12 Useful TIPS To Improve CUBASE Performance when MIXING

today i have 12 tips for you to improve cpu performance when mixing in cubase what's up my friend the chryslem here from mixdown online now just a quick announcement before i jump into this video i just want to let you know that i'm going to be releasing my next premium course in the next few weeks and this one is going to be all about mixing in cubase okay so you don't want to miss this one more on that very very soon so make sure you're on my mailing list if you want to stay informed and at the same time if you join my mailing list you'll have access to my free mini course how to build the perfect mix template link is down below now let's talk about the computer performance when mixing in cubase now i'm gonna focus this video on the mixing side of things and not the composition or arrangement side you know working with vstis and stuff and i will cover that just a bit you know but i'm mainly gonna focus on the mixing side of things when working in cubase so let's start with the first tip and this is the most important one if you want to gain a bit more cpu performance when mixing in cubase and this one is to increase your audio interface a buffer size so let me show you in cubase what that looks like now i have a mixing session with you know a bunch of plugins in this uh in this one and if you look on top i have my performance meter right here on top now if you don't see that on your end you can activate that uh just to see it all the time so it stays static on the top of your project window you click on the setup toolbar on the top right of your window and you'll see it right here at the bottom the system performance meter click on that and it's going to show on the top section of your project window you can also access the system performance window by clicking on f12 and there you go so as you can tell i'm pretty much maxed out so i'm going to go on top click on studio and go down to studio setup and then i'm going to go down to vst audio system i'm going to make sure this is selected and this is where i have the interface that i'm working with selected on top and then just below if you will go back to the left side of this window just below i have my yamaha steinberg thunderbolt settings okay and this is what where i want to go and i'm going to click on control panel by clicking on control panel this will open my yamaha steinberg thunderbolt driver window now this window uh might not be the same window on all interfaces okay so you're going to have like a unique look to your parameters that you have here on this control panel window because this is going to open the control panel of your sound interface directly and this is where you're going to be able to change the buffer size like you can see here so the buffer size right now is at the 256 samples which can be low for some now this will depend on the the speed of your computer if you have a tool of a buffer size of course you're going to have way less latency however it's going to be way harder on your computer so your computer might produce some glitches and stuff and will not perform very very well the more you're going to add plugins in your mixing session let me give you an example i'm just going to cancel this one out i'm going to go back into my mixing session and as you can tell my cpu meter is maxed out so if i click on play this is how it's going to sound like and there's no way i'm going to be able to mix whatsoever using this okay so i'm going to go back into my control panel and i'm gonna increase the buffer size okay so by clicking on the buffer size uh option here i'll be able to increase that to another higher value so let's go with 1024 maybe in your case you're gonna have to go to the max it's going to depend on how fast your computer is to start with so i'm going to go to 1024 and now my performance meter is a bit you know i have a bit more room to play with let's play the song i still have a bit of glitches you know but it's better so um i can go and move it up to 2048. way better i have more latency but it doesn't matter when i mix you know so latency is not an issue when mixing only when recording so that is one thing you can do you can increase the buffer size of your sound interface to speed up the cpu performance next what you need to pay attention to and this is the second tip that i have for you is activate multi-processing and azure guard in cubase and this can be found again in the studio setup window and this time just make sure you click on vst audio system where you have your sound interface selected and you will see in advance under advanced option you're going to see activate multi-processing that is going to need to like for most systems anyways it's going to need to be checked on and this is for all computers that are using multi-core processors okay so and this is the case for the majority of the computers today in 2020. so if you have a multi-core processor in your computer make sure you activate this option and also you can activate the azure guard option and this is also going to free up some processing actually what this is going to do it's going to shift as much processing as possible from the azure real-time path to the azure guard processing path end result um you're just going to end up with the more stable uh stable system so if you have like dropouts and stuff like that you can activate that and it's going to just add a bit more stability to your system and you'll you'll see right away just pay attention to the metering level on top and there you go as you can tell it shows right away but at the same time it's gonna add some azo guard latency right here okay so this is something that i would suggest you to activate if you have like processing problems um that is gonna help and this way you'll be able to bring down the um the buffer size also so in my case i won't need to go to be as high as 2048 i could actually go down to 512 [Music] samples so there you go so that is also gonna help a lot let's go to tip number three print your vst instruments before you start a mix session virtual instruments are cpu heavy a lot of them are anyways and if you add those up on top of adding plugins into into your mix session you're gonna overload your system quite easily okay so i this is something that i do on my end all the time all virtual instruments all midi performance are going to be bounced into audio so this way it's not going to jeopardize the performance of the computer when i'm going to start to add plugins in the mixing session and also it's always easier to archive afterwards if i just need to save that project for future use i just love to print everything into audio before