Cubase 11 Pro Tips

hi my name is nintu miso and welcome to my youtube channel this time i am in cubase 11 pro um cubase well it is one of the most intimidating um doors you can find because there's just so much there's just so much much and these are some tips that i'm going to give you to help you get started um building momentum because sometimes you do lose inspiration when you open a door and you are just compounded with options and options on top of options and sub menus in sub menus so let's get started these are things that i wish i knew before i got started because i see a lot of tutorials on youtube and none of them really address some of the things that i find useful for me in my everyday workflow so starting from the beginning let's just open it this is very non-linear and non-structured so i'm just gonna go through things that i use i'm gonna go open up cubase 11 pro and right here from the beginning we are welcomed by the steinbeck steinberg hub and this is where basically your project starts here but what i like to do is to start empty and then create myself a template of things that i am going to be using so um let's just start with an empty template um if you see on the left this is where you find all your news um there's stories of updates or tutorials or tips that you might find from the cubase website um over here you've got some tabs of templates that you might be interested in using maybe if you just want to try it out and just have a look at what these templates are doing and these are your recent projects but i like to go here to more and just click on the empty and start a new template over here at the bottom that is where you are going to be saving all your project files i've got it set here for prompt for project location so every time it um i start a new project it basically is going to ask me where i'm going to be saving that project and those files over here if you click on the use default location that is where all your projects are going to be going and over here on the side you have a chance to to name that but that only works with here on the use default location you've got a chance to save that project folder but here i like prompt for project location and i am going to be clicking on empty to begin an empty template there there's the prompt and then i'm going to be selecting that folder okay upon opening um this empty template what we're gonna find this is the project window right here is your track pane this is where all your tracks and groups are going to be showing up um we've currently got our lower zone activated and our ride zone activated this is the left zone where you find the track inspector so i'm going to go ahead and open up a a new track i'm going to add audio track and it's going to ask me audio inputs um configuration and audio output where it's going to be going i'm going to name that vox for now going to create just one and right there off the bat you see um the track has opened up and over there on the left zone i don't really like the left zone so what i'm going to do i'm going to press ctrl alt and l to get rid of that because there's a lot of stuff there and most of it i like doing um from the track the track itself so over here you see that my my track has got quite a lot of icons than the default and you might see a lot of people on cubase who make videos but i never really saw anyone who explained how to get them like this so let me show you how to get your track to look like that i'm going to press ctrl alt and e to get rid of the lower zone and what i'm going to do right here at the bottom you're going to see a little gear icon and that's the track control settings and over here you are going to be seeing all of the icons that you may want to to appear on your track zone so maybe let me just add eight to make that wider and make eight as well to change the layout so those are the types of things that you can do with your your track um icons you want to get everything and and it's quite helpful for me because um you've also got presets that you can open up you've got presets standard i think this is the default one that you see yeah that's the standard you've got simple if you apply simple and you've got recording apply recording and i'm going to go there and place your name you can change um the length of the name how long you want the name to appear over there as you can see and there all the icons are going to be there on the left so what you want to do is just take them and move them over to the right let me just take a a a preset the mixing preset and just move things over you want track freeze um lane display type listen [Music] monitor uh record enable and lock and just put in all the options i like it that way so there you've got all those stored over there and just press apply and then okay and then you've got all your options laid out right there on your track pane and for me this is very useful because you can use the freeze channel when you are using midi and right here on your track you can just freeze a track from your track pane and that makes it so much easier because if you don't um freeze over here you're gonna have to open the inspector from the left zone so that's control alt and l and there you're gonna have to use and open that and you know it takes up so much real estate to do that when you know you can just set everything up um beforehand and just have it right there on your track icons and there we go so if you want to create a template a template is very useful because all the stuff can be set out every time you begin a project because you're going to see all these things on every new project you just put in all the stuff that you are going