15 reasons why Cubase is better than Logic for mixing

[Applause] hi so today we're going to be looking at logic versus cubase now anybody's been watching my channel for a while knows that i favor logic or have until recently favored logic as my daw of choice i use pro tools as well and have used pro tools for many many years and mix many albums in it but given the choice if i have one i use logic because i find it better for mixing and i've done a video that explains why that is which is linked in the description below if you're interested but today we're going to be looking at logic versus cubase and why did i move to cubase if i was so happy with logic well it's basically because logic became more and more unstable it was an incredibly stable da for a decade but a couple of years ago it started crashing kind of fairly regularly with various plug-ins from the big manufacturers plug-ins that i'd come to depend on and that got worse and worse and despite upgrading logic upgrading my system and eventually upgrading my computer the crashes didn't get any better so you know everything changed i changed everything the only thing that remained the same was logic and the plugins which are the plugins we all use from all the major vendors and it was just crashing more and more it got to the point where um i couldn't depend on it i'd open a project for a client and they would crash and i would be able to open it and i'd have to open it in safe mode and disable plugins and try to figure it out and it wouldn't be the same plugins it would be different plugins every time so yeah it got to the point where i i thought i'm going to have to use something else here so i looked around to see what was out there i didn't go back and start using pro tools for the reasons i've explained in the other video but also because i do use i need a doll that's absolutely amazing for midi and also for scoring and um so um i checked out various stars including reaper and other ones and then i thought i'd try cubase i tried a demo of it and i was absolutely knocked out by it i realized that i could start using it right away without having to really learn it because it was so similar to the way pro tools and cubase works right out of the box which i didn't find with reaper and and some other daws i just found cubase i just i was just mixing in it within you know 10-15 minutes and as i got to know it better i realized that there was an amazing number of features in it that neither logic or pro tools has which having used it now for a while i guess six or eight months or something i'm everything is easier and quicker and better and yeah so this video is looking at that it's comparing logic to pro tools from my own perspective it's the way i mix now you might mix differently um i mean i found reaper really difficult to get on with because of its ergonomics but for some people it's just it just fits them perfectly and it's it's the perfect doll for them so and it's the same with you know you could you could i know people that mix amazing albums in ableton and you know it's it's a personal thing so this is not a video that is saying this doll is better than that door absolutely not this is from my own perspective and i hope you'll find it useful if you're looking to maybe change your daw or you're just interested to see what features other dolls that you haven't necessarily tried have but before we get started if you can give the video a like and ring the bell and subscribe that's really helpful to me and really appreciate it and so let's have a look okay so here we are with logic and cubase now um you can see that they're set up in a quite similar way both have an inspector on the left which is context sensitive i really like this way of doing things um it means that whatever you click on you get a bunch of settings um that apply to that thing tracks look the same timeline up here everything you know pretty similar to most stars um so let's now i'm going to start looking at some of the things which are better about from my perspective about cubase um and there are some things which i think logic is better at but uh just at the outset here to let you know far more things better about cubase just from my perspective i did a video a while back showing how there are a whole bunch of things that i thought were better for mixing about logic when compared to pro tools and now i'm pointing out that i think cubase is even one step further up than that so here we are in the mixer um now the mixer has all kinds of amazing features in it um but i won't get to that yet um i like the colors as well it's got a really nice kind of color scheme about it i mean you can choose your own color scheme but whatever color scheme you choose in a mixer i just like the way the colors are rendered now i like logix mixer as well i've never had any problems with it what i really like about pro tools logic and cubase mixers is they all have ergonomically for me the way i mix everything's perfectly laid out in a really really good way like only the things i need are there like if you look at what you've got here you've got mute you've got solo some other things here i'll explain what they are you've got the fader you've got pen and you've got your right controls and record and uh monitor i mean that's what you need like constantly day in day out right at your fingertips and the way that they're arranged and the way the plugins are you know right above here and everything is right above the strip really nicely arranged really clear now i find logic is just as clear and it's got things are they're not exactly the same place but it's got the same stuff right there right where you need it and not a lot of other stuff pro tools is the same just the stuff you need right there not a lot of other things some other daws like reaper for example which i know reaper is a really amazing daw and it can do a huge amount maybe more than any other daw in terms of the depth of features and things although i would say the cubase is very deep as well i don't know if a close second maybe or maybe it is more in some ways less than others it's very very feature rich but what i really like about cubase is all of that depth is hidden away until you need it and that's the problem i have with reaper is there are so many buttons all over the place most of which i'm not going to use very often in a mix i'll use them once a day or once a week or once a month but they're all there and it's just too much to look at now i know you can customize it and take take things away but when i looked into that i found it not so easy to actually take away all the things i wanted to take away some things i could and some things i couldn't without getting into kind of programming language and things which is not something i have time for or the