Cubase Workshop: Advanced Mixing, Composition & Editing with Greg Ondo

[Music] my name is Greg Ando work as the senior technical specialist for Yamaha but I've worked with Sandberg for over 26 years so back when you know every studio had to look like this to kind of get functionality and now we could do so much in the computer you know one of the things that we see with Cubase and in talking to a lot of people at the mix con it was interesting I see so many people using multiple programs to achieve kind of their production workflow to me that seems silly it's like almost like okay if you have to use three or four programs maybe you're not using the right program and perhaps Cubase I think it kind of fit this bill a lot better so we'll show you some kind of hip hop production techniques from working with bands stuff some mixing some film scoring with some people doing film scores and if you could do all those different things you don't have to say no to any work and that that's a beautiful thing so Cubase has been around for we're gonna be next year celebrating 30 years of Cubase but Steinberg as a company has been around since 1984 and Steinberg has a long history of innovation so we were the first company that actually allowed you to see all of your parts where they come in before or after another parts in kind of a linear time range we're the first company allowed you to edit your music while it played we take that for granted now we're the first company that integrated MIDI sequencing digital audio recording and notation into a single program we're also invented in 1996 technology called VST virtual studio technology we've all heard VST a VST plugins' most widely used plug-in format in the world we invented that and opened it up to every company and we don't realize any revenue from that because it was the right thing to have standards so we have VST as the most widely used plug-in a couple years after that we said hey would it be cool if instead of buying a new instrument like a new keyboard workstation for four thousand dollars every other year that we could have VST instruments and send MIDI to the so we invented that whole paradigm and so we've seen this whole paradigm shift and what used to actually see a Steinberg kind of defining the workflow and defining the paradigm before other companies and other companies often copying what we do but not nearly doing it as well so we see Cubase as a creative tool if you're gonna be doing hip-hop production if you're gonna be doing all sorts of work with you know I'm just a composer I work with bands I mix and I want to have kind of the best tools to have that now when we work with this one of the things that's kind of interesting the current version of Cubase we have is for Mac and PC set up equally well for either one but one of the new things you actually do is on the latest 9.5 you've actually doubled the precision of the audio engine so we have a 64-bit floating-point audio engine so that as you're working we hear this all time like I don't know what it is but when I play tracks in Cubase they just sound better we pay a lot of attention to detail so that we don't screw up your audio we're also the first company to say let's have plugin delay compensation because why insert a plug-in anywhere in your signal and have all of your tracks go out of time we thought that was silly right it seems seem silly but because it was hard but a lot of companies still don't do plug-in delay compensation correctly so things like that so now let's let's talk about a creative let's say how many of us have write songs raise your hand all right so everyone's a songwriter all right have we all gotten into ruts of chords and chord progressions where it's like okay I'm gonna do one four or five again hey I'm a genius or I'm gonna do a one six four or five Wow I'm gonna do a one two five you know so a lot of times we want to be able to come up with interesting ideas now what we want to do is kind of solve problems that people have before people realize they have a problem so if I want it to literally just kind of come here and say we're going to take my production here let's say I just wanted to come up with an idea so I'm gonna start off with perhaps like a quick drum loop so we have this right so how many we start with a drum loop so what I want to do is now we have this technology called a cord track so I'm going to say I just wanted to say let's start off with like an F chord and I could have it go to a track like a Rhodes you could just kind of try out different ideas so you could add these chord tracks and try them out just let me see you play and now what I want to do is say okay let's do like go to the four chord and then I want to end on this C chord maybe like a c7 chord now what's interesting let's say I don't know Accord to go between B flat and c7 I could actually double click and go to the chord assistant and have a few bass give me suggestions based on proximity or circle of fifths of the chords and what I can do now is just say okay it could actually just suggest different chords for me [Music] and let's say you give this to a guitar player Greg why would you give me a song in the key of F you can just say okay let's transpose it down to eat just like that so very very easy to work on this but where it gets interesting is let's say we have a sketch for a song what we're able to do now is to kind of take a sketch of a song and I could have the tracks follow the core track so let's say I'll just come here let's say to my editor I wanted to be like a G chord the next chord I want to be like an E minor chord to C let's say to a d7 and now all the MIDI tracks will just change based on the chords that I just enter in so I can take like a sketch of a song copy it and just simply at that point just typing chords and have it automatically be something different and interesting let's say I was doing something maybe for like a sequence like maybe like more of a soundtrack type of environment so what I can do now is I'm gonna take this [Music] so sideways start off with like a d7 a D chord so we'll do that and we had to timpani come in I can just say it's good to like you can be minor chord [Music] and then if I want to put like your turn around exact a let's do and this is actually just changing all the MIDI information and I can even do it for audio as well [Music] then sew all the midian spaces just automatically switched depending on the cords I just type in is that is that pretty pretty cool all right so creative tools so you could write your songs faster try out different ideas you know we have composers that have templates of like 3,200 tracks do you imagine going through every single track and say I want to eat minor chord let me change every g-sharp to 1600 I'm using two a G natural yeah you can do it if you get paid by the hour or if you actually want to get work done we could do using