moving forward so this is what i would suggest you to do is to make sure that you don't have any virtual instruments active into a full mixing session this way you're gonna be able to save more processing power off your computer let's go to tip number four freezing audio channels if you went through all the first steps and you're still having some problems you know the further you go into your mix you can freeze the audio channels and that can be useful especially if you're working on a slower computer so basically how that is going to work let's go and okay i'm going to select this base channel i have like a bunch of plugins here so let's say i just want to freeze this bass channel so i'm very happy with the sound that i have so i don't need to mess around with the plugins anymore i can simply freeze that channel by clicking the freeze option now if you don't see the freeze option it's going to be on top if you click on the top tab of the left zone of the channel you'll see right here you'll see the freeze audio channel option and you also have access to this freeze option straight on your channel now if you don't see it just you know enlarge this window and there you go and larv the track list and you'll see it right there if it's still not present right click on the channel go down to track control settings and make sure that the freeze is on the right side okay if it's on the left just move it to the right and it's going to show right here into the track list okay so the only thing you need to do you select the channel and you click on freeze channel and you you know you set up yourself a tail size which is always important to do you click on ok and what that is going to do it's like cubase is going to create a freeze file it's a temp file that is going to be stored within your session and that is going to be used when you're going to play back your mixing sessions so this way all the plugins of this channel will be bypassed and the the event is going to be locked from this point on you're not going to be able to work on the plugins and you're also not going to be able to edit the audio event itself okay everything is going to be locked and bypassed something to remember if you need to go back and work on this a specific track that you throw so you just click again on freeze channel and it's going to ask you if you want to unfreeze the channel or not by clicking on unfreeze that will bring back the channel to its original state where you'll be able to work once again on the plugins you can also just a side note that you can also freeze the virtual instruments if you're working in a pre-production or you're writing music and you have like a bunch of virtual instruments loaded you can also do the same and freeze those up it's going to work the same way as freezing an audio channel it's going to create a file within the session and bypass your virtual instrument note that this will only work with virtual instruments and also with audio channels only you're not you're not going to be able to freeze fx channel tracks and group channel tracks okay so only audio channels and virtual instruments for tip number five don't mix at a high sample rate now i don't want to start a debate on whether high sample rates are better than lower sample rate this is not the goal of this video i'm strictly focusing on the computer's performance and mixing at high sample rates will be harder on the cpu of your computers so if computer performance is an issue in your case and you're working with an older computer i will suggest you to mix at 48 kilohertz and 44.1 and avoid higher sample rates when mixing now for tip number six remove unused plug-ins in your session yeah uh plug-ins they're gonna take processing even if you mute your channel okay so i would suggest if you don't use a plug-in you can bypass it for sure but better just remove it if you don't need it don't use it you can also disable the track and this is something that can be useful let's go back to the basic channel let's say i'm not going to use this channel i have something else instead of just the muting because muting is not going to do anything the the plugins are still going to work i can just right click instead and click on disable track that's simple and that is going to disable the track okay so now as you can see i don't have any more plugins the uh the channels is grayed out that means that the channel is disabled even though from the mix console it is not going to be there okay and you can also come back to it if you want to just use it again you can come back and just click on enable track and that's it and the good thing about this one is that you don't need to delete the channel or to get rid of all the plugins that you have on this channel so if you're not sure on what you want to do with this channel you can just disable it and get back to it if you need it now for tip number seven direct offline processing this is a very cool feature that we have in cubase that is going to allow you to use offline processing on audio events you select your event you click on f7 and this will open the direct offline processing window i talked about that feature before on other videos and this is going to allow you to insert plugins and some other types of processing included in cubase straight on the audio itself at the same time it will create for example if i try it out with um i don't know let's go and use this compressor i'm going to click on new version so now it's going to create like a uh a temporary track again like it did for the freeze option and it will create that with the processing that i have with this plugin at the moment and by doing so i'll be able to listen to the track without having to insert any plugins but just listening to the the um the track itself with the processing on it this is good if uh you uh like i'm gonna use this like for example if i have like um a line guitar where i have a virtual amp i can use the virtual guitar amp as a direct offline processing plug-in instead of using it as an insert and this is going to save processing power off my computer so again you click on f7 and you insert the plug-in and you can actually insert more than the plug-in could be like a plug-in chain if you want you can actually save uh those as a preset if you want to get back to some processing that you worked on with direct offline processing you select again those audio events and you click again on f7 and that is going to bring you back to your your processing window and you can make your the change that you want so the minute you make a change or you add a plugin it's going to reprocess the file so this is a good way to save processing you know on some channels it's