head for but a worse problem for me with reaper was the way things were positioned um they just weren't for me this is just for me for somebody else it might be perfect but for me ergonomically they were just often in the wrong place too close to each other too small like five pixels wide and just like no i can't mix like that we're mixing fast it needs to everything needs to be a decent size in a different space and steinberg i've just got that right and it's like it's decades of refinement basically is what it is and you can see the same thing in pro tools and logic the ergonomics of it of all three of those daws are absolutely superb um i love working in all three of them from that perspective equally as much they just they're great from that perspective beyond that there are things you can do here which you can't do in logic or pro tools you can resize the faders freely like it's all fluid here um you can resize so you can go this way you know you can it's completely resizable basically and it's the same thing with the plugins you know the whole thing is awesomely resizable there is one thing that's better in logic and that is that if i load a preset which you haven't even got in pro tools but say i go to my library presets that i've made and i'll load a preset like i have here you can see what it's called and that i find incredibly useful it doesn't work that way in cubase unfortunately i wish it did um you just don't have any visual indication of what preset you've loaded for me that's a that's a kind of a slightly bigger thing i actually think it's really really useful to be able to see that i wish steinberg would think about that adding that in functionality be really good the gui the interface so cubase is super slick i like i like logic i like the way logic looks i never had any complaints about that it's kinda resizable in a very basic way it's not super resizable but that never really bothered me too much um you know you can obviously zoom in and out on the timeline and so forth using a key command uh you know and all of that um and you can resize things like this it's limited but you can do quite a bit however with cubase it's really a different game altogether you can really you've got fluid resizing with this the mouse wheel i mean this is so smooth this is just like look at this straight into the waveform um even right down to the sample just you know super quick and out um so that's nice but everything is also resizable as you'd expect it to be and everything is configurable which also you get in logic so everything up here you can change and there's a lot of other stuff i haven't got up here which you can put up here so there's a lot of you can completely configure your toolbar up here um and you can configure lots of things all over it and configure down here you can't do in logic you've got kind of one area here in cubase you get two you can get have just you can use just this one for all your stuff you can have one in each um yeah it's a hugely customizable and hidden away in these little corners are all kinds of really useful little things and all kinds of customers ability up here but one thing i think is really a great i mean that really moves cubase ahead of logic is that although you've got the inspector here you've got this secondary inspector up here which is about values and things you'll see you'll see what i mean you've got all kinds of stuff in here so you can change the start on the end of the of its part and you can do that you know super accurately here you can change the fade in so you can do that by hand you can change in or out you can change the volume so this is actually changing the volume of the whole part um you can change the name here you can change the name of the file here and in fact you can do i think all of these things in logic in the inspector most of them anyway so i'll just show you that in logic you've got the inspector and you've got similar kinds of things here you can change the gain here and you can change the fade in and the fade out and various other things you can't do the start and end here no but there is a floating inspector which is a bit of a pain where you can change the start and end the position of it you can do it that way i wish i've always wished this was built in somewhere because you've got to have this little floating thing which i suspect a lot of people don't even kind of know exists so here's a really big one for me in cubase you have this thing called a double solo if i've slowed a bunch of tracks okay and so you can see here as i press sellers they add to the solo if i want them to replace i hold key command and it replaces the previous solo it's very smart about soloing it solos just what you need and not what you don't need i almost never don't get what i want in cubase when i press a solo if i'm pressing an aux and this thing's being sent to it um but it's got this really amazing feature say i have a bunch of tracks soloed here okay and i've got a hundred tracks okay and there's certain ones i want to hear together i want to hear the whole horn section together for example right say these are all my horns and i've and it's you know maybe i've got 15 of them okay and i've gone and solo them all but i just want to hear for the moment i just want to hear this one horn how do i get rid of those solos do i lose all my solos let's just solo that and then i have to go and solo all of them again that's what you normally have to do in logical pro tools but in cubase you've got this second solo that solos within your solo which is just amazing i mean once you've got this you just don't know how you lived without it it makes everything so much easier i just don't even want to go and use another doll when just with this one feature it saves me so much time especially when i've got a huge arrangement with loads of things and i'm trying to hone in on a problem um and i've got a bunch of things soloed like a horn section a bunch of backing vocals you know and you've got 15 tracks soloed and now i just need to hear one of those um i can do it it's absolutely fantastic and amazing there are some amazing um macro like functions to it so for example i like to color code my mixes and i like my drums blue and my bass brown and guitar is purple keys turquoise i like my subgroups to be the same color as the instruments but darker okay so if i get a new mix i don't know what it's going to have in it so i bring in all the audio files or they've been recorded in here or whatever it is but oftentimes i'm bringing them in from from outside and i need to then go through and color them all so i can simply set up a macro using the logical editor and logic has a logical editor but it's not on this level anything like this level so the logical level here can do things like read