stuff like the chord track now we can do interesting things also because we could have multiple projects open simultaneously inside of Cubase so one of the aspects that you'll see in Cubase have we all been victims of I like to call it version itis where you you buy a software program and you're like oh that's cool and then all sudden it's like oh but now my this plug-in doesn't work with this version of the operating system you get this update you get the new version this program but the plugins don't work with this and it's there's a new operating system but don't upgrade to that one yet do this one instead you know and it's just like your guys that none of your stuff really works so what we want to do is to incorporate all of the different functionality into the program so you don't have to come by like 40 add-on tools to get the typical functionality that you want to have so one of the things that we could do is let's say if I I'm going to just take this chord track information let's say I look at this song here so I have a piano part and I can actually just look at my edit screen directly here so as we're kind of looking and let's say I'm listening to the piano and I could look at it in like a dedicated drum editor so say while we play here or I could say let's just look at it in a score editor and I can see my score directly in two parts now it's really cool as I say you know how you see that chord track before I could take this piano part [Music] and what I want to do is to go to my core track and say create chord symbols and now it's automatically created the chord track based on the piano wasn't that hard so let's say we do this now and we talked about the level of integration because not every singer sings in tune have we experienced this there you go you put them into like a microscopic environment you tell him to be relaxed and casual and we're gonna hear every single detail while you bare your soul to us so you know singers can get wigged out in the studio so we could actually just come right over here and we have what we call very audio so I'm just gonna come right over here and then I click on pitch and warp and I just oh it's already done the analysis for the vocal and I could do all my tuning directly inside of the program itself now since we could actually colorize this based on the core track so I could say let's just take this particular chord track here and use that color so if it's a green note the green note is actually in the core two blue notes within the scale and a red node is out of scale so if I wanted to come here let's say if I move this note to like a red note let's see we'll see how this sounds okay sounds like the Grammys live fortunate alright so now I can move into a green note I don't have to understand the music fairy I know that the green note is gonna work and let's say I just want that note longer I just wouldn't be cool if we could just drag it like that oh yeah you thought so too and sometimes a lot of times you see like singers where they kind of lose their diaphragm support at the end of notes you could actually just double click and create an anchor point and just gonna bring that up like that if you wanted to you know let's say it was a little too Broadway in the vibrato you could just go to the straight and pitch icon right over there and just straighten out the pitch now we're gets really interesting is we have that chord track information so once we have that chord track let's say [Music] all right so let's say we see where she says tell me why what I want to do is actually I'm going to select out with my range selection tool and we know what the chords are from the chord track so we thought it would be cool if you could just go to your audio menu and say let's just generate harmony voices so I'll just come right over here and we'll hit OK it's now we've created for harmony parts that are gonna be musically correct so it's not just giving you like a third and a fifth and an octave what it's actually doing is allowing you to just say okay we do this and now let's go ahead listen to [Music] wasn't that hard some people say it's cheating you know this is where it gets a little cheating all right I'll give you this so if I come here and then we go into our editor I could now you know as soon as I just select those different events here I could say okay let's edit this and then we'll go back to our very audio and now I could actually see all five vocal parts together so I could say oh let's just move this voice to there and see what it sounds like or I want to move this voice or this voice so and again even if you don't understand the music theory behind it and it's match to vibrato its carried over all the settings the effects ends and inserts from the channel so they sound the same so very easy tool to make your tracks sound better now let's say if you're doing like hip hop stuff the beat is the essential aspect so if I wanted to come here we're gonna give you again all that tuning built in doesn't cost anything extra no version itis but we also give you a compelling drum tool called groove agent SE so Steinberg did the first software drum machine called it LM for like 1997 or so so if I wanted to come here let's say we'll look at this first track you know here we're gonna have like an MPC style paradigm drum machine so we could have pads that just will trigger different patterns and you could drag these patterns directly onto your project window just like so you could also come over here and have pads that will set up and do different samples now we could drag and drop any audio from our project window directly on to a pad as well but let's say if I wanted to change the sounds of a beat all I could do is just I want to take my kick that I'm using here you know if I want that to be like really loud [Music] all right now let's say if I wanted to come over here and just change the pitch of one element here so I'm gonna solo just this little percussion and I can actually go to my pitch and I'm going to say let's just randomize the pitch so that makes it way more interesting than just one particular sound now I can also kind of take the patterns here and let's say I want to add more swing to it do that but let's say let's come over here to the instrument I want to change the sound and I want to put a filter let's say so I could take just an individual sound or I can take all the sounds here and be able to now just kind of take my filters and I can do filters on each individual pads or an all of the paths and if I wanted to automate that by like a CC message from my controller just learn CC move a knob it's assigned so multiple filter types let's say if I also wanted to come over here and let's say I have a drum loop so let's say I have kind of a generic sounding drum loop that sounds like this so when I take this what I want to do is I'm gonna open up a blank instance and if I wanted