Efficient and Stress Free MIDI Recording | Cubase Retrospective MIDI Recording

hello everyone welcome back to the channel it's alvin here and today i have another tips and exploratory video for you on how to be as efficient as possible with cubase and this time it's with the retrospective midi recording feature it will save you a ton of time and it will help with anyone who has anxiety when you are hitting the record button and you know you have to perform and play midi notes as best as you can so without further ado let's jump right into the tutorial [Music] so we are going to look at something that's called a retrospective recording which is a feature that's been recently enhanced i'm not sure how far back this goes but i know in 10.5 they enhanced it with some more cool features here uh like insert as linear recording and cycle recording and we'll go through a little bit more about what that means i'm just going to click this empty retrospective record buffer which should be the default as soon as you load a new vst like this so i've got keyscape loaded up here it sounds lovely something like this so you see that as soon as i play a few notes here retrospective recording starts lighting up and if i press shift and numpad star it will automatically copy in everything that it has been recording in the background that you might not have realized has been happening so let's just make sure it sounds like what i just played okay so yeah it's there so that's super super handy and we can do a bunch of things workflow wise with this and even use it uh later on with loops i don't know about you but but i used to be very uh anxious whenever i hit the click track or whenever i hit the record button or even just you know recording youtube videos here like hitting the record button anytime the record is on you get that that anxiety so with retrospective recording you kind of take away all that pressure although it might be psychological but i'll show you what i mean so let's say in the past or maybe you're doing this right now you might be doing something like this so i've got my metronome going i'm just gonna hit the record i see that it's starting to light up i gotta wait for the timing and then i start playing and then i totally mess up and then i stop and then i would have to you know delete that track or that midi event clip and uh do it all over again and then i try and the anxiety builds up [Music] and then nope didn't like that either and then maybe this time i would use a you know command z or control z here to remove that track and then i'll you know what i mean if that is you and you have a bit of anxiety sometimes you might just want to just freely jam this is a good way to go in that uh you can just i'm just gonna un uh solo that track and let's say i have a whole bunch of backing tracks here and i'm just gonna just play through this and no pressure of recording i'm just hitting enter [Music] all right maybe i screwed up at the end there so no harm no foul let's do this again so i'm just playing okay i hit spacebar and now i'm pressing shift star on my numpad and voila i have what i just played recorded in there there we go so i like that take you know maybe i'll adjust a little bit and uh boom you can go and over and over again as much as you want and you'll finally get the one you want and all you have to do is press shift and numpad star there and get it back so there are some hot keys that you can also use to make your life even easier so if you don't like to use a shift in a numpad star there or you have a 10 keyless keyboard you can just go into your key commands here and search a retrospective and there you go there's a few options here so this is the default one that cubase maps to shift numstar uh what i'd like to do is i'll map the insert track input as linear recording and i'll map that to the letter r i don't usually care for the rf to uh and enable and disable the record enable i usually just use my mouse or by default it's already automatically enabled so i use that letter r and it's super fast just one letter and i get what i need so let's go over the difference between the track input as cycle recording versus track input as linear recording let's get into that right now okay so let's say we have a four bar loop here and we just want to play through and try out a few things and it's just gonna go on and on and on a few times so maybe let's do uh three iterations of this loop and start jamming and see what we can come up with [Music] okay so i just stopped it there with hitting spacebar so now we have a few options after we've recorded those three i think maybe fourth iteration uh since i left that little bit at the end there as it restarted over the fourth time but if i hit insert as linear recording here you'll see that the entire time i was playing everything's been recorded and it's just sped it all out over uh 12 bars i guess so let's say we don't want that but anyway just i'll play it through a little bit just to let you know that it did record everything that we played earlier that was the first loop [Music] okay that was the second loop and so on and so forth so let's say we don't want it all in one continuous linear mode watch this this is the cool part so if you hit insert as cycle recording uh you'll see here that these are every iteration that we went through and it's all laid out here in a drop down list for you so i'll hit the first one here if you recall this is what i did [Music] okay and i can move on to the second [Music] okay if i don't like that i can move on to the third [Music] okay so so on and so forth this fourth one here you might be wondering i don't remember that but yeah it was actually at the very end uh i didn't hit stop fast enough so it actually tried to loop and play the fourth time so there you go you have all the the different entries here all stacked on top of one another so if i just drag them over here you can pick and choose and do what you want so yeah that is linear versus cycle recording so in the usual circumstance of let's say a very you know more linear not so cyclical loopy um uh example for orchestral scores or if you're writing a score to film or something like that you can use the same kind of technique here and i'm just gonna hit solo so if you're just don't want the pressure of the clicks or anything like that you can just hit enter start recording watch your film [Music] maybe uh that take was horrendous you start all over again no harm no foul just hit enter again start playing [Music] okay so let's say you really like that one again you can shift numpad star or like what i did i mapped it to the linear input there and i just hit my letter r as a hotkey okay well there you have it i hope that tip really helps you out and you can move really fast you can keep auditioning all your composition and as much as you want and then when you really like something you hit the r button in my case that i mapped a hotkey you can press the shift uh numpad star if you are working with loops you can use that method here where you insert psyc cycle recording and you can get all the different options of what you just played through all right well i hope that was valuable for you and you will be able to take that and uh speed up your workflow uh significantly and remove that pressure of the click track or hitting the record and to also not have to constantly go back and deleting what you just recorded and wasting a whole bunch of clicks and time uh this all should add up over months and years and uh yeah you're welcome you can buy me a coffee at some point that i saved you a bunch of labor all right that'll do it for this video i'll see you in the next one thanks a lot and have a great rest of the week [Music] [Music] okay

Channel: Alvin S Wong Music

Views: 385

Keywords: Composer workflow, Cubase insert as cycle recording, Cubase midi cycle record, Cubase midi recording, Cubase midi retro recording, Cubase retrospective midi record, Cubase retrospective recording, How to record midi in Cubase, How to recover midi played, How to write music fast, composer behind the scenes, daw software, film composer, greg ondo, music production, music software, cubase 10.5, recording midi, capture recent midi performance, dom sigalas, Retro midi recording

Id: FVtDNjpV81g

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021