Cubase Tutorials: MixConsole – The Cubase Mixer

[Music] hi i'm bruce asia and in this video we're looking at the mixer in cubase now a mixer really is all about glorified plumbing is the way in which the audio is routed around the audio workstation so for example we might take audio from an audio track or from the output of an instrument or it might be combined through groups or something like that but it's all about how this is actually manipulated and actually rooted around and actually i suppose ends up coming through your main output or is routed elsewhere to another output an audio card so we're in the project here and i've got a number of tracks set up these are all instrument tracks now they have midi information and that midi triggers certain these events actually trigger the playback of the instrument and the output of the instrument is in audio i've also set up an audio track here as well there's no audio in it at the moment but it's set up as a track now the mixer in cubase isn't really one mix there's a whole series of different mixers in fact they're just different ways of looking at this so-called routing this plumbing and we can access them in different ways so for example if i want to look at the output of a particular audio output of a particular track you can actually see it via the inspector so if we go into the audio track here you can see here we've got a fader and i can actually look at the levels i can change the level of the sound from here and this really is just a single channel version a very small part of a single channel that comes up in the main mixer i can also access the mixer in the so called lower zones and click on this icon here it's all set up in this case for a key command for f4 if i click on the lower zone i've got the track selected and you can see here i've got mix console now the editor and sample control are dedicated for other functions which are related normally to the editing events or might be specifically to do the manipulation of midi but in this case the mix console is always brought up and actually i can use commands to zoom in and zoom out of the mix console and actually see more or less information in fact when you shrink it down and i'm using key commands to do this in this case you can see how it actually changes and scales the interface i can actually change the window as well and it changes the size of some of these boxes i can also look at more information by clicking on this and it actually shows a toolbar along the top and i can see different aspects of the mixer this is good for accessing things quickly but it doesn't really give a full sense of how the mixer looks in all its glory when you actually use it as one window on one page so i'm going to close that down and i'm actually going to then look into this studio menu here and choose mix console you'll notice this mix console itself mix console 2 and mix console 3. now all these really are are different ways of looking at the mixer and we can explore those in a little bit but if i just bring up the main mix console i've set it for key command one as well and you can see i have the various tracks now audio inputs are considered to be a track in this case so that would be an audio input from a sound card and also the audio output to the sound card is considered to be a track as well so they will all appear in the mixer and you notice how the fader controls fader colors here are different so inputs and outputs in this case are red and we've got these this slightly sort of the beigey yellowy color that's going to be for the instruments you can customize all of these so it may look slightly different if you've tweaked any of the colors in cubase then you'll see here we also this audio track which is different color again there are other types of audio track or tracks that actually hold audio route audio effects groups and things like that and they have different fader cap colors as well so each of these is a track and we can select them clicking here you'll notice the color here is a slightly muted version of the of the uh the track as it is in the main window and again you can select whether you want that on or off and how how rich the color is let's flick back into the mix console here then we also get these various areas of each track routing insert eq channel strip and send in fact there are more because you can actually customize what you actually show in this we can have all racks and it will bring in all these different things now the point is you're not going to be using quite a few of these um all the time if you never work with um another artist when you're actually recording audio then you're probably you're pretty less likely to use things like cue the cue send section the direct routing is something you may not necessarily use it allows you to route the output of a particular channel to multiple outputs multiple locations you've got quick channel controls you've got a panel which allow you to access certain parameters if they've been set up that way quite quickly but actually you'll notice they don't actually appear as as default as we saw before so i'm actually going to take those out and actually look at some of the more obvious and the more straightforward aspects of the routing within the mixer routing you can see here it's taking its input as a midi input from a keyboard and it's routing to a stereo out so instrument channels have a midi input and they have an audio output audio channels have an audio input and an audio output then we have this pre-section which is actually part of a kind of eq level settings section allows you to do a few tweaks before it then goes into inserts inserts are a form of processing and allow you to manipulate the sound in certain ways they have all their audio processes eq for doing various kinds of filtering and tonal shaping and then we have the last one here is a is a send really all that does it sends the audio somewhere else and most of the time that's going to be used for adding ambient effects like reverb and delay and things like that that's something that can be explored separately it's worth pointing out what the channel strip does now this is an interesting area because it actually combines a whole load of different things um it you don't have to load in any other separate plugins you don't have to load in separate processing but they're all in situ so every single channel has a noise gate a compressor an eq various tools things like de-essing and envelope shaping saturation threading over dry or different kinds of distortion effects and also a limiter and these can all be changed uh they have multiple functions in fact for each one so you can access them quite simply from this main channel strip if you want to go into detail with any aspect of the mixer you just select a channel and you can choose the little e edit button and it will bring up a separate window now this window will actually update depending on what you're clicking on and actually you can do the same thing so i can keep that window open i can move between tracks in the project page and it'll actually update what's going on notice how the name changes up here so if we go back to this audio track here you have a whole lot of information presented to