to add this to my drum pad would it be hard if all you had to do was let's say I'll just take this and let's just drag it onto one of the instrument pads so I just come here and drag it so now I can just take that particular loop and drag it on to the pad now what's interesting we have that one loop on two pads but if I come here to my slice menu I could just say create slices and now taking each slice and mapped it across each of the pads for you automatically don't you wish your sampling drum machine would do that and let's say it's now Oh automatically created a pattern for us so what I want to do now is to take this pattern I'm gonna drag it to my timeline here and let's just go ahead and I'm just gonna copy that pattern a couple times so just come here and let's say this pattern I'm going to scientifically change my edits for the pattern so zoom in here and I'm just gonna hit my arrow keys to kind of navigate between my different tracks here so I would say I would take this [Music] alright and let's say I just want to take this let's go to our functions and let's go ahead and reverse this oh come over here so I just right click and I have all my tools handy so it's just reversed that MIDI so I'm taking that one drum loop split it into individual slices and then flip it around backwards so super easy to kind of take your existing drum loops and be able to work like that but let's say I wanted to have perhaps another type of drum so a lot of people want like an MPC style interface you have that built in drag and drop files drag and drop patterns but if I want it like a real drummer I could come over here and have like a virtual drummer where when I go to my agent here I could see all my different patterns so if I want to take like my real drum samples again I can select the kick and I could just say okay let's add more overheads to the kick or I want to add more room mics or adjust the tuning say for the snare but what's really cool about this is the patterns is I could come here and I have different intros [Music] as well as my patterns now each of these patterns I could have different levels of dynamics so drummers can play soft ooh but I can have 16 levels of complexity so if I want that pattern but I want a variation to be more complex but I want that to be in halftime I [Music] could also say every bar do one or two levels of complexity so it's not playing the same pattern back over and over and over and over again where it sounds like an annoying drum loop so it's gonna do its own variation and how about every four measures do a random drum fill so if I just want to write a song instead of writing to a click track all I have to do is literally just put on groove agent I could be inspired to initially write a song just that easily so very amazing drum tools are included and you could go out buy other plugins that just do MPC style or other plugins that just do like virtual drummer's or just use what comes in Cubase and do both now if we wanted to do like some interesting work you know if we're doing more kind of like DJ style work it was kind of an interesting plugin I'll show you here called loop mash and I had two pleasure showing this a couple years ago in town here to Grandmaster Flash and it was kind of a bold thing to show them I didn't know if he would like hate me or not but it was an interesting reaction so I'll tell you so we come here I'm going to just say okay let's say we have and these are all included cents and instruments now my master bus I have a plugin called bleep massfx so what this will allow me to do is we can actually play this is real time buy a mini and I could just say okay so come over here to do [Music] wherever I want to do [Music] [Music] so you could automate this or just play the real-time I spend a lot of money with third-party tools but this is all included with Cubase and these are the things that kind of make the workflow so much faster and easier make sense all right now let's say if I want to do a quick remix here so I wanted to just take this and let me see if I have this project on my system here let's say we have this track and I put out my click track and my click track isn't lining up so if I were to put loops on top of that what happens is the loops line up to the click track but a click tracks not lining up to the original audio track so what I want to do now is to come here and we thought it'd be cool if you could just go to your project menu and say tempo detection and say analyze and now it's automatically created a tempo map of the track so now what I want to do is - let's say I have tons of loops that come with Cubase as well so I want to come over here and let's just find a drum loop that's a completely different tempo so say something like [Music] so I'm gonna drag and drop this loop to a file here and what I want to do is we're gonna just basically tell this loop to follow the timing of in our track so if I look at this and what I want to do is define where our downbeat starts so if I just listen to this particular song we're just our downbeat starts right there we have a little bit of a pickup note so I'm going to find just drag this drum loop over and if I want to make copies I just get to the right edge and drag it over wasn't that hard and then I tell this to be in musical mode just click right there now that drum loop is speeding up and slowing down so I see so many people go make the band play to the click track constantly but I rarely seen a band rehearse to a click track so you put a click track when you go into the studio and then all the musicians you know have to follow the click track not because it's the right thing musically it's because it's hard for the engineer to have a correlation between the bar and beat and what's going on to the grid of the music so now instead of making the musicians follow the click track make the click track follow the musicians very easy to do with automatic tempo detection inside of Cubase make sense now let's take a look at a couple of film scoring features all right so Cubase is used by a tremendous amount of film composers as well as you know going into television composers widely widely used and one of the things is you know like we've just released a new iconic sample library so that's a hundred and fifty gigabyte orchestral sample library recorded in the Berlin funk house how many people here have dealt with like string libraries big orchestral libraries and the nightmare is what handling articulations right total nightmare because if you have three different libraries you can do just anyone remember or where all their articulations are for switching between like pizza kado legato strings no one does so we would go in and we would see film composers have a spreadsheet open so that they could actually find their sounds and it would have like 40 tracks of Island 140 tracks of Island 2 for all their different articulations