Essential Cubase Key Editor Overview. Best MIDI editing capabilities of any DAW!

all right got another cubase tutorial and in this one i'm going to be going over the details of the key editor the key editor is probably the place you're going to spend most of your time when you're working on instrument tracks or midi tracks so we'll go over a couple little tips and tricks in there and a couple of the basic things that you need to understand when you're working in there to get to the key editor all you have to do is double click on any chunk of played information and in my case here that's going to open up in the lower zone a really cool feature of cubase is the fact that you can go and work on multiple instruments at the same time so i can go to this section right here where i've got violins and cellos and i can double click on both of them just by selecting both of them and so now i can see the cello parts down at the bottom and i can see the strings or the violins up top and if i solo the editor this little button right here i can hear just those instruments by themselves okay so that is how you would listen to something on its own in the editor don't forget that s button so important and by the way you can just press s when you're in the editor and that will turn the solo on and off so the s key command works in the editor the same way it works kind of on the main page but the beautiful thing about this is you don't have to go solo your tracks up here in your track list you just do it right from the editor so essential key command in the key editor is s to solo just that one and another important button here in the editor is this little acoustic feedback button so if you have that turned off and you click on a note you won't hear anything if i move a note around can't hear anything if i turn that button on watch what happens if i move a note [Music] so really nice to have that acoustic feedback you can click on notes and hear them right away i feel like every program needs to have this feature it is just so essential i love that feature so make sure that is turned on and then we also have this little auto scroll button which is the same as on the main page and that is just f here inside the editor as well and that just means your project's going to refresh itself when it gets to the end of what you're looking at i always like to have my auto scroll set to page scroll as opposed to stationary cursor i know some people like this setting i don't like this setting and the reason i don't like the setting is because if my screen is stationary i can grab notes while the playhead is moving as opposed to this thing that's constantly whipping past you so i always leave that on page scroll next we've got the tools and for the most part the tools look pretty similar to what we've got up top the next thing i think that is important is this little button right here and that is your note insert velocity so that's basically if you're going to be drawing in notes what velocity do you want those notes to pop up as and so right now it's defaulting to 100 and we can go all the way up to 127 in midi any kind of midi information so yeah do you want to be drawing in your notes at full velocity type 127 right there and now everything i draw in will be at full velocity so that is another helpful little thing right there we've got the snap on and off and of course that's the same as snap on the main page except now your snap is going to be set to the quantize value and then don't forget also we can change the grid type we can adapt to zoom this is something that is very a very neat feature of cubase as you zoom in you get more lines and i zoom in even more i get even more lines let's adapt to zoom setting would be very useful for some i think i'm used to just changing it as i go and leaving it on you know maybe a 16th note or whatever but you see right now it's only allowing me to move notes according to half notes so inside the bar i can only i can only resize according to half notes if i zoom in a little bit more by clicking in the ruler and dragging down now you can see i'm at 16th notes and if i zoom in even more now i'm at 32nd notes and so on and so forth so very useful feature just the grid is going to show you exactly where you can move things like i said i just usually use use quantize and then there that is where you're going to go set your quantize settings and of course in your quantized settings all you have to do is press this q button right here to quantize any notes that are a little bit off so let me just move a couple off and if i press q or if i select those notes and press q and of course they move over but they didn't move over all the way and that is because i have iterative quantize set to on right now which means it's only going to move things a percentage closer to that value so again we hit the e button for the quantize panel and there we can see we can set our grid we can choose our iterative strength percentage so right now it's moving everything 50 closer according to this value right here the iterative strength and as long as this button is selected it's never going to actually fully quantize straight to the line so in order to defeat that and just have everything go over quantized right to the line we just turn it off and now everything gets perfectly quantized and while we're on the subject of quantizing a lot of people are wondering how you quantize the ends of notes in order to do that all we need to do let's just resize a couple of these maybe something like that so you can see different lengths