Cubase Tips - Workflow Enhancing Tips & Tricks! 😉

everyone and welcome to another cute bass tips tutorial video now yesterday I was actually supposed to upload this video before doing the thank-you video but I completely forgot to even do this video so I thought I'd do it quickly this morning while I've got time so today we're going to be looking at some really handy features inside of Cubase for improving your workflow and some shortcuts for things which you guys are going to find really handy to use so let me just have a sip on this coffee write this out first thing I want to talk to you guys about is the main window here you've actually got a really handy feature for doing certain things so here you can see I've got this template loaded up and it all looks a bit crazy at the moment but let's say I wanted to create a workspace for I has no mixing this particular track obviously some of you go okay just bring up the mixer and start mixing and do whatever but let's say I don't know I wanted to use I wanted to this turned off I wanted that turned off and I just wanted something here loaded up with the mixer just to quickly do something but let's say I wanted it so my plugins was showing or should I have it now I'll have it like this I say I wanted this kind of window for whatever reason for working on something and I also wanted to show the video player so let's put the video player on let's say I was doing like a quick mix to a video that was playing here and I I just want that as a reference let's say here and what else can I add that I would like for this workspace looking via your performance oh yeah let's have the audio performance up as well and let's say that's disappeared let's say I wanted that as a a working window space for quickly doing something to a video let's say up here you've got this tab called workspaces and basically what this to do is create snapshots of your main editing window set up and it allows you to recall them at any points using the numpad so if I would wanted to create this as a workspace what I do is add workspace here and what it will do is assign it to an alt numpad number now you can see here already I've already got some set up for my particular workflow but we're gonna create this new one here we're gonna add the workspace and just gonna call the video okay now down here you've got these two options you've got global workspace and you've got project workspace global workspace means this will apply to every every session and you'll be able to recall it by using the same you know alternate and non alternate and whatever this will be assigned to your old six project window means it's only project specific so if you create a different project you won't have this in your workspaces to use it'll just be for that one project in particular so I'm going to keep this as a global workspace and click OK so what we'll see now here is it's assigned to all number six now if I press Alton alternate and one it will change to one of my other workspaces excuse me what you guys can't actually see is on the left on my other monitor I've actually got my mixer set up so it pops up and then if I press alternate two we've got a slightly different workspace again which is a little bit bodged because I need to rework it for this new template and then alternate and free you got one mixer here then on my other screen I've got a completely different mixer for those of you that don't know you've actually got more than one mixer you can load up at any given time in Cubase you've got three different mixers oh and why I like to do is have one for all of the normal main instruments and then I like to use another mixer for controlling groups as you can see here got my groups on there you know it's just a quick reference now if we finally go Alton six it'll bring back up that window we just created so it's a very nice way to sort of switch between different work styles if you're doing specific tasks you're editing or if you mix you know if you record in a score and you can set all these different windows off and use the workspaces feature ooh don't mean to cool it up just to switch between them you can also organize them as well if you want to delete any you can if you want to rearrange them or if you want to you know assign them to a completely different number it doesn't have to be alternate and sex you can assign it to a button on your mouse or whatever which then brings us two key commands so key commands are really you know there's lots of different shortcuts inside a key base for doing various things in opening up various tools and options no income is quite handy but you can also change how they are maps you can actually assign them to whatever keys you wish and so for example I've got one assigned to my mouse button so when I click it it actually brings up the VST instrument if I click it again it'll close it so it saves me having to sort of open you know ghost knee inspector and click on the button here to edit the instrument and to set this up is really straightforward really this applies to any key command or any shortcut you want to to set up you just go to file go to key commands and then you'll have a list of folders with all the different functions on if there's a specific function you're trying to look for just type it in the bomb topic so edit instrument VST instruments if I click that and it will find it straight away and it'll already tell you what the shortcut is for that particular option but you can also assign your own and you can see here I've assigned the minus key as the control for doing this with my mouse now the reason being is that some mouse companies for example I'm using a razor Mamba mouse and they'll have their own individual standalone software so if I load up Razer synapse and you've got different modes inside of these things and here you can see I've got it set to desktop because this allows me to map these keys to a specific key on the keyboard so for example mine when I'm in desktop mode I've my mouse key for as the - button which then corresponds to you know in here in Cubase so when I set up the key command and I want it to be for that mouse button I've already