and then they would use like a key switch to kind of switch between them so let's come over here let's say just listen to a little Schubert here now one of your plugins that you get with this free is convolution reverb so this is a sampled reverb where they've gone through and sample maybe the great halls throughout the world so say you want to be on French stone Chapel so instead of simulating and trying to recreate in actual space they've sampled the space and putted those samples into the plug-in itself [Music] [Applause] so when come over here let's say I want to take my violin one here and then we'll just double click on it so the problem gets to be is figuring out all of your different articulations so we created a technology called expression map setup so here when I click on violin one I could see all the available articulations for that particular instrument and they show up directly in my key editor here at the bottom so we'll just kind of zoom in a little bit here so you can see so when I start off let's say you know like I may have it set to legato and we'll just solo just the violin one so let's say for those shorter notes thirty-second notes what I want to do is to actually come here and say let's make those spiccato so instead of having to figure out what key switch it is I can see this peccato right here and just say oh and then when it goes back to the long note make it pizza make it legato again and what this is going to do is switch the articulation that easily and let's say for these strings right here I just want to take those and let's make it something like really obviously okay let's make it Pitts and go back so you could annoy your strings players there that fast switching between Pitts to narco you know it's okay they got a job you know but so you can go through every single instrument and capture the different key switches or MIDI information and turn those into these expression maps but the expression maps have been created already for you for all the large libraries and if you have iconic ax you get actually switched your articulations and they dynamically update because it's the right thing to do so you can manage these different articulations then when we go into your score editor you could actually see when I go to my page mode we can now actually see exactly the articulations automatically written in so that when it prints out it says switch to pizza kado go to legato switch this you know for the musician so those would automatically carry over into the score editor as well so fantastic tools for doing film scoring now one of the things that gets to be also interesting when doing film scores gets to be like let's say if I wanted to come here and go into my click track so I'm going to add a signature track and in this piece we're in 6/8 time so say if I turn on my metronome [Music] so if I wanted to take my metronome what I could do now is I actually have different metronome patterns so let's say if I was just wanting to try out different metronomes I could again come here and have click pattern so I could say in this particular piece I want it to be like 2 plus 4 or if I wanted to clock pulses to be 3 & 3 or 4 & 2 you could actually now come over here and print out different click patterns for emphasis now what else is interesting is I could take my signature track and let's say between the left and right locators you know you could now just come over here and say automatically render the click track to an audio file in one mouse click and then your click track could be rendered out and you can send that to different headphone or cue mixes very very easily so problems that you run into it's like traditional scoring sessions very very easy to handle right here inside of Cubase alright so let's go ahead and take a look at let's say if we wanted to do a project and one of the problems that people I talked to you run into a lot is making drums sound good is this you know most of us don't have the luxury of working in a room like this where it's like you know they did you know you put any drum get into tracking room and it's like okay it's gonna sound great so it's it's kind of a big dilemma for people how to make drum sound good and there's obviously a ton of different sample libraries available so there's kind of two different approaches that you could take quite easily one would be I want to let's say you get a project to mix drums and all sudden it's like maybe the kick and snare aren't killing it for you so it's a maybe like a project like this and you can spend hours or sometimes like joel is talking about overmixing and spending too much time so I have a a instance of groove agent loaded up here so if I wanted to take my kick and replace it with some different sounds from groove agent a lot of times people use you know third party plugins for this and it processes it in real time so I want to come here let's say to the beginning of the project what I do is double click on my kick and will not solo it and then once I'm in the editor here I'm going to switch to go to hit points so we're gonna say let's set our threshold so we'll say edit hit points and we'll just adjust our threshold and then we have this little function it says create MIDI notes and I'm going to put it on to see one on the first selected track which is where I have my groove agent so just in a matter of seconds it's now triggering my groove agent and I'm gonna mute the kicks because the check is now applying directly from groove agents soloing to make this kick [Music] so if I wanted to blend those three kicks together [Music] and I can do the same with the snare so let's just come here adjust our threshold and as we look at this you can say let's create MIDI notes and I want them to put this on to d1 get okay so again I can mute the kick and snare from the audio and just wait you tell the drummer's like yeah you're right your drums do sound awesome so I'm gonna just take this snare here and make it a little louder Gosei just you're tuning down just a little bit and that's all you have to do to dramatically improve your sound quality drums just giving you more options so you have the feel and it carries over the dynamics as well so you have that natural dynamic of when it's soft when it's loud all carried over into the MIDI domain now another thing that you could do that's very cool you can do like the very audio and turn that into MIDI as well so if you want to take a vocalist or someone goes yeah do a horn part that goes dead at that tau you can do that and just turn it into MIDI and have it output to a horn sample if you like or not chords at this point technology there's some programs that try it I I haven't been so impressed with it I think it will get there eventually so but very very easy to work with but let's say I'm gonna just mute this we could also have some great plugins for just processing drums as well so