not something that i'm going to suggest you to do on all of your channels okay but on some specific stuff that you want to do during mixing a special effect that you want to create and stuff it can be a very good tool as a creative tool and also to save some processing power if needed now for tip number eight share reverbs for more than one track this is something that i'm going to do in the mix session not only to save processing power but for a better workflow and on my guitars for example straight in my mix template i always have a an effects channel for delay and reverb that is allocated for guitars only so those are very useful every time i work with an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar that i just want to add a general reverb on it i just route that straight to this reverb guitar effects and also for a delay that i always have set up on this delay guitar effects channel track so those are going to be used for more than one channel so if you're trying to save a processing power this is going to help a lot because a lot of reverbs plug-in reverbs will take more processing than other types of plugins so to share that one reverb plugin to serve more than one channel is going to help you to add less reverb plugins in your session and ending up by saving cpu processing power and for the next tip mix using group channels this is something that i do also when i mix for again a workflow reason and not only to save processing power but that is going to save processing power anyways for example let me just give you uh show you what i have here on this session i have two lead vocal channels okay one for the verse and the other one for the choruses both are routed into my lead vocal group channel and this is where i have all of my processing for my lead vocal so i'm sending all of my lead vocal channels into that one lead vocal group that is used for processing okay so this way i don't need to load the processing on every single lead vocal channels that i have in this session it's not something that i do on all sessions you know it's going to be a case by case thing but in this case um this is what i decided to do in other scenarios what can happen is for example i have that one singer that duplicated his performance more than once meaning that he's singing like the lead vocal take more than once on separated tracks i am going to most of the time i will route those into the same lead vocal channel and process that group channel so this is one example but that can be done with guitars drums you know types of instruments you know like keyboards and stuff you want to just start to process those in a group channel before going down to individual tracks you can also do that so this way you won't need to insert as many plugins in your session and saving cpu power afterwards now to the next step print some effects channels this is going to be similar to freezing a track but for effects channels so if you want to free up a one effects channel track you can actually print that on its own channel and this is super super simple so let's say i want to print out this uh verb plate okay so let me just bring that one louder it's going to give you a very nice example here so i have this one this fx channel track that i want to print the the thing i'm going to do here is to add a track i'm going to add a stereo track just quickly and as an input i'm going to select the effects channel that i want to print which in my case is the verb plate and that's it that's the only thing i need to do and then i just play the song and i record this channel and that's it [Music] let's listen to what i recorded and that's it i just recorded the reverb itself and i can blend that up with my dry signal afterwards that can be very useful in a situation where you are maxed out and by just printing a couple of effects at channel track you might be able to free up your computer and continue working on your mix that's another tip now for tip number 11 work with stock plugins since stuck plugins are part of this system like in cubase or any other daw they will be less hard on cpu performance and that's because they are super well integrated into your daw let me give you an example like right here on this session let me go and check my uh my buffer size that is at 512 samples and this is the cpu performance that i have now i'm gonna load another project not that it's not the same song it's a complete other project that was mixed with only cubase plugins nothing else and even on this session i have like way more tracks total than the one that i have right now that have been mixed with a blend of the cubase plugins and also third-party plug-ins and look at the meter i'm just going to open this session and just pay attention to the meter that i have the performance meter one mix that has more channels in it that was mixed with only cubase plugins and the other one with third-party plugins and also a blend of cubase plugins as well but you see the difference in the performance meter it's quite impressive so that can be a good option for you to tame down the processing power of your computer while mixing in cubase now for the last tip this one is for windows 10 only activate high performance on windows if you're a windows 10 user you can open your control panel and look for power options you click on power options and then you will see high performance by default it is going to be set up to balance and i'm going to recommend to bring that to high performance so this will focus more on the performance more than the energy saving so it's going to take more energy off your computer but it's going to give you way more performance so this is what i have for windows 10. now i don't know the equivalent for mac but if you know the answer by any chance let me know down below there you go these are my 12 tips to improve the cpu performance when mixing in cubase if you have any questions comments or anything you want to add to this you can leave everything down below in the comment section also if you enjoyed the video and you think that the video is helpful share and like that helps me a lot and to finish this office subscribe if you are not already and click that notification bell so you don't miss anything until next time take care and see you

Channel: Chris Selim - Mixdown Online

Views: 39,816

Keywords: Cubase CPU, Save CPU on Cubase, Improve CPU Performance in Cubase, cpu, Cubase performance, How to save CPU in Cubasecpu guide, laptop cpu increase, cpu hacks, tips and tricks, more cpu, better CPU Performance, Cubase cpu, How to save CPU in Cubase, Chris Selim, Mixdown Online, CPU when Mixing

Id: 9dhN03uf9-Y

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020