of these notes i can select these notes and there's a couple different ways to do it if i go over to my inspector and i go to the quantize menu then i can see quantize lengths so if i hit quantize lengths it's going to quantize the length of my notes exactly according to whatever my quantized values are set at so let's just undo that and right now we've got length set to quantize link these two controls would be a little bit different depending on how you have this guy set up i like having my length quantize set to whatever i've got my main quantize set to quantize the length of that note also there we go and i do highly recommend quantizing the lengths of notes in certain situations so here you can see i have my cellos and my violin selected and you see how the violins are kind of grayed out and if i click on that one now we'll see the cellos are kind of grayed out so you know which one you are editing at that moment you can also choose that right here if you have a whole bunch of them and you're just not sure very quick way to see what you are currently editing right if you're if you were to draw in a note would i be drawing it in on the cellos or would i be drawing or would i be drawing it in on the violins and here we can't hear it because violins can't play that low right there's the lowest note they can play all right next thing very important this right here is showing me pitches according to colors and option would be to have it show velocity so now you can see darker purple notes are lower velocity and more red notes are higher velocity probably goes all the way down to blue for for quiet notes if i do that i don't find that useful at all i can see the velocities of the notes down at the bottom but seeing this here just becomes a bit of a blur to me and i'd way rather see something out of the ordinary as far as colors go if i have a note that is wrong you know it's just a really quick way for you to tell if there is a note out of the ordinary other than the fact that it's on a different line but some of your patterns won't be this this obvious right so you'll have a note that's wrong and the colors make that very obvious so i always recommend people to change that to show pitch the rest of the stuff you don't need to worry about this right here is a little toaster that gets you back to your virtual instrument so i can see my contact instrument right there and then of course we've got velocity down below let's just look at some really powerful ways you can play with velocity in cubase and this again there are so many features in cubase that set it so far above so many other programs and a huge part of that is because it's been around for so long so they've had so much time to perfect these things and to add new features as you go along but check this out if i have certain range of notes selected i can mouse over the bottom here and i get a bunch of little things that pop up so i get some dots over here dots over here and a dot in the middle watch what happens if i click this dot in the middle i am going to push all the velocities down according to where they kind of are already so you can see if i had some velocities that were kind of all over the place something like this if i select all these notes and grab that box it's going to scale them so in other words it's going to keep sort of the relative loud or soft between each of them as you move the entire range up or down so it's still going to keep some dynamic differences between these notes now the cool part about this is if i click right here and crank it all the way to the top now i've got them all the same velocity and then i can just do this so that's a really common way for me to instead of going you know taking the pencil tool and drawing a line across often what you'll see me do is just select all the notes go up and then move them down to exactly where i want them now they're all at exactly the same velocity if i were to want that another thing you can do with midi information here is you can mouse over the top left corner of this or the right corner and we can tilt the relative velocities so now it's going to start softer and get louder and then we can do the same thing here right so it's still keeping dynamic differences but it's now tilting the that range of velocities and you can do this over a gigantic range of instrument of notes so say you have like a snare drum roll or something like that you want to build up well then you can ramp it in or you can fade things out slowly another thing we can do is if we mouse over this corner right here we can crank it up to increase the dynamic range of the louds versus the softs sort of cutting off at the middle range and then same thing here if i crank this all the way down eventually we should get these guys to pretty much exactly the same spot that's what's happening there and you see how it retains the original velocity information so very powerful features here in the midi editor the key editor as far as what you can do with velocity now just some some basic things if you want to change the length of a bunch of notes at the same time just mouse over all of them and you can do things like that you've also got this information line right here which shows you the names of notes if you can't see the names of your notes in your cubase window like i've got right here there's just plus and minus buttons right here so you can increase the range and the smaller you go eventually you lose the names of the notes i always like to have my key editor set so i can just see the names of the notes and that's