let's say if I want to assign these to a group so say I'll take all my drum tracks I could select all my tracks we'll go to our mix console here then I'm gonna just say right-click and you say add a group channel to the selected channels we'll make it a stereo group we have a plug-in called an envelope shaper listen to what this does it's kind of a drum anti stock plug-in so I'm scary here to my envelope shaper and then let's say I want more attack on the drums I want to add more length so say out just bypass that one plugin [Music] so I see people spending like 12 hours trying to get their compressors to do that like so many drummers I want that John Bonham sound it's like yeah play like him that would help you know but just using an envelope shaper which is like a transient designer could just bring those things out so fast and don't use it just on drums you know use on vocals and bass I've seen people use on it to bus because they could just kind of make things bigger and fuller so just a great tool and even if you want those drums to be like super tight you know so say we're playing along here so I grab it sound really big bus I want it super tight [Music] so you just so you want tight this is a layer so super fast and easy to work with now when your things that you do in cubase it's super cool is having folder tracks so let's say you know if you want to just come right over here you can just place all your drums into a folder and collapse them from view just that easily so if you have 3200 tracks in your template you know you get app folders within folders within folders all your guitars all your keys all your drums all your vocals all in separate folders if you wanted to so very simple very fast and easy now let's take a look at another process so let's say we're doing a tracking session and all sudden you're doing this like amazing tracking session and you raise that it's like oh then the drummer wants to hear themselves louder when they're tracking and the guitarist once here more me more than guitar the bass player guess what they want to hear more than solve so in a typical studio where we don't have a nice console like this doing headphone mixes for people is tricky at best and have have we lied to musicians at recording we're recording multiple musicians and told them we're giving them their own headphone mix and we just made it louder alright so I'm guilty yep yep yeah so it gets to be a problem so one of the things that we have is a control room section and within the control room we'll take a look at some other uses for this but within the control room we could actually set up four different headphone mixes and what we do is use the available inputs and outputs of our audio interface and I could have a back microphone so I could communicate with people from the control room to wherever they are into their headphones I could have four external inputs so if someone brings in an iPod did you play this you know from their iPad or their phone or from a CD or to track you know half-inch analog machine but we could also have four different speakers and will will touch on speakers in just a minute but let's say we have a mix and we wanted to do a quick headphone mix for everyone so the bass player everyone wants a more me headphone mix right so that gets to be problematic so what we want to do is I'm going to go into will just go to my full mix console here and let's say I'll just hide a couple of channels so let me just come here we're gonna hide our input channel so let's say we have our drums guitar bass so I'm going to select all of my tracks in my mix console here so I'm gonna select the first one I'll just select this very first one and now let's go down to our last track and you see I only have 65 tracks in this project it's not uncommon you know I I've seen Cubase projects it goes on Michael Wagener studios you know and I think you had one project at 12 kicks on it you know so 300 tracks isn't out of the normal so I'm gonna select all my tracks and we're gonna give them a more me headphone mix by right-clicking in a control room and I'm gonna go to all queues and first I want to activate all of my cue sends I want to take the current mix levels and use those for all of my cue sends so and what I want to also take the current pan settings and assign those so now what I want to do is in my racks make sure that we have the cue sends visible and we can now see our cues laid out for us here so we guys slide back over here we can see that these mixer elements are automatically reflected into cue mix so when I come to if the bass player wanted more snare I would go to these go directly to the snare and send it more to the bass headphone mix so that top is our drums our base we have guitar and our vocal different headphone mixes so what I'm gonna do now is come over here and activate something called qlink and I'm gonna select all my drum tracks like so and what I want to do now that quicklink is active I'm going to say we're gonna send more drums to the drummers headphone mix I go to the bass track alright so I want to send more base to the bass player's headphone mix and then I want to send more guitars to the guitar players headphone mix so we kind of see how this pattern works out so let's say I'll just select my guitar parts here and we'll send these to our guitar group all right so now when I'm in my control room I could listen to my mix [Music] this is the drummers headphone there this is the bass players headphone man should I say the bass players like yeah I'll hear myself enough right now you're crazy great you know but now he can do this come over here [Music] [Music] so that's what the bass players in our headphone mix and what the guitar players carry so the drummer's bass fires mix and your mix control so you just switch between these four mixes and the beauty of this is when you're tracking a band one of the age-old studio secrets is the quality of the performance can often be directly related to the quality of the performers headphone mix you know if you want to make the rhythm section sound bad make sure the bass player doesn't hear the kick in their headphones when they're playing live you want a singer to sound sharp make sure that the singers aren't hearing themselves well you know if you want them if they're flat they're often too loud in their headphone mix so it's kind of this a psychological thing of making sure that the performers have the right headphone mix very critical for recording live musicians now as you work with this also what's cool is you can save this with the project and then you know because there's nothing like having a great headphone mix system and then you can't recall it with the project two days later this is just stored with the project so that you could have multiple musicians each with their own headphone mix but let's say you're doing this in the singer have we all like