10 Cubase Shortcuts you should know- Up your PRO game!

hello everyone and welcome back dome here and this video is for all you Cubase friends up there on this video I'm going to talk about my 10 essential Cubase shortcuts that you should know and will make your workflow a lot faster now if you're a seasoned user you might know quite a few of them but I've been using Cubase for as long as I can remember myself and I'm constantly finding new shortcuts in queue based also on this video I'm going to show you some shortcuts that I've created that have sped up my workflow immensely and they're not in Cubase by default is the way I've set it up over the years and I found which things I'm doing more and more and I do very often and basically I thought okay I need a shortcut for this so let's add a shortcut for this that's the beauty of cube is you can create any shortcut you want and you can create macros I'm gonna show you some macros as well so let's get started I hope these will speed up your Cubase workflow massively right let's talk shortcuts the first shortcut I want to show you is the what I call the chopping shortcut so I mean imagine that you want to do some vocal chops or you want to create some interesting stuttering effects stuff like this in Cubase you could grab your scissors too or you would press alt and start clicking like that and you would if you want to create some stuttering effects you could probably go like this and just delete some of these and so on and so forth this is all very good but there's a quicker way to do this so the trick is to grab your scissors tool so if you press 3 on your keyboard you will activate your scissors tool and then you can basically say I want to click on this see old click and boom see what happened now the scissors tool created sixteenth-note segments why because I have my quantized value as 16th notes so if I wanted eighth notes amens I could go like this and I would go like that now the trick to do this is to have snap activated and that's my shortcut number two actually it's snap on and off that's one of the things that you will have to do very very often in Cubase if you want to move things around for example let's say I'm this event right here and I want to move this and I have my grid type set to bar obviously you can turn this to adapt to zoom which is my favorite mode that was introduced in Cubase and basically the more zoomed in you are the more resolution you have but if you want to be completely free and move things around or if you want to you know kind of align some claps that have a little bit of you know sound a reverse on until the actual clap falls in that's a very easy thing to do you just go and press J on your keyboard and then you activate and deactivate snap which is really really useful for example you can be like this and you can be completely free and then you activate it and then you have your snap back I'm sure that most of you Cubase users out there know it but this is a very useful function and I think it's worth mentioning now of course one of the most important things in Cubase is the zoom in and zoom out now I'm going to give you a bunch of shortcuts here because I'm pretty sure most of you know that zoom in is H on your keyboard and zoom out is G on your keyboard right this is all very good but I'll show you something else if you go old G and H you can zoom in and zoom out vertically like this but there's another shortcut if you go for shift gh now you're zooming in the waveforms so especially if you have like parts that were recorded with very low volume maybe like minus 12 dB sometimes you know with pads you can't really see what's going on see this event right here if I want to clearly see what's going on here just go shift H C and now I have a nice representation of my way from and then I can go back to the original size now the next shortcut that's extremely useful is when you want to loop a selection and that's incredibly useful when you're working on a track and maybe you're building a drum loop or you're processing something or you're trying to find a click in a portion for example let's say I want to go to this portion of my track and see I'm grabbing my rein selection tool and I can go like this and now the shortcut that you're looking for is old P so when you press old P you're basically looping that section over and over again so it's very easy to start producing stuffs or adding like high hats and maybe if you're trying to find a mistake or if you're trying to you know basically work on your mix on a specific portion of the track this is very easy so very very important shortcut it remember old P extremely useful if you want to loop things multiple times in a session now the next shocker I want to show you is all about editing and this is an incredibly crucial shortcut if you're doing lots of cuts if you're processing vocals and you want to cut the breaths you want to you know change your s's and you know lower them in volume and that's a very useful shortcut and I'm going to show you what is let's go to a vocal let's go here this is a beautiful vocal from room shift gh and I'm going to find that breath here see let's go like this okay let's say I want to make this breath a little bit lower in volume there's a very very quick way to do it I'm going to deactivate snap okay so I'm gonna go like this grab the breath and now if I want to turn it down in volume check what you have to do the shortcut