Basic Audio Recording in Cubase

hey Steff Gibbons here and just got a small tutorial on how to set up your microphone in Cubase for recording audio the first thing you want to do is get your audio track in there and one thing to make sure you don't do is set up a stereo audio track in Cubase so to setup a mono audio track you have to go up to project add track and then choose audio and then at this point is where you want to make sure that you've chosen mono and not stereo if you choose stereo by accident you'll see audio recording on only one side of the file and when you listen to it you'll hear it probably only in the left speaker and that's when you'll know that you've record an audio the wrong way okay so I mean if you did do that I guess you could export the track as a mono file or as separate mono files and then you could just import that one back into a project so it's not the end of the world if you've accidentally done that you don't you don't want to lose what you've done but anyways set up a mono audio track I've made a key command for that which is just a so when I press a I get a mono audio track and then another thing I always stress is that you name your audio track right off the bat so we're going to call this vo X which is kind of recordist code for vocals I think it's Latin for voice the next thing to do is to set up the inputs the input and the input routing with Cubase so to do that we press f4 and up pops the audio connections and in the audio connections we can see what are called busses and busses are a little bit confusing but really all the busses is just a connection between hardware into the computer so the way it works is we've got a stereo in as a default which is just input one and input two automatically and to remove this bus so we can right click and go remove buss stereo in and go yes and then now we can add a bus so we want to add just mono bus and most of the time you're gonna be dealing with mono things anyways so if you really wanted to for your interface you could choose up to however many inputs you actually have I've got eight so I'm just gonna say eight mono inputs and then we call this maybe in one in two etc so I'm just gonna say in and that's it hit add bus and I've got in one in two in three and four and 5 etc etc and what I could do now is save this as a preset and call this eight inputs and just hit OK and now I can just choose that as a preset every time I come just to change my input so if it's back to that stereo in one that it started with I could just go simply to that preset choose a tins and I'm good to go once I've got my input set I can close this window and go back over to my vocal tract and right here where it says no bus I'm gonna zoom in there just you can see it this little input shows you something coming in to the computer and this is something coming out of the computer but this is our input so I click on it and I choose input 1 so now we've got our input 1 I click on that track and now I can choose to start recording on that track and what that means is input 1 on the interface is now connected to this audio track if I made another audio track and decided after I record my vocals I want to do some guitar now what I do is make sure this is set to input 1 also I can see it's set to input 1 as well and when I record on this track it's also going to record from the same microphone but it's going to record it onto my guitar track so what you have to get in your head is what these input channels mean and if I go to the mixer by pressing f3 I can now see all of my inputs in red these are my inputs these are my audio tracks and this is my stereo output so what I can do right here is I can see the level that's coming into the computer from this microphone right here so this shows you the level coming in and this is the track that it's going to be recording on I'm gonna mute my speakers so I don't get feedback and watch what happens if I press the record and the monitor button on my vocal tract so if I do that I will see level coming into this audio track and the other thing you need to know about setting levels is that you never want to adjust this read fader because here's the thing if your audio is coming into the system and it's clipping the level is going over zero and you just simply turn this down all you're going to be doing is turning down a distorted signal it's still going to be distorting so it's not gonna sound good so set that back to zero never touch these red faders but you can always touch these faders if I turn this up it's not actually going to record any louder all it's going to do is let me hear it louder if I turn this all the way off so I couldn't hear it in the headphones at all it doesn't matter it's still recording okay so this fader right here you can do whatever you want with it it won't change how anything is recorded so once you've set our input the next thing we need to do is go and check the input level so to do that we need our microphone so let's grab this microphone right here and and I've got my pop filter just a few inches away from the microphone you don't want to be too close but you do want to get it fairly close to the microphone and I'll just raise this up a little bit we set the leg so that it's facing me sticking out towards me can't tip over towards me or as easily anyways we get the microfilter a few inches away and then we get up nice and close to the microphone and we are ready to start checking our level so for this let's look right at the audio interface itself so we've got the microphone plugged into input number one right here and then we can see there's this little button that says 48 volts and this 48 volts button means that it's sending phantom power to these four first four microphones and phantom power is needed for condenser microphones to work so if you're working with a condenser microphone you must have that on or the microphone simply won't work so we turn on phantom power now power is going to the microphone and we can see over here in input 1 that we have level so the level is working the microphone is working and this is where I adjust the microphone level of input number one on this interface it's a little