to use so now that you've seen how i open uh a create a channel and create this preset for these tracks so what you want to do is to open uh to when you want to save a template you're going to go here and you save as template but before that before that what you might want to do is now that you've opened the track for recording this is a audio track you might want to press f4 f4 opens your audio connections and what you see here is that it's in stereo in what that is going to do is that your recordings are going to be coming on one channel it's going to be coming from most probably excuse me it's going to be coming from the left side if you've seen that if you're recording on a mono channel or a mono mic you're only using one mic source you're using just one microphone so it's going to be coming from either the left or the right depending on how you set up your audio interface so what i like to do i like to just well remove it i don't want to see that so i remove that and what i'm going to do is i'm going to add bus i'm going to add a mono channel and it's going to be on one input so all my audio is going to be coming from over the middle straight from the middle it's going to be in mono okay right there i can go back did i save that yeah it's going to be in mono so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna open the mixer channel go back to routing and the mono in and there we go i'm back mono in so that's how my vocals are going to be coming in can i record this i'm not sure okay there my vocals are coming in that way straight down the middle straight down in the middle that's what you want your vocals coming in if you open a stereo track you're going to be doing one and two stereo i'm going to be opening that and record it's going to be coming from the left and we do not want that you do not want that you want it coming straight down in the middle so mono check going to go back the stereo track has been recreated again so i'm gonna go ahead and remove that so yeah so that next time when you are opening up your template you want to make sure that you have all your inputs as a mono and don't forget it's f4 you're gonna go create a bus and add a mono so that all your audio tracks are going to be in mono um moving right along um i'm going to be talking about adding all your tools right here on top these are the tools that i have selected for my cubase um there's a lot of stuff that i took out because it's stuff that i'm not really looking at um sorry about that um mainly the transport bar because um it's basically stop is um the number zero or space bar um start is enter or space bar and you've got record which is the star key that's the one i use and loop is the is that the forward facing that's the force forward facing um slash um the metronome metronome is c so to turn it on and off you press c so those are the things that i do um and over here you've got the automatic midi quantize now this is important because if you're going to be punching in midi you're going to be playing um if you have it off you're going to be playing live unquantized and if you have this on you can set um how to have your midi quantized um and this is also very very useful so i always keep it on so it's going to be quantizing whatever you have set over here for your quantized presets for me i've got a custom one i've just added just a little bit of swing but you can um change that make it a 16th note so every time you are playing midi all your midi is going to be quantized to the 16th note so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna add an instrument and um let's just draw in some midi and that's the bottom layer and that's the editor so you see those are the 16th notes right there but mine as i said because it's going to be that the custom would adjust a little bit of swing this is going to be very very linear it's going to be sounding um you know it sounds very very robotic when um audio is just right on online on the line it's not quantized so my one it's just adding a little bit of swing that's what i just added there just a little bit of swing just to edit that little bit of human element as if you were like a almost perfectly timed human being so what to create that this is the open quantize panel so you're going to open that and then you set how much swing you want and how much catch range and how many ticks is just basically how much of the quantization you're adding at this point and then you can just press quantize and keep quantizing until it's gonna move just a little bit move just a little bit every time maybe you just want to add some more percentage it's gonna swing a bit more maybe feel like a little bit more swing as needed it's just going to be swinging just a little bit more um you know just to give your your your music just a little bit of that element you know and just that little bit of human feel in case you do not want like your music to be very robotic so that's how you use that quantize feature and no i do not want you i want you back right there as you see the line that's moved a bit just a little bit so that's what the the swing and quantizing does it just moves it just a little bit to give some of that human element so that your music doesn't sound very programmed and very robotic i'm going to go ahead and get rid of this lower zone once again i'm going to move that um yeah so those are the tools that i've got here you use okay this pathway is going to be your views so that's the lower zone that's the information line you're gonna see all the details how long you've recorded how which where you are on the track and stuff like that that's the overview of the song so if you need to go to a certain