had to edit out the click track bleed from the singers headphones that's recorded into their microphone there there's not many more sucky jobs than that I'm going to take every click out of a great vocal performance because the click track is bleeding through the microphones here what you do is you actually say the singer doesn't want to hear the click track and turn off the click track in your headphone mix that easily so very very important now let's take a look at some interesting things that we could do for automation so let's just open up in our project here so you could hear a couple of different things this is a project you know done entire written composed edited every mixed entirely in cubase now how many of us use a reference track when we're mixing pretty common and how do you incorporate the reference track you just load it into a track yeah so yeah do all sorts of creative routing because the last thing you want to do is to have a track that's actually going through like your master section presets because then it's all just kind of a reference track isn't a reference track so let's say if I have a particular track here [Music] all right and let's say what we can do here is we could have a secondary so what I'm gonna do like on this we have like a mix down track but let's say this is a reference track so what I want to do now is to actually just take this track here and I'm gonna route it to no bus and then I want to go to my cues and what I want to do now is go to my cue sends and as we do this just say and I want to just route this to my cue send kind of all by itself so when I go to this let's say this is my reference track so again the problem is if you have a reference track and you load it into your dog which is what a lot of people do you have to turn off all of your master effects of your you know anything like that and then if to do that easily to kind of reference it could be difficult so what I've done now is I've routed this out to one of the cue mixes so I could listen to and it's gonna be the same song but the EQ did a little differently so let's say this is my mix and this is the reference it's not going through the master effects section [Music] so I'll just EQ it all suitably here let's say this is our reference track so now you listen to fine mix verses [Music] and that way I see so many people make this mistake you use a reference track for mixing and then they run it through all of their master effects processing and it's like lying to yourself so but it's real hard to turn off eight plugins at once but we thought okay just run it through a separate bus so you have your comparison now we've also added some really clever automation stuff within Cubase so let's say you know we could have you know to adjust volume there's a number of interesting ways to do it inside the Cubase one is you could just come right over here and grab the center handle we've been doing this for 20-some years and you could just adjust your clip gain you know if you wanted to split you know a particular word this words a little too loud too soft you could cut it and just adjust your clip gain directly there if you wanted to do a fade in or fade out we could just kind of take this particular clip and you know I could just select it and grab the upper handle and just do fade ins if I wanted to edit the fades we could do that as well now other stuff we can do is when I just click on the bottom we could go in directly into our automation so this is pre fader these and if I wanted this to be kind of post fader I could actually just go directly into my automation I could just grab my range selection tool and just say okay I just want a little bump there I want this down here it just will make those four points for you anytime that you hover over the center area you could also just grab the center point and just adjust the automation like so or if you have the range selected let's say if I want to come here to this range I could just grab to say if I wanted if I grab just the upper left edge I could just do like fades like so and where gets also interesting if I grab the my right edge I could do that but let's say I switch to my object selection tool I can outdo my Bezier curves just that easily let's say well you know this is like a perfect automation that I want to repeat over and over maybe four I can EDM track or dance track I could just come right over here and just command D and duplicate it a number of times so if that's a since filter sweep or whatever very very simple and easy to work with there now let's say I've gone through my mix console and let's say like this track we have you know 86 tracks in this particular song going on and how many times have we grabbed the wrong fader right oh I'm not here to change me digesta more just a more you're right you know it's like a minute later it's like crap I'm on the wrong Channel and then right I'll never get the mix back to where it was you know where the fader was I knew I know it was perfect it was absolutely perfect so we thought it'd be cool if you could actually come here let's say I adjust the faders I just come here just the panning I wanted to come here it just you know I could also see in the bottom if I wanted to add a plug-in I could come right over here say okay I just wanted like you know maybe a delay plug-in here on those three oh and adjust the parameters that we thought it'd be cool if I could actually just come here and you have unlimited levels of undo on the mix console fades that are independent from the actual channels themselves so if I'm just moving the wrong fader over and over again you can just up and when we go into our mix console we can see that we have this mix console here but any of these windows here can go directly back into our main into a dedicated floating window so one of the cool things [Music] so if I'm here I can actually see you wait here I could adjust each parameter to four different sizes so I could actually see when tracks are coming in or leaving by my wave meters I can right click and switch to different PPI meters these can be pretty close later I can adjust my EQ here but let's say you hear something really weird at a particular moment in time you also have different configurations so you say I'm hearing something really weird right here I could say filter out every channel that's not playing at that moment in time and then BOOM you only see the channels playing where the cursor is that so you have these different preset configurations you use where you could say show me only drums show me drums and bass show me all the guitars just show me vocals show me only groups so you could save different channel configurations now your history you could also see directly laid out for you right here so as we kind of come here say I tweaked my different parameters here we could just scroll right back through so you have an unlimited