16 Track Types in Cubase Explained (Tutorial)

what's up everyone we're back with another tutorial in Cubase today I'm gonna show you all something very special I got a comment someone was asking me to describe the differences between effects tracks and group tracks and I thought well let's do about 15 better and describe what all of the track types in Cubase do so if we see the list here we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 16 traffic types in Cubase and I'm gonna go through them one by one in this order so the first is audio tracks and audio tracks are exactly what you think they are they are audio that you record through a microphone into Cubase so I have a couple tracks here singing and other singing and let's take a listen to them [Music] way down in the depths okay so you get the idea that's audio tracks and audio is pretty self-explanatory let's move on to instrument tracks I have Haley on sonic which is the main like rom polar type thing loaded up and an instrument track sort of combines a MIDI track and an audio track into one track and these are the easiest to load if you just want one thing going on so we can listen to it I have a piano loaded here [Music] and Hailey and Sonic se is a multi out entrant but I do less multi out stuff these days because I just load up a brand new instrument track for almost everything that's sort of my new workflow but that's a good thing to keep in mind so you can load up an instrument track for each sound that you want and that makes it easier on me because I don't have weird audio outputs and MIDI tracks floating around it's just it makes more sense to me but you can do it the old-fashioned way with MIDI tracks and that's what we'll get into now MIDI tracks so I have here Haley on strings and what that is is that since Haley ons multi timbrel if you look here I have a honky-tonk piano loaded but I also have a coke EU violin loaded on channel 2 so if we take a look at that patch it's on channel 2 MIDI channel 2 you can see that there whereas the honky-tonk is on channel 1 so the important thing with MIDI tracks is to know what channel you're on and you see that here in the side inspector I'm on channel 2 so you'll hear the coke vial in here but so that's a use of MIDI tracks with multi temporal instruments you can route multiple instruments to the same instrument by use of different MIDI channels but MIDI tracks are also useful for controlling FX so let's open up our audio tracks again and let's add an insert let's add a guitar rig and this works for third-party effects I think one problem that we have is that for Cubase they want you to use the quick controls down here and that doesn't work the same way as it works with these so but let's look at this guitar rig that we have open let's add a wah pedal to this vocal signal and that's neither here nor there but now we have this FX track and I'll show you if I have this MIDI track selected and I route it into Guitar Rig now this is going into Guitar Rig and I have a wah-wah setup so I'll select both tracks here and I'll just choose MIDI learn and then what I'll do is all on my controller here I'll just move this and as you can see I move the thing and the wah pedal moves so let's try out messing with this singing pretty cool huh so that's another way you can use MIDI tracks is as effects controls for external effects that have MIDI learn functionality and then final way you can use it is for your rack instruments the old-school workflow so I have a groove agent loaded here with a drum set loaded and if I added a MIDI track add track MIDI and we'll call it GA for groove agent and we'll move it into the folder we want GA to be routed to groove agent Maine and the thing about the rack instruments is that they have this additional audio out that you have to unmute now we have groove agent right here and that's the MIDI track is controlling groove agent but the output is going through an audio out down here so I prefer instrument tracks because it's a little bit cleaner so so far we have audio tracks instrument tracks and MIDI tracks so let's listen to what we got [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay and the next track up on the list is the sampler track the sampler track you can find in your lower zone you can drag a sample into it but I've just taken a sample from the audio track it's this sample right here [Laughter] and I dragged that into the sample or track so I'll show you where it's at let's open this and here it is I just sped up the speed a little bit and on my MIDI controller [Music] I can play that word but as if it were a keyboard able thing pretty cool huh so let's hear that in the context of the track [Music] [Music] that's pretty awesome huh so those four tracks are the tracks that you'll use to compose with more or less everything else is sort of organizational arrangement or mixing oriented but we'll continue to move on FX and this is what I was asked what's the difference between an FX and a group of a group track and I feel like effects are more for your sins whereas groups are more for direct routing that's how I think about them in my head now in FX would be like an aux track and a group would be like a bus if you're into that sort of terminology so we have this effects track this reverb that I've set up and we can look at it it's just a room works just this stock Cubase reverb so I can route my audio I have these two I can send my audio into the reverb bus so I'll turn that one on and this one's on as well and so now and if we want to bring down we can bring down the send value of the reverb [Music] so that's how send drafts work you send this signal as much of it as you want into an effect and then you can adjust the send amount and the return amount of that as opposed to group tracks where you actually directly route the signal to a bus so I have a group track setup here as well and I think I called the group vocals so here's the vocal group [Music] [Music] and so that's how groups work you bus individual tracks they actually route to a group track and then the next is VCA which i've never used but i found it quite fascinating VCA is sort of what happens when you link tracks so I have these two tracks linked to this VC a fader here which I call vocal er and sampler BCA so let's just link the sampler to so now when I move this fader if