is Shift X so this works with the range selection tool very well and now I can see go like this turn down that breath now of course I can do the same thing I can go and do a fade in here let's go here again shift X take down that breath if there's an s that bothers me in this case we don't have problems right here I could basically just take it with my range selection tool shift X and do this and of course it has many other uses you can use it from pretty much everything else if you're editing a lot shifts X very very useful shortcut now another shortcut that I find extremely useful that doesn't exist in Cubase I created myself is the quantize panel shortcut and there are quite a few instances I find that you might want to edit your quantize settings so I mean normally what you would have to do is you would go to edits and then you would go to quantize panel and then you open it but it's a little bit slow especially if you want to do this multiple times when you're editing different part you want to add a groove you want to you want to do two plaits all these things so what I've done is I've created a shortcut for this and my personal shortcut is ctrl alt Q so if I press ctrl alt Q or command alt Q for the Mac then I bring up my quantize panel and it's always there so it's very easy to bring it up without going into that menu I find this shortcut very very useful now sticking with a quantize function another shocker that I found is very useful that again I assigned on my own is the reset quantize function and let me show you what I mean how many times have you had this scenario think about it you quantize a part and for most of the party works but for a few nodes like three or four notes it didn't really work so what do you do then you know you undo and then you read do it again and then you've lost everything with all the other notes so I found that this function in Cubase C let's have this MIDI part right here and let's go to the quantize panel see here right there and we have some really interesting options there and they're all there you know you can always access them through the inspector but let's say I quantize this one press Q let's go for something that makes more sense like this okay and let's say that these guys work they work very well but these two guys it didn't work so well okay so how do I undo these all you need to do is select and you go here and say reset quantize okay and they're back in place but you didn't affect these guys that were correct and they were correctly quantized in my case what I assigned to this shortcut is command shift Q so see now these are quantized command shift Q and they go back to their original place for example if my original place was here in the middle and I quantized all of them again again if I grab those command shift Q I aren't quantize them and everything else remains unaffected now because I'm telling you how to set up your own shortcuts let me show you how I do it basically you go to edit and you go to key commands and see the command that you want is reset quantize so you just type here reset reset quantize that's gonna be enough and you find it so once you're happy with it and you found the command that you're looking for just click on this region right here and say command shift Q and then click on assign in my case it's there already now another shortcut that I use every day of my life literally to be honest with you I can't really remember if it was if it already exists in Cubase or if it's one of my personal shortcuts I'm gonna show you anyway is adding a new track and adding a new audio channel or an instrument channel so how do I do it for a new instrument is ctrl alt M or command old M C so ctrl alt M and immediately I get the add track for an instrument straightaway I don't have to go plus and then select what channel type I want to add it's all there so then I can go at track happy days I press ENTER actually and it's already done now for an audio channel I go control-shift-n and now I have an audio channel and I can select my inputs again very very easy now with group channels and effects channels I have a very specific way of doing it I'm gonna show you so let's say I have this guitars right here okay they're already in a group let's say I want to put them into a group so I select all of them and what I do is I press alt shift G and what that does is it adds these guitars into a group channel so as you can see I can set my group channel at stereo or mono I can add the name let's say guitars and a track and now all of these guitars they go to the new group channel that we just created now this is a macro command so let me show you how it's built if you go edits and you go key commands there you can also select to show the macros that's what you need and in this case there's a macro called tracks to group C if you open it there's all the functions their mixer at track the selected group channel and in this case what I did is I basically went there and I literally added alt shift G C macro tracks to group and that's it now the other macro that I'm using is the add effects channel two tracks so imagine you have vocals we have five vocals and you want to send them all to the same reverb then what I'm using let's let's actually do it before I show you this let's say I have these vocals one two three and I want to send them to the same delay alt shift F and I can add a delay right there name it and then all these