levels of undoing a mix on the project window and for all edits and within your mix console as well so very very easy to work with now we have these racks and we could customize exactly what components are in racks but these will all be kind of broken down views of let's say this particular channel so when I look at a channel we have 16 insert slots we see this green line this green line will allow you to switch between pre and post fader every channel could have a full channel strip built in so I could say we're gonna have our noise gate on every single channel without loading up a third-party plug-in I want to have three different types of compressors I wanted to have the envelope shaper or a de-esser for a vocal I want to have three types of analog saturation I wanted to have three different types of limiters and I could now come over here and to my strip and just say let's just make switch to signal flow of the order for that particular channel and I can still see my EQ I have pre I have my high cut low cut eq's so my high pass low pass filters an additional 48 DB of gain and phase reverse so I don't have to load up a plug-in to flip the phase now something super helpful let's say I adjust my EQ here let's say I know the song is in the key of G we thought it'd be cool instead of just memorizing the frequencies that you just come here and say g3 and hit enter and the EQ frequency would just go right there so you can say uh let's try g2 and the frequency would just go directly there so you have a tox ends so any number of different channel settings that you could do right here all within your mix console so extensive automation you can say I want look at my inserts here I wanted to see all of my channel strip I want to see my sins and you could just navigate easily between all these different functions if you want to take different tracks and assign them to VCA you could just simply right-click on the selected tracks assign them to vc a fader boom and now you could just have your vc a fader automatically linked to those particular channels now how many of us have more than one set of speakers that we use to mix on and how do you currently switch between your speakers a monitor switch so they always color the signal yeah so what we can do as part of our control room is we could actually just come right here and we could actually see your different monitors so if you want to switch between let's say your NS tends to your Dynes to your large speakers you can just click right here and let's say all those speakers are different different volume levels at this point you could just go to your inserts here and you could just say I just wanted to now adjust the volume level of monitor a versus monitor and monitors see so that when I do switch that they're the same level because otherwise any speaker that's louder sounds better so I see people go out spending way too much money on like monitor management systems when you could just come here and do it all directly in Cubase oh you wanted to be you wanted to do a mono down mix you could just simply come here and boom it's your mono down mix you wanted to do five one two quad two stereo to mono you get down mix directly there as well so very easy and if you wanted to apply plugins on different monitors you could do that as well so kind of a full control room section first you know speaker switching you could set a dedicated and we get this question a lot in our support where people would use their master fader as their volume and then they go yeah when I export my mix it sounds really wimpy why it's you know it's like your master faders at minus 50 DB you know that could have some do of it so we do the control room this is your monitoring volume that doesn't affect the gain structure of the mix and then you can set a known reference point so if I'm here I want to go to my known this is as loud as I want my mix to get I could just go directly to my reference point that I set so that saves a ton of money and unnecessary hardware just kind of doing these things also full metering so if I want to see my meters at this point I can say okay let's see a little bit so if I want to see different metering scales I got a digital scale cin ebu cat system 20 that system 14 also have full r128 metering so if you're doing anything for broadcast you can see all the different metering options directly inside a key base without the need for additional plugins now a lot of times I hear people complaining that when they're doing a project that they're running out of CPU power with plugins have we run into this like maybe I would you know you buy a like a DSP card that has plugins and you're gonna run 32 of this plug-in I could only run eight of this plug-in and that could be problematic so one of the things that we could also do it's kind of an interesting mixing technique where we could use computers a little more intelligently is to have what we call Direct offline processing so let's say I want to take my drums here and jump to our drums now a lot of times people don't do processing of files because its destructive meaning that you can't get back to where you were so let's say I wanted to take this I can now just hit my f7 and at this point I could say I just wanted to run it through a plug-in so let's say I want to run it through like an analog tape saturation so this says run through Magneto and then as soon as I just kind of come right over here you could just say Auto apply and what this will do is it's just process all those plugins through that particular plugins so if you have like you know different plugins sets that are finite and what they could do you could just process it like this so let's say I want to run it through a little bit of an envelope shaper so again I go to my dynamics come here to my envelope shaper and then I could just kind of tweak the settings here so say I want this and now basically and if I process all those files but what it's doing is it's just simply playing back an audio file it's not taking any of my CPU resources other than playing back the audio file now where people tend not to work this way is because if you close the project you're stuck with that you can't get back to the original unless you did some painstaking I'm gonna be clever make a duplicate file all this stuff but you know here also let's say I just wanted to take the bottom snare and flip the face just in the bottom snare but I could now open up my direct offline processing ten years later and say you know what I went good to the magneto plug-in and adjust that parameter and it will just automatically reprocess it and keep everything else completely intact or let's say I just hated everything I did ten years from now I could just come right over here it and say delete all and all the processing is back to where you were normally so it always stores the original file and the process file will go back and