section you can just see what you've done and just scroll over there quickly that's the left zone right zone is activated lower zone transport bar right there at the bottom so over here that's where you are going to be deciding with the when you're recording your midi if you want to record new parts i i use new parts so every time my loop section finishes it just goes back to the beginning and starts a new part um you've got merge so that if wherever your loop part reaches the end and it starts over you are going to be basically putting both midi parts together and replace it replaces any existing thing that you're recording just replaces everything it's not like comping it's completely replacing and when it comes to cycled midi notes recording i'm not too sure about this section i just leave it at default so yeah right there i've got auto quantize so whatever i play is quantized um that is for me when i'm busy recording vocals i've got keep history and that's what you use for comping so whenever you're comping you're going to reach the end of your loop section it's just going to go right back to the beginning so let me create a loop section to show you what i'm talking about i'm going to loop that and then i'm going to go right to the beginning cycle at the beginning so it's busy recording right now and then as you see as i'm busy talking it's just gonna go back and whatever i'm saying these waveforms are coming back over what i'm saying so to open that loop section those sections that i've recorded right now i'm gonna open the show lanes and right here you can select with this bottom small square right here at the bottom you can select which take do you prefer and you can close that up if you don't want to do that there's an arrow right here at the bottom you can click that and then you can select your take that way and then if you want to commit you can just remove overlaps and simple as that simple as that and okay let me get rid of that transport bar at the beginning because i do not i really ever see that i don't can't even remember when was the last time i saw that so this is basically what my project looks like my project layout looks like from the get-go there's a lot of things that i don't open i don't use i don't see so basically i like to keep it as simple as possible um i like to see over here that this cash load this is basically my performance of my computer so i can monitor how much computer processing units i'm using how much cpu how much disk is being used is because sometimes you might use something that's taking up so much of your disk usage and it starts to cause your computer to stutter and it really kills your inspiration so it's just good to have a monitor have a look at that over here so all these options that appear over here you have a gear right at the top right corner and then you have all these options and you can just click through them and you can see which ones you want to see which ones you don't want to see which ones you use which ones you don't want to use um what did i click on there okay track visibility configurations that stuff what is wrong with my mouse today damn okay that was weird but okay um my mouth started to act up now so i'm gonna move over to the right zone and i've only recently started using this media bay um it was very very neglected before so um let's start with the vst instruments over here you've got icons of instruments so if you're searching for an instrument and maybe you even forgot what it looks like you can just come here but before you able to see pictures like this you are supposed to save the pictures whenever you load an instrument let me load up something that um where you can see visually like okay we're gonna load up contact you can see currently the icon of contact that's the unrecorder so having a picture saved of an instrument it's it's relatively simple so let me just load something so you can see maybe okay we can load this one so bam you see contact just press this camera icon right here on top and the picture has been saved um but i like to have something there so it looks cool you know if you have stuff that looks cool on your computer um that's also like a way to generate some inspiration for yourself something that just looks cool so um i didn't mention how i loaded that instrument so i'm just gonna take a step back and go right back to loading up so right here on the media bay loading up an instrument is as simple as just taking a picture and dragging it in to a empty space here on your track zone so that's it and if you want to replace an instrument you can just take and drag and wait for this arrow you need the arrow because if you wait for the lines at the bottom that's going to open a new track under it if you open up with this arrow it's going to replace the instrument because what i usually did before was go here on the left zone and replace the instrument like this that's how i replaced instruments i go right here on this area and click and select like that i thought that was like the only way until i found out with the media bay you can just drag and drop like that easy as you like man easy as you like how simple is that so yeah and the same goes basically for effects as well so we're going to go to vst effects and right here as well i've saved up all the pictures for all my plugins that i use and now whenever i need an instrument i can just drag and boom wait for the arrow in the middle and boom just like that dragged and drop now with effects you know that cubase 11 has got 16 effects channels so whenever you drop you might be wondering where this um effect channel is gonna go it's going to go linear right below the other so this is the