you look at these three here they'll move along with it let's listen to the track itself being sent to the reverb bus now in a group if I turn down the group I'll still get the reverb because these are post fader sins so all you get is the wet signal of the reverb as opposed to if I turn down the VCA fader as you can see the FX track corresponds in kind because I'm moving all the faders I'm not just moving a subgroup of the things into a group track if that makes any sense so you may ask why don't you just use a VC a fader all the time and I would say because if you sum these the two voices I can put inserts on them I can put EQ and compression and limiting and whatever I want on the bus to sort of mix in stages you know I mix the individual tracks I mix the groups of tracks and that option is not available on VCF faders but it's a good thing to remember if you want to maintain the balance and gain structure of certain things to use a VCF fader on linked tracks so let's move on to the arranger track the arranger track is something I've never used but it's actually pretty awesome I've just drawn in these things so if I wanted to draw it to the end of this I'd hit alt and then just drag it so I have these sections of the song let's an they call it on a ranger event and if we wanted to mess with the arrangement of the song we can do it in any order we want so if we wanted to start with the second part and then do the fourth part and then maybe the third part we can just organize any chain we want and activate the arranger chain and it'll play it in that order it'll play it be dcae so we can see here on the playhead and I'll zoom in so you guys get a good idea of it it'll start with B then it'll go to D watch [Music] to here [Music] and the power of this is like you could have a chorus and a verse and a bridge and you say oh I think we should do the chorus twice and we should do the bridge after the second chorus and you say no I think we should do the third verse then do the bridge then end with the course or something like that well you can try out all of those things without having to retrack everything you can just change the arrangement within the dawn and that's the power of the arranger track so the arranger track is really cool next we'll move on to the chord track and the chord track is a pretty dense subject the core track you can use it to control audio you see these chord events and you can have the audio sort of auto tuned to the chord track or you can use it to control instrument tracks and MIDI they'll respond to core tracks as well and they can you can play within a scale so I could play any you know notes within the scale on D major or a major or G major and it's a pretty dense subject so I'll leave that for another time and there's plenty of tutorials online about how to use the core track but it is powerful and it allows you to do a lot musically without having to actually make the music right then and there so moving on we have the marker track I love marker tracks because you can navigate through your projects if you add the markers with this thing here shift 1 gets you to marker 1 shift to marker 2 shift 3 marker 3 that type of thing so if I wanted to have a marker here I'd add it and I'll get back to it later and so marker tracks that's an important thing to know just for a project navigation and if you're recording over and over at something you know it's nice to be able to navigate very quickly next we'll move on to the ruler track the ruler track can be either seconds or a timecode or it can be bars and beats like you're used to or actual samples if you're recording at 40 for 1 or 48 it'll tell you how many samples or a framerate if you're working with movies so this is extremely powerful if you're composing the picture or you need a piece of music that's 30 seconds long for a commercial or something and you need to have the actual something other than the beats and bars up here you can have multiple ruler tracks to show you where you're at next we'll move on to the signature track now this is in 4/4 but if I wanted to add you just hit alt and enter and I can enter a signature of 3/4 or it can be 7/8 or it can be 13 16 or whatever you want you can set whatever crazy time signature you feel like and so that's a good one to know next we'll look at tempo track so let's see we have a jump let's put it to ramp so if I wanted this to ramp up from here to here and we'll hear it if I [Music] but we'll take those away because only MIDI ramps audio doesn't ramp with tempo so you have to keep that in mind before you start recording audio make sure you have your tempo set the way you want because it won't tempo ramp audio on the tempo track so that's a good thing to keep in mind finally we have the transpose track and this is pretty awesome stuff here so I can transpose it as much as I want but I'll show you how it works [Music] so you can transpose the keys and through some dark alchemy it actually also this one actually does also work in audio so keep that in mind if you ever want to transpose something of course you won't get a natural sound but you'll get something cool sounding so finally we have the video track and one thing I didn't cover was folder tracks but that's what I've been using this whole time I use the hell out of folder tracks because they're super convenient for keeping your project organized so finally we will move on to the video track and if you remember I set up a marker at the video track that's five so I hit shift 5 boom I'm there and I'll just play this video out I recorded it right after I got done mowing the lawn that's why I'm so sweaty hi everybody I hope you enjoyed that video if you did feel free to like or subscribe and if you have a idea of something actually do in the future just leave it in the comments and I may do it so if you like what I'm doing on this channel check out some of my other videos because I've been having a lot of fun lately ok that's all everybody bye

Channel: Talking Leaf Media

Views: 44,268

Keywords: Talking, Leaf, Media, Audio, MIDI, Instrument, Sampler, VCA, FX, Group, Arranger, Track, Cubase, Cubase 9, Pro, Elements, Artist, Audio Engineering, Recording, Talking Leaf Media, DAW, Tutorial, Tips and Tricks, How to, Learning, Track Types

Id: s94ixJro0Kc

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 28 2017