you which actually is another way of looking at exactly what you've seen in this mixer here and actually you can put down to a separate window and move it to some other part of your window so you can always access it quite easily we have again these insert effects you have the channel strip you have this equalizer the channel strip again can be seen here in a little bit more detail you can actually control the parameters so for example if i enable the compressor here i can actually see the controls for it i can see the controls in this case for a de-esser or a saturator and actually have access to all of those in one small window then we have on the right-hand side the main output so that's going to be the final output level after all the things that have gone on here that's the output level that you actually see in the mixer and in fact that's the same as the main fader here so as i move this you'll notice the actual fader moving so that's the level of that audio track on the output i can do it here as well and you can see how it would move it if i go into this groove agent and i play back play that back you can see how i can also remove this i can look at it in the mixer and it will scale the level there so that is the final level the output of the groove agent after it's gone through all of these things and then it sends to the main stereo output [Music] at the moment in solo mode this allows me just to hear what that is doing [Music] that bass line can also be so load and soloing is a really useful way just to get a sense of what's going on with one particular channel and so you might want to finesse it and hear it in isolation and that's what the solo mode is for you also have controls for muting so solo muting go together and there are other controls which you actually use when you're going to be recording for monitoring audio and things like that and of course we have the edit control and we can open and close these areas of the mixer to look at look into them and have a little bit more detail in terms of what they're actually doing now you may or may not use all of these at the same time in fact you might find you want to keep things really simple and actually remove some aspects of the of the of the mixer here you can also customize the mixer in quite elaborate ways but i think it's worth pointing out that like the project page you also have these two zones so you have the left zone which i can open up here and also the right zone which can open up there in the left zone if i leave that open you can choose what you want to have visible you may want just for this particular mixer to only show certain channels and you can untick them or tick them you can also move them into certain other areas of zones of the mix so for example if i want my inputs and outputs to be more on the right hand side i can go to this stereo output here i can click on that and it will move it over here i always find it quite useful to keep the keep some of these aspects some of these areas simple in fact i use three different mix console windows and swap between them with key commands i use key commands one two and three in this case it's something i set up i find a nice way of working with them in that way and i can swap between them very very quickly and i might have one mixer dedicated to instruments one to audio my audio channels and another one to outputs and effects and things like that for the time being let's stick with this mixer i'm going to keep that stereo output over there and actually what i'm going to do is i'm going to make sure the stereo this input here i have its own zone on the left and notice how it leaves this little boundary here it means that when i actually if i want to scroll around across different the cross through the mixer we know i've got multiple channels the input will always remain on the left and the output will always remain on the right and it keeps things quite neat in that sense you can if you want also as i say before take take channels out of out of the view here also there's a quick way of doing that you can also decide on what channel types you want in each mixer window for example if you're not going to be using things like you don't necessarily want to see the midi channels themselves that can be quite confusing actually because changing the fader on a midi channel actually doesn't change the audio it actually sends a volume message to a midi device so i'll take that out of the equation i probably don't want to see the sampler channels and various other things here i may want to see if i'm not recording audio i don't need to see the input channel and rewire which is used for routing audio to other applications i might not be interested in that either so i can be very specific in terms of what i want to see and you actually find once you get used to working with cubase you will set up things in a particular kind of way and it's it's quite nice to have a familiar environment set up in a way that actually makes sense each time in this mixer window you'll also find that you have this toolbar along the top and usefully it mimics some of the controls in the main project window so you can use the transport controls you've also got locators and various kind of other functions and access to deactivating all mute states deactivating all solos automation lots of other kind of controls here as well that allow you to do some quite sophisticated things just from this main mixer window and so that's really useful it's quite a quite a powerful set of tools which means that when you're just in that mixer window you can still kind of navigate around the track let's dip back into the project window and just to remind you that obviously we come back here and we've got that lower zone here now you can obviously customize this as well to show only certain things so some of the controls are sort of mimicked but anything you do here won't be updated in mixed console one two and three so in fact you've got kind of four mixer windows really you've got the main mixer or the mix window in the lower zone which which relates you can always see when you're using this project window you have the three other mix console windows as well which can be customized separately and it's up to you to decide how you want to access those and how you actually set those up so in this video we looked at the mix console in cubase and we looked at various ways you can access those mix functions the lower zone the various mixers and how you can actually customize different aspects of the mixer and actually explore ways in which you can actually customize the routing or the types of processing you want in each channel you

Channel: MusicTech

Views: 1,889

Keywords: MusicTech, Music Production, MusicTech Magazine, cubase tips, cubase pro, mix console, cubase tutorial, mixing in cubase, learn cubase, cubase beginner, cubase lesson, cubase tutorials, cubase mixconsole, cubase mixing and mastering, cubase mixer, mixconsole cubase, cubase course, audio mixing, steinberg cubase, mix console cubase, cubase pro 11 tutorial, cubase tutorial recording, cubase tutorial for beginners, cubase pro 10, cubase pro 10 tutorial, cubase 10.5 tutorial

Id: a9z5Oyn5uDU

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021