first one i've dropped right here opens up on the first effects chain channel so if i were to drop another one i'm going to drop this l1 and boom it's gonna pop up right underneath it easy as you like man easy as you like so and there we have it um one thing that i did do because i do not like the default way that cubase saves um presets and how they are viewed because it's just so much man i mean look this everything stored in folders some stuff is appearing like this in folders some things appearing in other sub folders and subgroups because i don't want to like click through stuff and some of the stuff is missing i want to see everything that i use all at once so over here you've got um vst effects you've got a drop down list you've got defaults i've saved mine as in domes essentials so what i did i did open plugin manager and in the plugin manager there's a plus sign right here on the top right corner you're gonna press that to create a new collection of plugins you're gonna click on empty and on empty it's gonna give you a new zone over here right on the side it's gonna be empty so you're just gonna take all the instruments and selects you can select all the instruments you like and just drag them over to this right side and that's basically how you create your collection create once your collection has been created you can just select it here i've gotten to missiles essentials so everything that i use on a day-to-day basis appears in one thing no folders no sorting it's all just here in one collection so i'm gonna go ahead and get rid of this right zone and talk about track colors so i'm gonna add that new color new tracks and pretty much it's looking very gray dark and bland so what you want is colors you know so you can sort out what you're doing so i've got vox i'll add that vox 2 um i'll add guitar i'll add piano so yeah those are all my tracks so if you've got like a whole bunch of tracks um opened up and you just want to sort out let's say you've got a project it's got like 100 tracks you're going to need to sort things out so you know and colors are the most useful way to sort out um your project so um what you want to do you want to come here to project colors set up if you come here these are the default colors there's 16 of them if there's not enough of them for you there's a cool place to go um you go here to presets you're gonna click on the maximum i want the maximum you're gonna go to color tints and now you've got a huge selection of colors you've got basic colors or you can sort them on color tints basic colors that's how i usually use it so now when you open up i press shift and click and that immediately opens up all the colors so now i can just set my colors and sort them out shift and click that's how i do that or if you want to manipulate a lot of channels it's shift alt and c shift alt and see now you can just keep this thing on and now you can colorize as many tracks as you want now you can have that select boom click there click there click there click and shift alt and see is how you do that and there you can sort out and colorize a lot of tracks also remember that in the mixer window as well you do have the option of changing colors if you go to the track name and there's a an arrow on the right that's going to appear alright let me get rid of all these tracks delete to get rid of them and these are some underrated tools that are in cubase but i'm not spoken much of one of my favorites is the ruler track i'm gonna add one ruler and there you have the ruler track it's basically on defaults it's going to show you the same as that bars and beats but if you click on it you can go to time code and for me that is bloody awesome because now right here on your your project area you can see the time and for me that is helpful for like whenever you're getting um a song from someone else and they've got a section they want you to add something maybe like an effect uh or maybe um you're doing a collab and they tell you that your verse is coming up at maybe like two minutes 51 and you know you can just easily find that section in case maybe they sent you like a two track and you're having trouble finding now you can just go to this section go to to track go find whatever go to scroll to whatever time or maybe you want to set a marker at a certain time your client or whoever you're working with is sent to something and then you can just scroll over to that time it's relatively that simple you know yeah so that's the ruler it's very very underrated that tool so my next section um dammit what's wrong with this mouse i'm gonna go click bars don't need you yeah i think now fixed it so now if you go here to toolbars in default mode cubase is going to have this the the arrow and the range selection tool both opened up as one tool so i'm going to open up this track wide so if you go to the top half of a track you are going to see the range selection tool if you go to the bottom half of a track you are going to see the object selection you see that is set by default by this equal sign if you have that selected that's um going to be selected both these icons and it's very useful i'm coming from pro tools myself pro tools has that same feature where the top half of an eye glitter track does something differently to what the bottom half of a track does so i think i like that it's pretty cool um so what i also find useful and a very underrated tool is the range selection tool that's this one the top half one but how i used to use it i think it was cubase nine where whatever you select on the range selected tool that was gonna going to be looped that's this section the loop area there is a way to use that it's alt p to loop