got it set to the - key if I make sense so moving on what I want to show you guys now is the folders and visibility section inside of Cubase our folders are a very very very very very very very very handy useful life saving way to navigate through particular sections in your template and also you know makes life a lot easier when you're trying to find specific things so here in my session let me just expand this a little bit too much so you guys can see what I'm doing smooth that over so here I've got the folders set up now if I were to minimize these there's two ways you can open and close a folder you can do it from the visibility plane or you can just click on the icon here and it will do I'm just going to do it for the visibility pain for the time being just to give you guys an idea of my folder scheme so here I've got these folders which I've colored in black and I call these my master folders so this for particular template I've got the strings folder the Brass folder the woodwinds folder and the percussion folder and then inside of those folders what I like to do is create the vendor's which I will be using for particular patches so here our cinematic studio series so if I want to if for the strings out if I want to use cs2 then I've got it in a folder with my patches loaded up here so I can just view them or close them and you know if I'm not using them then I can just keep the folder closed or I can use the inverse the invisible I could use the visibility pane here to actually just hide them altogether so it's a nice way to sort of keep things nice and separated some people will just have a strings folder and I'll have every single patch loaded up and named in a certain way and what you'll also notice as well with the naming games here I've actually put these tags in and the reason for that is when you're using the search function it just makes it a lot easier to find a particular vendor so if I type in that you'll see that this is all my inspire and patches from all kestrel tools and it's just a way to sort of organize things a little bit better so without getting too distracted with the folders there's not really much to it you literally you can assign a bunch of things to a folder by holding shift and then click in the top and bottom to select all the things in between then you can right click and send something to a folder obviously I've already done that on here so it's just a way to make things easier for navigating around and really tidy in on each session and making it a bit more organized you can see as well I've used the color code in here for this the inspector you can also navigate through individual patches in the inspector I wish this was slightly resizable but it's currently not but what this allows you to do so if I have the strings selective the master folder here you'll see in the inspector I got three different folders showing up which of the subfolders and if I open up one of these it will show you each patch and now the handy thing is here is I can actually click on this and it will bring off all of the normal options here for the tools but I can you know it just means I can move through patches which is a little bit easier let's see if I got all these opened up I'm just gonna make this ridiculous for a minute okay so let's say we had it all like that and normally you'd want to click things like this okay tis to open up the options and start working with one but you can just do it like this using the inspector and it's just a quick slightly quicker way in all honesty just to get to something if it's a little bit fiddly to click on over it sort of like that extra way you can get the things everything with visibility as you can individual patches as well or individual things it's entirely up to you I think we've covered that moving on swiftly what I want to look at now guys is the quick controls function now quick controls is so handy it's something that many people don't really use or maybe not know about and but what it allows you to do is control pretty much anything inside of your session depending on what it is you want to do so for example here are my master outputs I've got my quick control settled by the way this is not showing you need to go to the icon here the setup icon and just make sure it's ticked on here and so for my master output I've actually got a couple of quick controls set up here to control certain things and you'll notice I've got the SSL thrash and the Pro L thrash now basically what these are controlling here is if I load up my inserts I've got the waves SSL buss compressor on here and what the quick control allows me to actually do so I don't have to keep loading what the plug-in let's say I want it to adjust the threshold of the compressor I can use the quick control to adjust this now this is a really handy control having quick controls and it's really easy to set up as well I've also got one set up here for the fabfilter limiter so I can control the threshold of my limiter to apply a various amount of limiting now as I said this is really easy to set up and it's really handy so if I click the learn function here all I would need to do is whatever plugin all products you've got open you just literally take one of the controls and just move to dial on it and you can see it's now mapped it to that unfortunately for me I've just done that wrong because this one mapped it to this one here but never mind you don't have to use the quick learn feature for this you can also click on an empty box and this will bring up all the control for the channel so this will include you know the the mixers EQ the pre section the channel strip and and then it will go on to your insert is why you can see here so the import filters if you want to use the built-in EQ for the channel the panning and then you've also got your insert section here and you can see here I've got the individual plugins which show up and then if I go to here I can then choose one of the controls I want the quick control to effect so I can set this one to attack and you can see here this is now controlling the attack well this also works for libraries it doesn't work for all sample libraries