bit different on other interfaces but here it is right here so what I need to do is sing into my microphone check check check talking talking talking and then I watch the level so what you want to do for this part is set the level so that whatever is the loudest part in your song for their singer for the instrument that you're recording you want to make sure that those loudest parts aren't going to clip clipping is when it goes beyond zero zero line right here this zero if the audio goes above that you are technically clipping so we could crank this up and now you can see that the signal is clipping so that's no good what we need to do there is we don't want to adjust the fader right here remember that we've always want to adjust on the audio interface so I come over the audio interface adjust the preamp right here until my snapping doesn't go over zero so I can reset this clipping light so I can see still clipping turn it down a little bit more and and I think I'm ready to record my snap track if that's what I'm gonna do but let's go back to voice and see how that looks check check check testing check check and if I'm singing I'll probably want to actually go and sing that part but let's pretend that I'm just recording spoken word and you say to your person if it's not you you say can you just go over that loud part and or just get them to say something a little bit louder see where the level is that make sure it's not going over zero I could probably have a little bit more gain on my audio interface check check check hey testing testing check check and I can see that the level is going over zero or it's not getting too close to zero and at that point I have a pretty good level so the next thing is to make sure that you can hear enough in your headphones so you'd want to plug in your headphones and if you're playing along with a track you would definitely want to play a look play the track sing along and if you do that you're gonna find out whether or not you have enough level in your headphones of your main of your voice so can you hear yourself and so if we go over to our actual audio track say this is our vocal track right here we want to make sure that this vocal track or this level right here is loud enough for you to sing and hear yourself in the headphones put the headphones on I press play and I start singing along and maybe go to the loudest part of the song so you can make sure that you're not clipping and then at that point I could say no I still don't have enough level and so what you could a simple thing you can do at that point would be to go to all of your other tracks and just turn down all of the other tracks and there is an easy way to do that if you had a whole bunch of tracks so if you have a whole bunch of tracks and they're all too loud right now for you to be able to hear your voice what you can do is click on the first track and then shift-click on the last track and then right click on any of those and choose link selected channels it'll give you options and we're just worried about volume so we're just gonna click OK and now what we can do is turn all of those other audio tracks down with one fader try that see if that feels good enough maybe you're gonna have to adjust your headphone volume again turn it up a little bit more and then right click once you're happy and choose unlink selected channels and by doing that you've just created more of a difference between the vocal track and the other tracks so now you'll be able to hear yourself and you're pretty much ready to record so at this point make sure the record button is on and then also make sure that the monitor button is on and if you have Cubase setup this way every time you press record you'll want to hear yourself singing through the microphone if the monitor button is is not on what you're going to hear it you're going to hear either nothing there's nothing on your track where you're going to hear the last track that you just recorded so what I would do is I would have my headphones on I press record I start singing I sing my whole track and with the monitor button on right now I will be able to hear myself through the headphones everything will be working properly and when I press stop I go back and I look at what I just recorded so here I can see I actually probably could turn up my volume a little bit more I could use some more gain on this track because it's I'm not going to be talking that loud in this recording and you're gonna find that as you go you'll be like you know what I just recorded that first take a little bit too quiet or too loud and it clipped at some parts no problem turn it down a little bit record another take when you're recording a second take now you can press record and just record right over top and do your next take so whatever it is that you're doing here I'm doing spoken word I'm gonna talk a little bit more I'm recording right over top of the other take and that's okay and then I press stop and then now if I go back and I want to listen to that remember with Cubase audio you have to make sure the monitor button is off there's another way of working where this does this automatically I like having control over it now I press play and I can listen to the take that I just recorded okay so if I turn my speaker's back on and do your next take so whatever it is that you're doing here I'm doing spoken word I'm gonna talk a little bit more I'm recording right over top of the other tape there we go so I can hear the audio that I just recorded and of course you'd hear that with all the other things in your mix and then you get into vocal editing which I have another video that talks about editing the vocals and comping the vocals so thanks for watching and go to gibbons creative dot CA to see what we're up to and make sure to hit the subscribe button as I will be putting a lot more videos on in the future

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 133,452

Keywords: Cubase, Cubase 9.5, Nuendo 8, Microphone Setup, Audio Recording, Audio Recording setup, DAW, Digital Audio Recording Basics, Recording Tutorial, Jef Gibbons, Gibbons Creative

Id: 2jcraXZhErg

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018