channels of vocals will basically have a send to that delay and then this you set up like this you go to key commands and you go to your macros and it's this one right here at effects channel two tracks the next shocker I want to show you is the market shortcut you have let's say you have your chorus right here and you want to insert a marker you just press insert on your keyboard I know that most laptops don't have that so sometimes I assign it to a different key but there you go but what I definitely have is I have my Haeckel marker as a shortcut because let's say I want to create a cycle marker for my chorus another showgirl as well P to set my locators to an event they say I'm just selecting this press P and the locators are set there I think you probably know that already what I'm doing is I'm pressing ctrl insert and that's how I can create a marker a cycle marker it's very easy to loop a course if I wanted without selecting you know events every single time and also you know when you export your project and you want to have the exact same length every time what I do is I always have like you know I select everything and I press P and then I create a marker that's basically my export and then when I want to export like a new version or a new mix I don't have to go and set the markers all over again it's already there and it's very easy to also export different versions because with Cubase you can export different cycle markers which is really cool now I'm going to give you my last key command and again this is a customize key command but I think you might find it useful if you don't have already a key assigned for this and that's my quantized value so what I've done is I've assigned these bracket keys on my keyboard to the quantized increase and decrease value see so I can go very easily from like a full bar to a quarter note to a thirty-second note all these things see how easy I can do this so that's very very simple now let's go to the key commands and show you how this is done the command that you're looking is select next quantize and select previous quantize it's very very useful because many times you want to move from one quantized value to another one you know let's say you are editing drums that's extremely useful if you're editing drums and you have let's say hi-hat so play sixteenth notes but then you want to quantize your kick drums in eighth notes or quarter notes you know this is really really useful because that means you can move very quickly and change your quantized values adding to this I also want to show you the other one that I've customized and that's my grid type is this one basically it's grid and you can do grid relative which is very useful if you have events that don't start exactly the beginning of a bar but they extend a little bit at the you know before the beginning of the bar and you want to keep them in the same relative position grid relative is the way to do it event is also very useful because you might want to basically let's say sync this one to marker you don't even have to be exactly on the grid you can just snap it to the marker you know and then we have shuffle we have cursor all these things so these I have assigned to control and then again these brackets see so now I can move very quickly across these grid modes which is really really tedious if you try and do it like that all the time where everything is on your keyboard and again if I go to edit and key commands it's here it's select previous snap type so control and bracket and left bracket and select next snap type control and right bracket and also I have the same thing for the grid type so that's old and left and right bracket and this changes see right here it changes this value so I can go from bars beets use quantize and adapt to zoom which basically to be honest with you I don't use so often after Cubase had this adaptive zoom function because I found it works really really nicely so there you go guys shortcuts in my opinion is one of the secret weapons when you use your DW it will speed up your workflow it will make you more creative because you don't have to go into menus to do you know pretty much anything you can use a keyboard anywhere you are even if when you don't have a controller with you and you basically stop using your mouse so much your hands don't get tenant IDs or all these things and it makes you look more professional so if you're a young producer you want to work in a music studio this will help you immensely because people hate it when they see you going like ok edit menu ok and quantize you know this is slow so try and learn your shortcuts I hope this video helps you get an idea of what cool things you can do in Cubase with shortcuts so if you find this video use or entertaining please consider clicking that subscribe button and that bill notification icon I'm trying to do more and more videos these days so this really helps if you feel that you have somebody that would benefit from it or they would find it useful feel free to share it until next time have fun guys happy music

Channel: Dom Sigalas

Views: 86,263

Keywords: cubase, cubase 10.5, cubase shortcuts, best cubase shortcuts, produce music in cubase, cubase tutorial, cubase guide, how to be fast in cubase, how to quantize in cubase, how to mix in cubase, steinberg, music production, cubase tips, daw, cubase 10, dom sigalas

Id: C67OjuSL90U

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020