for example cinematic strings doesn't allow me to control any functions using quick controls but some libraries like heavy on city stuff for example when you when you load the product up and the patch up inside your mixer is already assigned quick controls because heavy asset you have already done that for you but you can you can assign your own if you wish so for example if I want it to control the level of the mix for the mid microphone here or I would literally do is click the learn button do this and you can see here it's now being assigned to this top function here it's it's very handy and you can also automate these things as well you can clear all of them by pressing the remove all assignment and you can also get the default settings from the actual product now that's a very handy one because if you if they've already got it mapped out for you you can automatically just click on this and it'll the signer unfortunately for CS strings yeah these don't really control anything because they've not been mapped out which is a shame I hope they made you can do that but there you go so that's quick controls the next thing I want to show you is stuff inside of the actual mixer as well so if I bring up the mixer and it's got a very you've got three tabs here on the left if they're not sharing you can these buttons to hide and show various things and you've got your visibility it works exactly the same as it does when I was showing you guys the folder options you can hide specific things and you can already see that it's showing up the folder hierarchy you've also got this thing called zones okay and what zones does is allow you to split the mixer so you can have it offset to the left and stuff offset to the right so as you can see here I've got my vc a piece notice how it's disappeared now if I were to scroll all the way over here you can see it's on the left side of the mixer but if you want to have like all your groups and all your effects on the right-hand side that a mixer you can just use this feature to put them over to the right as you can see there and it just splits it up and I like to have two separate mixtures so one with all my group faders and stuff showing in any of one with the actual normal channels on it as well you've also got the histogram while the history section which is really useful so let's say I done this every little move I make gets recorded here okay and so let's say I did something I didn't like the sound of it and I want someone to do it I just look at the history here and then just click back on wherever it was last that things sounded normal and it'll reset things which is pretty pretty handy while we're in the mixer here another thing that I want to show you guys is to do with inserts and visibility so first let's get the visibility stuff all the way up here you got a couple of options you've got configurations if you to the left of that you've got this little box here if you click on that you've got all these different checkboxes and what you can actually do is customize what you see in your mixer so if I want to see my audio channels like I see them I've gotten then none of them in this session so instrument channels I want to see them MIDI channels these can be a little bit annoying because you can't you know you don't really want to see them so I normally turn those off sample channels while we're not using any sample of channels grupe channels we want to see those so they can be brought up effects channels of VCA faders and then the outputs as well if you want to see your output section the other thing you can actually control is the tabs and salves what tabs you want to see so if you click on racks you can show all ranks if you wish or you can turn them all off and then you can show specific things so we want our inserts pre and post you can have the routing on there as well equalizer if you want to see that all the channel strip you sends your key sends you diary round - and all the rest of it and you can just customize the visibility of these now another thing you can do with the racks here is this star icon and you've got exclude you've got expanded exclusive expanded rack you've got fixed number of slots and Link racks - configuration basically when you've got fix number of slots on when you click this it'll load up a predefined it will load up all the slots that you've got sharing here in the mixer if you turn this off it will just do like a few okay another thing to do with your slots here's a few rights if I expand these also fixed number of slots you'll see this green line okay and what this green line does is define where the pre and post fader section is for your inserts now on older versions of Cubase it'll be at the very bottom you'll just have to ok for your post fader and then if you right-click on any of the empty slots you can actually set as the line of where the post and pre is so if you want needs to be post fader all these plugins you can set in this post fader along here if you want pre you can have all the pre section here as well saw rides on just sneaking into my my office here all add to the comedy trying to be really quiet you can be really loud if you want you need to take that and add into the comedy I've stole I stole my over half the lights for for that video the other day and I forgot to take you back and now she's reclaiming it so yeah you got you pre and your post plug-in section here and you can put the divide in line and if you wondering what the difference is between pre and post fader obviously it's pretty self-explanatory if it's it all determines if you want the plug into the post fader or if you want the plug-in to be pre fader and this is actually handy if you want to do something like record record audio through plugins and all that but I won't go into that for this video because we're looking at just handy features now going back to plugins let's move that down there if you want to delete a plug-in you can it's easy to do you can either do it with the down arrow icon and go to no effects or when the plugins got the red the really thin red box around it you can click delete and it will delete the plug-in let's put that