the mixing console to the edit window to the sampler control to chord pads we'll be getting into all this later on so to turn zones on and off come up to the top right and we'll turn off the lower zone you can turn off the left as well and the right zones if you want more space for your project window and at the top i want you to check that your grid type is on grid the one at the top your snap is on i will explain all this later on and that your type is adapt to zoom if for some reason you've got something weird here then you may need to click this down arrow here and just make sure you're on bars and beats not one of these other ones here okay let's get started i want a timing reference for when i record my guitar i can switch the metronome on here and i've got some settings for the metronome here or i can press c on my keyboard every single thing in cubase has a keyboard shortcut so if i press c you'll see the metronome come on but i'm not going to use a metronome i'm actually going to use a drum beat so this is a good opportunity for me to show you how to get a drum beat into the project like i say you can drag a sample in from the media bay but you can also load up a virtual drum machine which is what we're going to do first of all we need to add a track so click the plus button here which says add track shortcut is t as you can see and on the add track window make sure instrument is selected there are other types of tracks which will get to later on in the course but we want instrument track for the moment and just make sure on the instrument drop down you have groove agent selected which is under the drum section so make sure it says groove agent here we're just going to name this track drums and we're going to click add track okay so this is the virtual drum machine here called groove agent i'll just come to that in a second but cubase has created an instrument track and in the inspector on the left zone you can see all the information about it let's have a quick look at groove agent so you've got 16 virtual pads which i can click with my mouse or trigger with my midi keyboard or perhaps if you've got a drum pad interface you can use that at the moment there's no samples loaded onto these pads you can see they're blank and when i click them you get no sound so a couple of ways we can get sounds on these pads is that you can go to loops and samples if you wish and just drag any sample in maybe some drum samples for example just click and drag that on to pad one if you wanted to but there's also some inbuilt sounds so we can load a whole bank of sounds so if we go to where it says kit one click that and these are all the banks of sounds so you can choose your style here pop electronic dance whatever rock metal i'm going to click pop and i'm going to click pop kit 5 you can do the same because we're going to be using this kit so double click pop kit 5 if for some reason you don't have pop kit 5 don't worry just choose something similar we're probably going to be swapping out the sounds later on anyway in this course but just to show you what these sound like i can now click kick cross stick snare snare open tom etc i'm left clicking my mouse here so we've loaded up a bank of sounds called pop kit 5. so i could if i wanted to press record down here and play them in with my midi keyboard just for example i'm just showing you this i'm going to undo it in a second so you can record in the drum hits here but let's not worry about that too much at the moment just going to close down that zone again and i'm going to press ctrl z or command z to undo that just wanted to show you you can record in your own patterns if you wish but we're going to use a built in pattern so if we change it from instrument mode here to pattern mode we're going to use a pattern that's already been made for us so i'm going to left click and hold on beat 1 pad [Music] and we're going to drag that onto our timeline here we can now close down groove agent and we can make this bigger and to zoom in horizontally i'm going to use g and h on my keyboard i press h it's going to zoom in if i press g a few times it's going to zoom out there are other ways to do this for example if you hover your mouse in the timeline until you get the four crosses you can actually drag down and drag up as well you can also zoom in and out here at the bottom so you'll get to know that there's loads of things in cubase that can be done in different ways but anyway here's the pattern that we brought in from the virtual drum machine groove version we're going to double click it and we get the edit window open up in the bottom window which we can adjust the size of here or we can make this window bigger by pressing this arrow here open in separate window so let's do that now if this means nothing to you don't worry about it but these blocks are basically blocks of information which tell cubase to play the sound c1 which is the kick drum at this point in time and also to play this sound here f sharp one at this time at this time at this time and this snare to play it here so let's just have a listen to that okay so that's the pattern we dragged in and these sounds correspond if we just go back to instrument mode they correspond here c1 means note c octave one and here's the snare on d and f sharp one is here all correspond to these notes here c1 d f-sharp okay and we can adjust this pattern if we don't like it so although we've pulled in a pattern which is already pre-made we can change it so let's just have another listen to it [Music] so i'm going to change the kick drum pattern here which is this one here so i'm going to move this over and i'm going to create a new one so i'm going to go to my pen tool or draw tool and draw another kick drum in [Music] and then i want to change it in the wrong place so it's going to go back to my normal tool and put that 1 16 backwards so you may have noticed that i can click and drag these on these lines here basically the grid is split into 16 different parts or each bar i should say which these are the bars at the top one two three and there's 16 lines that's because we've set the grid up to be separated 16 times that's what this number is here 116. if we change it to one eight you can see the lines have moved and we now only have eight lines two three four five six seven eight per bar this is one bar here one to two and it means that we can only move these notes on the lines so it depends how fine adjustment you want it 16 is probably best and i can snap these notes across okay if you want to stay off the grid and be able to put this note wherever you want without being on the grid just turn off snap here and i'm now free to move this anywhere i like okay so if you want a more human feel and have the drums slightly off the grid because it's very unlikely for a drummer to hit every single drum exactly to the millisecond on the correct time each time you may want to do that but let's just carry on with making this pattern slightly different [Music] just going to carry on moving them around [Music] try it there [Music] i think we'll move these over you can also see that some of these are red and some of these are bluey this is the volume or the velocity which is down the bottom here this is set to velocity here and basically the red ones are louder and the blue ones are quieter so these high hat hits here are quieter they're in blue but even some of these kick drums are slightly less in volume than others [Music] so let's just make that one a bit louder by clicking here bringing up these lines here to make them louder [Music] okay so i'm just going to zoom out by pressing the g key and so that's the first two bars done so i've changed that kick this is the color kick was originally just going to play the second half of that pattern i don't like this kick drum pattern as much so i'm going to draw a box around them by using my mouse left click and drag draw a box around them to highlight them press my delete key and i'm going to do the same for these ones this is the new pattern so they're highlighted i'm now going to copy and paste these over so i need to click on the first one but hold down alt or option on a mac and click and drag them over so i didn't have to program them in on the second time as well i just copied and pasted them over so let's have a listen to all four bars [Music] and that's fine for now i don't want to do too much more than this on the first lesson there's tons more we can do to this we can add drum fills and start messing around with the velocities and the timings and everything but we're not going to do that we'll do all that later on in the course i just want to mention that anything we do record like the guitars the vocals or even this midi this is called midi this information here everything will be included in the downloadable work files so you can follow along and make this track with us if you want to i'm going to also explain to you how to loop this so at the top here you can see this part is gray and the rest isn't that means this is the left locator and this is the right locator and we can loop this if we want so down here we have a loop function and you can see it's called cycle so sometimes it's called cycle and you can click that button so it goes blue it also goes blue up here now when i press play it will loop around at this point i can extend that to the whole thing if i want to and an even quicker way of doing this is if i just deactivate that for a second and let's say you've got a loop over here a very very quick shortcut is to highlight the segment and click either alt p or command and p and it will automatically set up a loop and start playing [Music] okay so that's really really useful we're going to be using all these things later on and just so you know this screw version it can be complicated it's because it can do so many things it can do so many wonderful things you've got all these other options here you've got mixers and all sorts of things going on here and we go into all of this in our groove agent course if you're interested so i hope this got you started with a bit of setting up and how to use a virtual drum machine in the next lesson we're going to be recording an acoustic guitar i'm going to show you how to set all that up and record it so i hope this was useful for you guys i'll see you in the next one all the best bye [Music] you

Channel: Born To Produce

Views: 148,757

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Id: 3z8znWYjJ2A

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022