all the names and color them so i've set up a logical editor macro that you make in the logical editor very simple to do so i'll show you the logic well i'll show you what it does i'm going to press a key command and you can see that is instantly colored intelligently colored on my tracks the way i like them and it's done that by reading the names so it knows anything is called kick or bd is going to be a drum anything with sn or snare is going to be a snare and so forth and it knows if things are uppercase which is always how i like to do my groups and auxes and effects tracks it knows it's going to be also a drum if it's got that name but it's an upper case it's going to make that a darker blue and so forth for the other instruments so that that's a massive time saver and there's endless things like that that you can do that you can program in and not nothing like programming language anything like that you just have to go to the project logical editor it's got a whole load of presets built uh that do all kinds of useful things but you can make your own and you can make them do all sorts of stuff um it really is pretty huge what it can do once you kind of get the idea of how it works i'm not going to go through it now it's really quite simple to use and then if you go into the key commands the number of key commands that you can do i mean it's like everything pretty much that's almost absolutely everything i mean there might be one or two things you can't key command but it it does almost everything and you create macros that can be based on whatever you like and like logical project uh logical editor things but it doesn't have to be you can add as many steps as you want into the macro link it to a key command and yeah it's fantastic very powerful there's a lot of good things about editing in cuba in cubase and i mean logics editing is also good but let's just have a bit of a look at the difference so cubase has this multi-tool which logic also has so you get the selection at the top you get the pointer at the bottom and if you have something selected in the middle turns into a hand and now i can just grab that and move it i can move over here or whatever with logic you've got a similar sort of thing where you can just select a bit and grab it like that something that has always bugged me about logic is there is no way to automatically do fade in fade outs you can do that in pro tools and you can do in cubase you can set cubase in fact so that as soon as you cut something it automatically does like a a very tiny fade at the beginning and to stop any possible clicks i just have it set up so that it doesn't matter what cut i do that's always going to happen and therefore i can never get any clicks i don't have to worry about fading in and fade out if i don't you know obviously need to but fading out is a matter of moving your mouse up here fading in and fading out like with pro tools you get to see a change in the waveform i'm going to make the waveforms a bit bigger so you can see what i mean so if i fade this in here just by grabbing that here you can see the waveform has i'm going to do it here be easier to see you can see what's going on and you can edit the fades in lots of complicated ways you can do custom fades um it much like pro tools you can you can do all that same sort of stuff um really comprehensive and actually this cubase 11 in cubase 12 you actually have a much more sophisticated fade editor it's really it's taken from wave lab which is the mastering steinberg's mastering software and it's incredibly sophisticated way more than logical pro tools with logic you've got a similar thing where you can move up to the top and you can fade so quite similar as i said it doesn't automatically do mini fades when you do a cut which means you can get clicks if you don't go and fade every single one but you can grab everything and fade them all in one go using this so i can select all of these and fade everything in and out and it keeps any phase you've already manually done but adds whatever fade you put here to the ones you haven't already added a fade to it's the same in cubase except it's up here you can adjust the fades numerically up here and you can mute all in in a single key command so all those kind of things are quick and easy in logic just like in cubase pitch editing if i double click here i get the sample editor grab this bit here analyze it and here you can see that it's found all the pitches and you can freely move these around so this is way better than logics one logic doesn't look very similar but the sophistication of this one is fantastic so if you move down here you are basically moving it closer to to the pitch that's detected so if it's a little bit sharp or flat you can fix that here you're changing the amount of vibrato here and this is a problem you often run into when you change the pitch and vibrato is the transition from one note to the next gets messed up in logic if you change the vibrato too much or you change the pitch too much you get this kind of hiccup what you can do here is you can grab this here and it leaves that alone see that little thing you can move it in there and it now is not going to mess with that you get a smooth transition happening amazingly fantastic you can stretch right here in the pitch editor you can change the volume of a note independently here you can move the pitch of just part of the note down like just the beginning or end of the note you can shift the format of the note all right here so this is like this is way more sophisticated than logic and i have to say the algorithms sound just fantastically good um i would definitely say better than logic's algorithms um logic ones are okay but these sound like absolutely like wow can't you can't tell it's been messed with and i mean i'm because i do jazz i do not do a lot of pitch editing um because in jazz we don't auto-tune things and we don't um you do get the odd thing where you know somebody plays a great take but they've made one wrong note or you know it's a great vocal take or something but there's a couple of notes that are just a little too sharp and flat you can fix that and those are the kind of things i might fix generally speaking though like a really great jazz vocalist is going to have such control over the pitch that you don't want to mess with it if they're moving a little sharp and flat they're doing it on purpose to create a tonal effect but even a great vocalist can sometimes make a slip up like anybody can maybe a good vocalist but might need a little bit of help but you're still not going to be in jazz auto tuning and fixing everything perfectly it'll kill it but the sophistication of these tools is yeah just way past logic it all works really smoothly quickly and easily too that's the other thing