it very useful and then over on the left hand corner is where you're going to see some of the other controls that we can look at in the midi editor velocity is one you're going to want to see almost all the time but a cool thing we can do is turn off or on other lanes so right now i've got pitch bend set and i don't have any pitch bend information in here so it would make more sense for me to remove that lane now i've just got velocity if i want to see something else i can click this little plus button or if i want to change this to show something else i can click right where it says velocity and here i can go turn on a different thing so i could use modulation and modulation is this control right here on the keyboard and with that control i could use the pencil tool by the way and i can draw in modulation and for some synthesizers that will make a filter open up or it will make a string library get louder or softer let's see what happens here i'm going to solo this editor press s [Music] so you can hear how that's making that sound louder let's go to my loud or my cellos and here we can see modulation let's listen to this let me now take this and do something like that so you can hear it being quite loud and then dropping off and then getting louder so obviously that's pretty drastic and i probably wouldn't want to do that much of a change i can select all of this modulation information and then now watch what happens when i move this up everything gets increased so let's say maybe go like that maybe that's too drastic still [Music] right so that's how we can draw in interesting modulation information for things like cello and by the way the reason this is allowing me to enter so many points in is because i have my snap turned off watch what happens if snap is turned on and i'm starting from scratch it's just going to do these big chunky changes which probably sound very artificial so we wouldn't want that make sure the snap is turned on or turned off and then now with the pencil we can draw in whatever we want so it's a really neat way to add dynamics to things like your strings so maybe something like this and then maybe a little bit loud [Music] so you're feeling those dynamics of those strings and making the fake orchestra sound that much more realistic if you try this on something like a string patch and it doesn't do anything then you might have to figure out which control is actually controlling dynamics and a lot of situations it's going to be modulation it might be expression and if that doesn't work you can always resort to main volume and but again to get there you just click on the name of your current lane of information down at the bottom and choose something else if you wanted another lane in the bottom you can go click this little plus button and then i just added an entirely new lane to my information down here at the bottom and i can change that lane to show something else so maybe it's sustain pedal and if you have sustained pedal problems with your midi information say you're playing piano and your sustain pedal keeps getting mixed up then you would see some information down here on the bottom a couple of other really quick key commands and then we're done here and one is to click on the note and press the up arrow and that will allow you to move a note anywhere else really quickly i do that all the time i select a note i move on to the next one i arrow onto the next one i change that do things like that you can watch me with my arrow keys and i'm flying around changing the order of notes sometimes i will duplicate an entire midi track or instrument track into another instrument say like a viola and a violin and i'll copy the exact same pattern down and then very quickly go through each note and move it so that it's creating a harmony it's almost like drawing the notes in on paper on staff paper so arrow sideways selects the next note shift arrow over selects a whole bunch of notes arrows up and down moves all those notes at the same time these are like power tips i'm telling you if you start incorporating these you will fly around this editor just with the keyboard shift up arrow moves a note up an octave shift down moves it down an octave so very quick way i can command a and then shift up and i've just moved my entire track here up an octave this one's super useful too this one i didn't find for years so normally arrows to the left or right will select the next note but if you hold command or control on a pc and move the note over or click the arrow over that's going to move the note over by that value another great way to change the note information so i think that should get you rocking here in the key editor of cubase it's a ton of information there and hopefully you learned something new make sure you hit the subscribe button and the bell and hit me up in the comments if you have some more ideas of things you want to see on future cubase videos or videos in general thanks for watching we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 27,664

Keywords: Cubase, Cubase Pro, Intro to Cubase, Cubase AI, Cubase Elements, Nuendo, Cubase Pro Tips, Cubase Basics, Cubase Tutorial, Best Cubase, Jef Gibbons, Gibbons Creative, Cubase Lesson, Cubase vs, Cubase tips, Basic Cubase, Cubase Beginner, Cubase Teacher, Cubase 10.5, Cubase Pro 10.5, Cubase New Features, Cubase Update, Steinberg, Cubase Stock Sounds, Cubase Included, Cubase Loops, Cubase Instruments, Cubase Mixer, Cubase Channel, Key Editor, Cubase Key Editor

Id: tMQtz-x0EKY

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020