forth between the two so if you have like plug-ins where it's like I only got like one processor chip I really should have four you could just take that process it offline very fast and be able to have access to all the sound but still have the flexibility to come back and say ok at that point I need to to change it a year from now or a week from now or tomorrow now once we have everything mixed or let's say we need to send it out to a producer to monitor or let's say we need to record a musician have we all had that musician that we've met that you don't want them in your house like you know like wow this guy's like a great amazing guitar player but I just don't want him near my girlfriend or my wife or my family I don't want him see my stuff you know he's gonna steal something from me you know us musicians are always interesting types so one of the cool things we can do is actually come right over here and we have VST connect and what this would allow us to do is to actually take someone who is remotely not in a studio they could download a free program and then this way you can actually see them on a webcam and they could record directly into your session but you can also send this out to like a producer and you know if they want to get their feedback for the mix you could actually stream it to them they could listen to it remotely and just say okay at this point we want to ya tweak this you know the vocals a little hot here can you add a little more compression on the bass do this and make the tweak while they're listening to it and playing it back in real time or be able to record someone directly into your system so these types of things that often you have to pay a lot of money for very easy to do inside a Cubase now let's say we go back and I need it to I always hear people say it's like you know you know I do this you know like if someone else isn't using Cubase then like I can't really share my files with them right that's the biggest fallacy in the audio industry because like no one really cares what book like a famous author what word processor they use for their book right but if you have to actually archive your stuff what we could do now is we come over here we have this export audio mix down and what I could do is I'm going to I could mix down directly to my stereo 5.1 file but I could also create stems because a lot of times my mixing friends you know a lot of their secrets is they use Cubase because they find the mix engine sounds better but they also don't want to give away the recipe for how they created that great sounding mix because they may use very interesting esoteric often shareware plugins so we have what we call a batch export so I can say I want to take my stereo mix I want to render all my group channels all of my effects channels all my VST instruments all my MIDI all of my audio channels and it can make equal-length audio files or stems that can be played back in a roland hard disk recorder to be played back in any DAW just simply start them at the same point in time and this is how people transfer files because you know going even from within the same dogs like oh you had the 0.3 I only had point two and that features working differently and you don't have that plug-in so it's not gonna play right so one Mouse clicking Cubase and you could render all the files to stems that could be played back and this is what you actually could give to the record company when they want the files don't give them the magic sauce of how you created all that stuff you know it could just be and let's say you wanted to document like what you did on particular tracks one other great features you could have a notepad in each track so you can come over here I use this plug-in I use this this is a using sm7 mic through this mic free and when you go into your mix console you could actually see notes so you could have a notepad but you could actually come over here and say I just wanted to see the notepad in my console so at this point you could actually take notes and keep them within yourself and also choose to export your notepad as a txt file that you can pass on to someone else if you wanted to so you could actually have track documentation so as you can see whether you want to be creative with Cubase oh you want to write a song whether you wanted to do vocal tuning whether you wanted to do you know have access to all your virtual instruments to have access to you know the drum plugin to groove agent SE so you're going to do like virtual drummers you wanted to do different types of like MPC style workflows for hip-hop production you wanted to have loop mash effects if you wanted to have all the different functions there's amazing guitar amp simulators we're gonna have amazing bass amps in there if you wanted to be able to do all your film composition elements for handling your key switches also getting into like your convolution reverb all of your envelope shaper for you know radically changing drums fixing drums being able to do like you know turn your drums into existing MIDI events with one mouse click to be able to do all of your mixing with full plugin delay compensation even for outboard gear to have the best audio engine with 64-bit floating-point precision to work on mac or pc to not really have limitations built in so if you want to create if you wanted to produce if you wanted to mix if you want to take all those different elements and keep repeating and then whatever project you get thrown at you Cubase can do it so instead of running for of the wrong programs and being kind of stuck into like oh as soon as I get to this level I have to go to this program soon as I get here I have to go to this program run the correct program in Cubase so you got one program you could actually get your work done so Cubase good let's say everything else bad any quick questions I know we're just probably close we have it's usually sells for around like 579 ish we have on the seventh floor I have coupons one of the stores locally is doing sales so we have a 10% off coupon upstairs if you want to get that as well and you can start off at $99 Cubase elements we have like up in the middle mid-range is like what we call Cubase artist and then you get the full Cubase and if you started Cubase Elements you can upgrade to the fall and still not lose any money doing that so you know but an incredibly powerful program and what you see is Steinberg defining the feature sets and all the air companies following what Steinberg is defined so thank you so much for your time if you have quick questions I'll be here for a couple minutes and also be upstairs on its seventh floor thanks [Music]

Channel: SonicScoop

Views: 58,372

Keywords: Cubase, Greg Ondo, MixCon2018, MixCon, Steinberg, Cubase 9.5, composition, editing, mixing, mix, mixer

Id: BUuPl-yO3oQ

Length: 72min 35sec (4355 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018