logics is a little bit fiddly and bubbly buggy and you can sometimes move a note and fix something and it kind of sounds a bit weird but you can never quite get it back to sounding right again even by moving a back or undoing which is always a little being a little bit buggy this is just so smooth and so slick and sophisticated the way it works and this is the thing i like about cubase is it's like that all the way through the whole thing is very smooth and polished and sophisticated and just sounds great so now logic has good automation i prefer it to pro tools automation which i find fiddly to use and a lot of that is because of the fact that if you look here you see when i move this part see how it gives you a vertical line well that just makes it so easy to align things i mean if you're working in jazz and everything isn't to a grid you need to align things visually and say okay you know there's a transient i know this wants to start on that drum hit so i can move it here and i can see that right there or you know when you zoom in a bit it's so easy to do that you can't do that and in pro tools because you don't get this vertical line and in logic you do you get the vertical line which is great and so that's something they both have with automation they also both have that so i mean there's a couple of things logic has which cubase doesn't have which in terms of automation which i like so if i write some animation here so you can see that as soon as i write some automation it opens up the automation lane and let's just say i'll instantiate a plug-in on here i'm going to write some automation here we see a new lane i'm going to move another knob opens another lane and so forth so we've got lanes get opened up right right here as soon as i've done that i don't have to go and go into a menu and find them like you do in logic i can hide these but if i hide the whole thing like that and then i open it again it remembers them logic it forgets so if you set up a whole bunch of complicated automation in logic if you decide you need to hide your automation because you've got too many automation lanes going on and you want to go back and edit it doesn't remember them all it remembers the first one you got to go and find all the other ones again in list so you've got a list and you have to go and find them it's it's a big pain and this is so much faster and quicker because it's just smarter now there are in logic i would say one of the things i prefer if i just nip over to logic and look at its automation uh one thing is um so i'm just gonna write some automation here it's not so easy to write animation like from a plug-in uh you can do it but it's not as quite as quick as easy as um as it is in cubase but say i've got you know this and i wanna i wanna automate that okay you can go in here and it's really easy to find it there it is you know pitch done deal okay so in cubase you can't do that i'll show you what you can do but look at look here this is what's so great and what you don't get in pro tools is as soon as i move this i get that vertical line and that is so important if you're not working with a grid because you can line it up with waveforms and other things and i you know it's such a pain not having that once you've had it for a while you realize just how valuable that is and how much quicker it makes everything so quick when you can line things up so jumping back over to cubase you get the same thing you get that wonderful line that allows you to line things up that just makes things so quick and easy so many times i need to line up two bits of automation to happen at exactly the same point and without that vertical line you know it's a real pain but what if i want to add another parameter from a plugin which isn't there you know which i haven't written yet you know i have to go in here it's not nicely organized like logic you have to go into more and then you find inserts you find the plugin you find the parameter and then it creates it okay it's not the end of the world but i prefer logics it's quicker it's smart in that way it just puts all the things you have instantiated all the plugs you have it puts them right there in neatly ordered folders really good there's another thing i like about logic each automation lane gets a different color that's handy i wish cubase had that doesn't have it but it's a minor thing in general i say with the pros and cons they're pretty much as good as each other logic and cubase in their automation uh except i would say that remembering what you've had is quite a big thing actually i don't think that the advantages that logic has in those couple of little ways is as good as that that is a major improvement that that logic doesn't have that saves me a lot of time oh yeah there's some other things as well for example that i can click on the background here and it doesn't write automation and that is such a pain in cubase because as soon as you click on the background you've written automation you know if you've got automation lanes showing and as the amount of times i've done that accidentally yeah it's a pain so adjusting automation cubase is easy works well you can move it either way you want you can constrain the movement to horizontal or vertical snaps you know really good you can tilt things up and down yeah it's really good sophisticated and slick the big problem with logic is that it's not simple accurate especially when you get onto aux's automation on auxes which i use a lot it's pretty crazily off it doesn't seem to have any um latency compensation at all so if you've got quite a bit of latency you know your automation's happening here but it doesn't actually happen you see it happening here but it doesn't actually happen until over here so you've set your automation up to kind of pull down this part of the vocal and it pulls down that part of the vocal if it's on an aux and i often use auxes for automation for lots of reasons so that's a big problem and a big pain in logic cubase all locked and accurate really nice so that's another big one the bounce dialog is so amazingly sophisticated here i can i can bounce anything i want i can just bounce my effects channels uh my groups and that's one group but if i had like a whole bunch of different groups it'd all be listed here um any individual channels um i can bounce uh in individual channels and their sends or without their sends any combination basically that you want in terms of bouncing stems is all just easily selectable here and what's amazing is that you can set up multiple stem bounces and just add them to an export queue so you just set okay what i want to do is i want to set it up like this and this and this and i want that reverb going with this and i want this one dry send it to the queue i want that going out as an mp3 or