whatever section that you have selected with the range select tool so if you want to have a section and you want to loop that it's alt and p but for me what i like what makes sense for me like how i used it in cubase 9 9 or 9.5 round about there is whenever i selected it immediately looped like let me know if there's a way to still do that because i really enjoyed that feature so i spent most of my time using the range select 2 when i was using cubase 9 and cubase 9.5 so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to edit and i'm going to go to key commands loop selection is alt p what i i'm going to do i'm going to remove that and what i'm going to assign i'm going to assign control and the forward slash because forward slash is the keyboard shortcut for for activating the loop area so that for me i'm gonna say open that's how you edit basically shortcuts in the cubase so now whenever i want to loop something i'm gonna say control and forward slash it only makes sense for me that the button to activate the loop area and the button to activate the loop area playback it's going to be the same thing so i'm just going to make it one small tiny change little variation but at least i know when it comes to looping and activating and playing the loop section it's gonna be basically just one thing so that's what i usually do with um the loops section that's what i like okay another underrated tool for cubase is the bounce to midi and bounce selection bouncing is very very useful excuse me the bouncing is very very useful so whenever you've got huh what's that okay whatever whenever you've got like something that you would like to bounce like you have an instrument that is taking up too much of your um computer power your processor or whatever so what you want to do you want to press alt until you see this thing and then you're gonna write bible you're gonna okay gonna control and click right click okay control and right click and that's gonna open up this section right here so you're gonna go down to render in place what i usually do i go to render with current settings and there whatever you did last time is going to be um rendered so if you have like an instrument and no like contact or instruments like that that take up a lot of processing power you press um render and then it's gonna bounce it from midi into audio but if you don't have if you don't like whatever settings you did last time you're gonna go to render in place and go to render settings so this one you're gonna go into more of a menu that's in depth and whatever you want to do whether these two if you have multiple clips show you if you have multiple clips i'm gonna duplicate that okay when i select them both let's say you've got multiple clips you wanna bounce that as separate events let's name that into bounce so in balance now i've bounced both of them into separate events if i have i want to bounce them as one thing i can say bounce so now they are one thing one event so again if i go to render in place go back to the settings okay me i like it separate events now the processing these this is also very important these options right here is how it's going to be bounced so for me the thing that makes sense for me is to use the complete signal part which means it's going to be balanced with all the effects that you have added on the effects chain all of those effects are going to be bounced with that um midi event so when you're bouncing it it's going to be bounced with all the effects added on into that channel so you can just delete the original channel and save your processing um moving on we've got a tail mode you want that off i don't want to tail um go back use custom name yeah yeah yeah the file path i do not touch that and source events um this decides if you want to keep the events unchanged that's what i was doing or if you want to mute source events render the original track becomes muted you can just unmute that later the other one i think that's the unmute there there we go you can just unmute that later so those are the bounce effects and yeah so far i've covered most of what i've wanted to cover what's left um recording when you are recording um there's something very very useful that you might not see very often on cubase and that's the delay compensation because over here it's going to show you how much processing and how much latency each plugin is causing or if there's a plug-in that is causing some latency it's going to show you how much latency it's causing it's going to show up over here so let's go down and show you a plug-in that i know causes some latency i'm gonna click on dsr so the tsa when you open that it's showing you that it's causing 34 milliseconds of latency so whenever you've got plugins you can just monitor for those plugins that are causing that latency yeah those plugins that are causing that latency and you can just take them out and yeah you can well not even just bypass because what i've just done is bypass you can just replace them because i use the the waves dsr most of the time and basically it introduces no latency so it will not affect your recording in any way so yeah those are my non-linear tips that are very helpful for me hopefully they are helpful for you as well my name is in domesto and um catch you on the next video if you like this just tell me what it is that you enjoyed and if you'd like to see more videos like this um leave a like and subscribe and i'll try and get more out to you guys later peace out

Channel: Ndumixo

Views: 228

Keywords: cubase, steinberg, tutorial, free, tips, tricks, music, mixing

Id: WAufFl1ZbH4

Length: 41min 45sec (2505 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021