plug-in back in another way you can do it is if you want to delete all the plugins in a rack you just click on the inserts here this is one thing it's slightly annoying with Cubase is that you know it will do stuff like that or it closes up well if you've got the main box selected here you can actually click delete and it will delete everything in your rack as well okay that'sa let's undo that you'll see they've all pop back on you've also got this other button here called select preset and there is actually a lot of presets inside a Cubase with you know using the inbuilt mixer features to tailor a sound but you can also use this to save your own signal change as well so for example if I wanted to save this particular set of plugins occiput and they you can see I've got a couple here tracks and master all the rest of it you can actually save this chain of plugins and then at any point you want to load it up and recall that you can actually just load it up again but you know it's as simple as up what else what else is on my list here so we've done control control room okay so if you press f4 on your mixer there's actually two ways you can set your outputs in Cubase you've got the normal way which is using the output section but you'll see here I haven't actually got this connected because I'm using control room and what control room allows you to do allows you to set up loads of different things so you can if you've got like a console you can set up you talked about you can set up your queues you have phone mixers and and you can also have the ability if you've got more than one set of speakers plugged in and you want to switch between speakers to check your mixers you can also do that using the control room it's pretty straightforward when she set it up obviously I've just using it for my main stereo outputs and the reason for this is it so don't want to close that over here if you click on the right and you've got your different tabs vsti media meter and CR which is control room and it's got all these different functions so you can check if you've been working in 5.1 you can check between speakers and then you've got different setups you can create and but the cool thing is here you see this monitor one and monitor two if I had two sets of speakers set up I got this other you know section how can rename this as if I wish by double-clicking so so I could say that's a Yamaha speakers and let's say I'd know I had some krk monitors or something like that as well you can see here it's rename them and by switching between the speakers is as simple as just clicking on you know that you can just switching between them so if you if you check in your mixes out on different media you can do that it's a really really cool feature also though the control room allows you to do other things as well allows you to put your whole mix in mono or stereo and then you can control things like you click you've got a dim and you've also got a a quick dimming feature here where allows you to drop the signal by 20 DB so if you want to listen to something quiet and you can quickly listen to something quite without having to reach for the volume on your audio interface there's also a lot of other Handy features here as well inside of this I mean this shows up in your mixer is why I always have it up in my mixer you've got your meter section here and it gives you the rms and the peaks and you can change the difference scales as well if you wish so moving on what else can I show you how to do deleting Porkins oh yes resetting the mixer let's say you've got a mix on the go and you want to just reset everything to its default values this is really simple up here and you've got this icon this down icon if you click on this and go to reset mix console and channels if you click on that and click OK it will remove all your plugins reset the pan to Center on all of your channels and also reset the fader levels to 0 DB as well I think it also resets the routing as well as everything now another thing I'm going to show you actually what I'm thinking about it is routing itself is actually really really easy to do if you want to do a lot of things if I bring up this mixer let's say I wanted to send all of these strings to an effects boss normally what some people do is they just you know they set up their create their effects boss and then they find it in the list and send it and do it for each individual one there's actually a lot quicker way to do this and is that if you select you know by holding shift if you click on one of the channels and click on the last channel you want to select it'll select all of them in between you can go to right-click and you can do things like send all of these tracks to an effects boss or you can assign them all to a group or you can add a VC a fader to them so let's send them all to an effects tracker and you can see here add effects channel to selected channels that means it'll send all these channels to an effects channel if I were to click on that edges create FEX channel and these wouldn't be assigned to it and so I'm gonna click on that one and then you can put whatever plug-in you like on the let's put camel crusher on it for the hell of it okay and then you'll you'll see when I scroll back over to the strings here they've all been assigned to camel crusher and they've already set up now if I sites all these again and the whole shift I think it's shifting all was it just shift it's just one of them I know it's one of them yeah if you if you hold alt and shift when you've got all selected you can actually control all of the levels at the same time for each for every single one if you need to if you still got it all holding alt and shift as well you can also switch all of them to you know post or pre fader and you can also turn off things like all the inserts as well in any given go or you can activate them all for solo or mutable Alton shift just allows you to do and the same function to every selected channel so another use for this would be to add a plug-in to all these so let's say Heights add camel crusher to all that ease there you go is added camel crusher to all of these and if it's still hold on