i want it going out as a wave in whatever you know i want and so forth and then set it up again just add it to the queue and you can just make a cue for as many things as you want plus the whole mix you know all in one bounce session and we'll bounce them all out separately and you can even change the naming conventions of how it will name them um yeah it's way more sophisticated than anything logic or pro tools has in terms of bouncing like in pro tools you can balance an aux as i've just shown you so you know if you can't do that in logic um which is a real pain you can bounce an aux but in cubase you can bounce it in place so you can bounce it and it mutes the original and you get an audio file for for the aux for the group or the effects send either one you can do a bunch of them all at the same time so it's way more flexible and sophisticated and fast in that way you can freeze you can consolidate like pro tools consolidate you can bounce you can freeze you can do all those things but it also has this very nice ability to to um as pro tools does as well to bounce a um or i think protools calls it render i'm not sure it camera what it calls it now an aux track or an effects track so one of the big ones for me is that i use sonarworks it's a piece of software that allows you to calibrate your speakers for flatness and it listens to your room and you go through a whole thing with a special microphone and you calibrate your speakers to the room and i couldn't work without it it just it's absolutely essential in my view to calibrate your speakers if you can do any kind of professional mixing or mastering it just like i wouldn't even start without that the problem i always had in logic is that the only way to do that is to put it on your output bus and that means that every time that i want to let me just put it on here so i can show you what i mean so here it is i've got to remember to switch it off before i bounce now the amount of times that i've forgotten to do that and i've bounced with this on and what you get then is you get a calibration on top of your sound you do not want that it was forever realizing that i'd bounced it with that on accidentally sent it to a client and it sounds all skewed not good so that's what's so amazing about cubase is that it has this thing called the control room and this allows you to do all kinds of great stuff for a start you can have this on there and it doesn't get printed into your mix you hear through it but it does not get printed it's not on your master your two bus i can also have all kinds of other things on there um metering and um for example i might want to be able to have um reference tracks and again i used to have to have that on the master bus i mean you can bypass it it's not a problem but it's just nice to have it all separate so that's amazing so i can have my my limiter and my dither on my two bus which i need but i don't have my calibration also in here you get multiple monitors so you can have several more than one set of speakers set up i'm not sure how many i've got two sets of speakers it's incredibly useful to just be able to switch between them right here um and you can even have two whole sets of these or more than i think you can have four or five whole sets of this so you can have two different sonar works running one for each pair of speakers separately now that is is amazing uh logic doesn't have anything remotely like that and that's a massive time saver for me so that's a big one the other thing is nice about this is that it automatically loads it's part of your cubase preferences so as you learn new songs create a new a new arrangement a load an old arrangement doesn't matter what it is this is always going to be there set up just as you left it two sets of speakers however many sets of speakers everything is independent of the song you open cubase has an arranger track so what is that well it's here and as you can see cubase has another nice neat feature you can see that the this does not scroll this arrange track and you can put whatever you want up here i can actually put audio tracks up here if i want and i can resize this and have say an audio track up there are two audio tracks that say i always want to keep those in view you know maybe those are my vocals something like that and i'm scrolling a huge arrangement with 100 tracks or whatever and i don't lose my vocals or my drums or whatever it might be so that's really handy you don't have to have this but it's there with the arranger track you can draw things that look like markers but they're not you do have markers of course but you also have these and what these allow you to do is jump from one part of the song to the next so say i'm working here and i'm not going to demonstrate every tiny thing here because this isn't a tutorial about cubase and it would take too long but just to explain that i could have this section of the song here and i'm thinking do i want to cut this section out maybe or maybe i think this section should come here well i don't have to actually cut everything and move it i can simply put a ranger track marker here and here and tell it here that i want to play here and then i want to jump it here and i want to jump after that back to here amazing you can create an arrangement without actually having to cut and paste anything you can try out and you have more than one you can have loads and try them out decide which one you want and then you can there's a command which simply does all the review actually permanently rearranges it for you based on what you've decided it's pretty amazing logic doesn't have anything like that nor does pro tools and that can be a big time saver we got built-in ara loudness so you know if i take um something like this i'll just take this part here and move it down to here i can just do a key command and it tells me well look at this loudness range true peak everything you need to know in terms of getting your streaming loudness or whatever it is you're aiming for whatever platform you're aiming for if you're mastering you can just instantly see the whole track it'll just tell you meteoring of course is necessary but with metering you know you've got to play through the entire track from beginning to end uh and if it's a bit too loud or a bit too quiet you've got to go back and change it and listen to it you know it's it's time consuming this is a lot quicker another nice thing that i really like about steinberg is they're a company that does listen to you unlike apple who you won't try contacting apple and telling them that there's some feature requests you've got and you expect to have it happen you know it's not going to happen whereas with steinberg you can and they do listen um and they do make changes um they they have you know lists of things and with a bunch of people ask for them then you're likely to see them incorporated and oftentimes when they do make either minor updates or big updates they actually mention the fact that this was in brought in because a lot of people asked for it all does as you start to stack up the plugins start to add latency and so when you press play the more latency you've stacked up the longer it takes before play actually happens after you press play fair enough there's nothing to do about that laws of physics and so forth logic though has a nasty habit of being random about that so it doesn't just give you a set time after you press play where it's going to play that you can get used to you think okay it takes half a second or a second or even longer to start playing when i press play it's pretty random and sometimes it takes a long time and then the next time you press play it's really quick and sometimes you have to press play twice it's all a bit buggy and has been for quite a while cubase is really tight there's nothing like that um it's all super tight the um everything's simple accurate timings like that are really consistent really good i've got my automation here but what if i really you know i want to get these things exact i've done a whole bunch of automation down down the line here say i've got all kinds of stuff right and what i really need to do is to make sure that this returns to the same volume that i had back here how often have i needed to do that i mean it's every mix stuff like that happens right so there's no real way of doing this in logic you can try and get it exact it's fiddly the amount of times that i want to be able to numerically get this exactly right especially when it's really complicated it happens almost almost every mix that happens especially when you're automating plug-in parameters and you really need to get something just right you've moved you know you've moved the frequency of an eq or something like that and it needs to get back to that same frequency and i've always found that real fiddly in in logic well in cubase automation can be written by just moving a parameter so if i move this while playing it writes it okay and that's true of a plug-in if i open up if i put a plug-in on the channel and open it up and move a parameter it writes the automation if i press the right button so what's great about here is i can click on this and here is the value just need it to be at zero there it is need you know if it's an eq and i need to be at exactly a certain number because it's a you know an eq frequency or whatever there you are it just it's fantastic um you can snap so if you hold down if you hold down shift command it locks it horizontally which is super useful or vertically whichever one you move first so that is incredibly useful the curves are already kind of built in to to any point if you want them so automation is really it's nice you can grab two points and you can move them together you can make a selection and you can just bring it up and down and so forth automation is good i mean i think automation is also is good in logic and i overall in terms of actually manipulating automation i wouldn't necessarily say that cubase is better than logic i think they're both really good i both prefer both of them a lot to pro tools which i always find even though i've spent countless hours editing automation i always find it fiddly and get to logic and it's like a breath of fresh air it's just a lot quicker and easier to work with i find and cubase is the same it's very very good it just i wouldn't say that in terms of the actual automation it's better but that numeric ability to edit numerically for me anyway is really great okay here's another thing that's that's quite good so if i've got a bunch of tracks well first of all if i recolor a track so i'm going to recolor a track right so it just does the track and the part the event region whatever call it you can do them separately but it automatically does that now do i ever not want that no personally i always want them to be the same okay there's times i might not want to occasionally but in a as a rule i do logic won't do that you've got to go and do each time you've got to go and do them separately which i've always found like a real pain you can keep adding loads and loads of plugins like you don't have in as i explained in my video about logic and pro tools pro tools is way behind in terms of its ability to store chains of plugins so you know if i want to put in a chain of a chain of plugins i've got them stored here just as a preset and there they all are logic has that too and that is such a time saver a doll without that to me is is just like it's not it's not i mean i use pro tools because i have to but it that is such an omission to me that it just takes me longer to do every single mix um because it doesn't have those kind of features yeah you can store it in another song and load it in import it but and that's such a lava here you just you know you've got your libraries that you've made you know and you can store things by all kinds of categories whatever you might need you know you can make folders you make folders within folders you can manage all of this outside of cubase on your hard disk same in logic so you can you know you can do it by you know whatever by clients by anything you need it's absolutely fantastic um because i have lots of chains of plugins that i know for example some particular delay sound that takes the transient off the input and sweeps it around autumn and auto auto pens it moves it forward and backwards in the sound stage adds a bit of pitch shift all of that and it's got you know a delay of a certain kind all set up which could be quite complicated and i've got a bunch of those and i know what they do and i'll use them on different mug be doing a mix and think i want that one and so i can just nip in there grab it done and and logic's the same but cubase goes one step further and allows you to store entire parallel chains so don't just have to recall that one channel i can recall a whole bunch of channels and how they root to each other with sends with everything it's amazing and their subgroup that they go to the whole thing can be stored as a preset that you can categorize and name and all of that it's absolutely amazing and you know it's a step ahead of of logic and like five steps ahead of pro tools um it's also got really great um plugin management you like with logic you can make your own folders with you know however you want to have your plugins arranged and organized so it's so much quicker to get to your plugins than going through some massive list of plugins by alphabetical order or by type you know compressor and you know it's got so many in there and the one you want actually isn't listed there because