your shift and change the values on any of the plugins it will do it to all the plugins as well so that's that that's a very handy shortcut actually that I want to show you and you can also use it to remove all these plugins as well from those selected channels so it's just discard all of those okay there we go and what else can I show you I've showed you the mix of presets where you can load up mix presets it's the same story inside of when you click the button to bring up the channel settings here as well you can also load EQ presets or channel strip presets as well if you want to use cue bases built-in features another thing actually which is handy as if you want to use any of the inbuilt stuff in Cubase like to saturate as the limiters or anything Lana or the EQ and you want it before your insert chain then there's a button here which will actually move move the channel strip and equalizer of Cubase before the plugins okay so normally it's plugins then channel strip in the signal chain okay so if you and if you if you press this button you'll see here it reverses it it doesn't show it in the mixer here but it shows it here so the channel strip will actually be at first and then your plugins will be next in the processing chain so if you it's just something handy to note if you want to you know mix using Cubase and and color using some other plugins or if you want to do it the other way around you know it's entirely up to you I've showed you the batch sending stuff with all the you know selecting all these and groups VCA failures that's enough one VCO faders a good thing for me to show you with VCO faders they basically do they basically to what shift and alt do VCO faders in a nutshell but it gives you a little bit more control so let's say I have I know I've got a mix going on here and I like the sound of it okay but the overall volume is a little bit loud and I want to you know I want to move all of these down or up I could do it like this using shift and alt but it's not very you know I just want to keep everything where it's are you can use a VC a fader to do this as well as you can see here and it also keeps all the faders relative to each other as well in the scale of when you're moving up and moving down well the cool thing about VCO faders is that you can actually automate them so you can use this to automate all of those tracks and the beauty is is that when when you actually you know automating or doing anything like this you can move any of these inside of the VCA group and you know it will retain where it's positioned relative to the other stuff as well and whereas if you were to just if you weren't so use a VC and you just used automation to control all these groups if you wanted to control you know lower the level of something like say I don't know the percussion I want to lower the levels just a little bit the automation would stop you from doing that it's snap it back to its original position while it's moving up and down so using a VC a fader is a great way to control multiple channels but also allows you to retain you know the ability to move individual faders up and down if you need to tweak any levels in your mix and that's not the only thing VCO faders can do if I go to the link sentence here you can actually set it so any pan if I pan either know one channel little pan the rest of the channels exactly the same if I start EQ in on one of the channels at DQ and we'll assume it's just anything the automation you can't you can get them to link together quite nicely and do different things if I set this on here you can see here now so it's essentially just shifting all but it's a little bit deeper than that now how I use VCO faders if you're wondering as I use them to control I've got all my individual string sections and percussion section is going to a group channel and you can see here see our strings that's the group for cinematic strings that's the group for inspire strings and then I use the VCF edit to control the over all of these faders so when it gets a little bit when you think about headroom on your master channel you kind of want to leave yourself a lot of headroom you don't want to be driving a really hot signal into your plugin so I use this as my master fader essentially for controlling the overall level of the whole mix and then that runs into the master output chain here and that means I'm not going to hit my plugins too hard and it allows me to tweak things as well so that's why I use a VCO fader and there's lots of different situations for VCO faders to me to be honest so yeah I think I've covered pretty much everything I wanted to cover with you guys just to show you some handy ways to go about doing things there are a lot of features in Cubase there are a lot of features I'm gonna be doing some more videos soon after the competition I want to get the competition out the way first I want to show you some of the MIDI modifiers and MIDI inserts and some of the cool things you can do with those so as always guys thank you for watching the video be sure to hit the subscribe button if you haven't subscribed to the channel already if you're new to the channel welcome to the channel I hope you've been enjoying the videos been uploaded and if you've got any comments or questions or anything on art obviously put them in the comments box below if you want to keep up to date with all the videos on the channel be sure to hit the bell icon so you get notified when a new upload has landed and as always guys thank you for watching and I will see you in a week for the competition

Channel: PoundSound

Views: 21,700

Keywords: music, cubase tips and tricks, Cubase Workflow Enhancing Tips & Tricks, Cubase Tips - Workflow Enhancing Tips & Tricks! 😉, cubase, steinberg, daw, tutorial, music production, cubase 9, tips, how to, mixing, tips and tricks, audio production, cubase pro, cubase tutorial, cubase 9.5, steinberg cubase, digitral audio workstation, audio, production, cubase how to, cubase tips for beginners, cubase tips, best workflow, faders, music production for beginners

Id: d1ktTK6ADhQ

Length: 34min 11sec (2051 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2018