it's been listed somewhere else because it does more than one thing all of that kind of pallava that you have in pro tools you don't have to worry about i know some people like to do text do it with a text search that doesn't work for me but you can do that cubase is a little further than logic in some ways because you can create more than one of these you can create as many as you want these whole set setups you can change the order of these which is really handy you can't do that in logic sub grouping things is quicker so so what i can do in cubase is i can grab a bunch of tracks like that key command create a subgroup they're all automatically routed to it can't do that in in logic you can do it in pro tools um you can't set up a key command for it as far as i know so it's a bit quicker in cubase but i always find it's frustrating in logic that you can't see the name of where it's rooted to on the mixer you can in pro tools you can in cubase really great um so that's your kind of your ox but cubase gives you this extra kind of aux that's specifically for effects so same thing see reverb say for example key command there we go and it's automatically set up sends from all the tracks i had selected to this reverb sends all there all switched on all ready to go now they're all at zero but you can set that in the preferences as to what the default value will be so yeah pretty amazing much quicker than in logic you can't do anything like that you can do that you do that for multiple channels in yeah i think you can do that in pro tools as well but i don't think you can set the default send value or anything like that but it's not as quick as this just like one key come in and you're done so really useful and another great thing you can see the name of the send arcs right above your send how useful is that always really miss that in logic for me in mixing it's just so much quicker and simpler to just see ah that's sending to the delay that's sending to the reaver i mean they're all the reverb at the moment but you know to just at a glance see where things are routed um i'm forever in logic skipping around trying to find where everything is routed to um whereas here you can just you can just see it and you can even search within the mixer for a mixer track how great is that you can write it type it in you can find it so it's really quick if you've got a big arrangement like you know we sometimes get arrangements with a 100 200 tracks and it can be pretty hard to find something and yeah really quick and easy so courselogic doesn't have that i don't think pro tools has that either you can also visibility here you can turn offer on any you can hide or show any mixer track any group so cubase has a history just for the mixer so that is incredibly useful so you know if i've got something like this and you know i've set things up and it's like okay great and then i just think oh i had a lot better five minutes ago i can get back to it and then if i go to my arrange window there's also a history here the usual command z that's separate so i that's incredibly handy i don't have to go through all my arranged steps to find a mixer step you can um have like a console style eq compressors all of that this is just the eq but you've got a whole bunch of other other things here that you can use console style if you like if you're happy to use stock plugins which are very good i wouldn't use this personally but because sometimes people say to me well you know cubase and logic have very good eq you know basic um stock eq and other plugins and actually logic has some very good compressors um why don't you use them and it's because i move from dot a doll um i need plugins which i can use in any daw so you know if i know certain plugins are going to give me a certain sound and i've got a workflow that works with particular set of eqs and compressors and so forth which i've honed over a period of time i want to be able to bring those with me to whatever daw i'm using and i move between pro tools logic and cubase a lot sometimes i can move things from one of them to another other times i can because the artist might want to have the file back to do some extra edits or changes and send it back to me so you know there's plenty of times where i need to keep it in the door that it comes in but this is you know very quick it's all just there you don't have to go and load a lot of plugins so if you're happy using stock plugins for stuff this is way past logic in terms of just its quickness and flexibility you know it's got a lot here saturation limiter you know all sorts of great stuff um i can copy and paste this by just simply using command v which is super useful i can even paste it to a whole bunch at once really pretty amazing there's a whole bunch of other great things you can do with plugins if you want so yeah plugins are quicker and easier to work with than either pro tools or i mean pro tools this doesn't even come into the same arena as cubase and logic but cubase is a lot quicker than logic for all those reasons so another really great thing about cubase is that you can reorder your plugins and you don't lose your automation so if i set up some complicated automation on this and i want to move the order of them i can move it the automation is still there logic you'll lose the automation another thing is that plugins can have multiple sidechains i think up to four different side chains at the same time so you could have different channels side chaining it that's pretty handy another really good thing one one bug in that always bugged me in logic was that if you use logic's bypass for a plug-in it creates a click their their built-in bypass in a mix automated it will create a click like i'd say eight times out of ten not a problem with pro tools not a problem in cubase if you select an area for example you can move that around to different tracks you can move it across different tracks you can extend the selection um you know it's fully editable once you've made the selection and this this goes beyond logic way beyond logic selection capabilities are really just tremendously great basically um so or maybe you want to copy that you know it's it's just great let's start with the fact that you can have more than one project open at a time in cubase that means that if i have things in one project you know maybe um some midi parts or maybe there's some loops in another project or maybe there's just a section of a song which i got rid of in the current version of a project i have and i remember that it was in a previous one and i want to go back and get it i can just open up those two projects at the same time find the bit copy and paste it or drag it straight into a second cubase window um it's built to do that it does it really well logic on the other hand um used to be able to do that years ago but they changed something and now if you try that it pretty much always crashes that's my experience with it so i basically if i have to do it i will make sure i'm really careful don't do too much just get the part copy and paste it save and quit and open again and it usually manages it but any more fiddling than that and you've kind of had it cubase you can have many projects open at the same time and people often do have multiple projects and it just swaps the memory and it's very happy about it what do we have next one of the things i like about logic is that the folders if you put things in a folder it syncs to the mixer so if i make a folder here a folder stack so of course we have this in in uh cubase and i've had it for a long time pro tools finally has folders but logic and cubase have had them i think for a decade or something a long time anyway but what i like about logic is that it opens up it syncs so i can open the folder up in the mixer and it opens up and closes they sync like that can open either place and open it closes i really like that can't do that in in cubase with cubase open and close the folder in the arrange window it doesn't open and close it here folders don't exist in that way in the mixer but you can do the same thing i mean there's kind of a work around so i'll just show you how that works so here here's a folder so i can open and close that folder here but nothing happens in the mixer but what you can do in the mixer is you can highlight them and do it here so it's kind of the same and i like them being linked um like they haven't pro logic is not a huge difference not a huge deal but a little bit better in logic i would say the other thing that i think is really good about both cubase and logic is that they are both very cpu efficient i don't know i haven't done an actual test to find out whether one of them is better than the other but as far as i can tell they're about the same and they are both way more efficient than pro tools native obviously if you've got the pro tools hardware you can run a lot of plugins but if on native can't get anywhere close to the number of plugins that you can run in logic and cubase in pro tools native so that that's always a problem i always hit the cpu limit in pro tools um and i'm always having to freeze loads of tracks and always have to be careful about that um in logic and cubase uh i rarely hit it unless it's a massive arrangement at 96 kilohertz or something like that then i might and then i might have to freeze a few things but um doesn't happen very often the midi editor in cubase is definitely better so you've got the midi editor here and you know i can i can write in notes and so forth and so on um here you can see the notes name which is very handy you can change all the background colors to your heart's content um if that's not your liking um and it's got all the usual things you know that you can control i find this easier to use you know all the different cc controllers and so forth what's really great apart from just the fact that it's very smooth and slick you can you can open lots of parts at the same time in the window and edit them together color them by the part which you can also do in logic but in logic if you open several parts in there at the same time it kind of works but it kind of gets confused and you can't paste easily it can get all messed up and confused if you try to copy and paste with more than one part open at the same time i do it all the time but it often gets messy and gets confused and causes a problem in cubase it's no it's just really tight and slick and you can easily open up more than one part and edit them at the same time and what's really great is if you have chords you can just come and click on them and and hear the chord play for as long as you hold your mouse down and that is a big bonus because in logic there's no way to do that and what's so frustrating is that you used to be able to do that in logic and you can't they took it away a long time ago i don't know how many versions back it was i don't know why they did that but um they did and so you what all you can do in logic is to just kind of lasso them in a way with a selection and you hear the notes one at a time and if you've got sustain on the note they overlap and you can kind of hear the chord and that's that's all you get which i've always found like why don't they just allow you to hear a chord um yeah but in cubase just come and click on on any note and you hear the chord and you not only do you hear you hear it for as long as you hear mouse down so really great so yeah midi editing is the media editor is better one thing i'd say i like better about logic is in in cubase you don't see your instruments on the instrument track you see effects here and routing and you can show a whole bunch of other things here as i showed earlier there's a load of things you can have here way more than you can have in logic but the one thing you can't see is your virtual instruments and that i find frustrating why don't they allow you to see those here just like a plug-in that's what you can in logic you see it right there so if i just um create an instrument here you see it's right there you load it there and where the input is and um you know there it is that's so good you know and you can copy and paste that by dragging it if you have other instrument tracks great um in cubase you don't see it there which is frustrating and i think it's a legacy thing because i think it dates back to a long way and i just wish they'd kind of update it and improve it so basically if i want to see my instrument it's here that's how you select an instrument uh it's okay it's fine i don't mind having it there i just really wish you could also have it here just as one extra thing where you see your instrument and it looks like this so you could see what it was like that would be great minor thing minor quibble but that is a little bit better in logic so that's it i hope um you found this useful if you did please do give the video a like and ring the bell and subscribe and hope to see you next time you

Channel: Heron Island Studio

Views: 31,145

Keywords: compressor, compression, attack, release, ratio, equaliser, parametric, high pass, low pass, LPF, HPF, high shelf, low shelf, linear phase, boost, cut, cue, frequency, modulation, room size, size, mixing, jazz, fusion, progressive rock, prog rock, world music, review, plugin, plug in, heron island studio, 2 bus, master bus, pro tools, logic, automation, editing, audio editing, screen sets, apple, cpu, fades, solo, groups, looping, selections, freezing, stability, edit automation, plugins, Steinberg

Id: 6V7lUfjvWuc

Length: 68min 9sec (4089 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022