How to Comp the "Perfect Take" In Cubase -Full Guide #comping #cubase

[Music] i think that this is my perfect take hello everyone welcome back dom here and in this video i'm going to show you how you can compile the perfect take out of your recordings no matter what it is vocals guitars drums it doesn't matter and i'm going to show you all the tricks that we have in cubase to make this happen super easily and super fast right after this [Music] so in today's video we're going to talk about comping and if you don't know what a company is it's a technique basically that allows you to have multiple takes of let's say a vocal or a bass line or a guitar take and then you can compile the best bits out of each take to create the perfect take this is a technique that has been used in studios for ages and even now there are still daws that don't offer this feature built into the program but cubase has had this for a long long time and you know with every version it's becoming better and it's up to the point now that it's really fast and you can create a perfect take in no time and in order to show you how to do this i'm going to give you a practical example a real world example i have this track here i have some drums i have some roads and i'm going to lay down a baseline i haven't rehearsed so i'm going to just play whatever comes to mind and i'm going to try out a few things try different variations and then we can compile the perfect take out of all the takes that i'm going to record as you can see i have my track ready to go here so i'm going to be recording the base and i'm going to set up my locators my left and right locators here i'm going to set cubase in cycle mode so that means that when i reach the end of the take it's going to take me back and i can record multiple takes very very easily and then i'm going to show you how we compile the perfect tick i'm going to leave all the mistakes in and everything so that we take a realistic example right so let me bring my base and let's record [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] my [Music] so there we go now we have our takes here as you can see they're overlaid on top of each other so when you see these you know kind of grid lines here in cubase that means that there's another layer of audio underneath this specific event so how do you start let me show you the one thing that you have to do is click on this icon here and select show lanes okay so when you do this you will see that we have the three different takes that are recording this is the first one the second one and this is the last one the third one which is the one that we're going to listen to when we play back the track let's have a listen [Music] so as you can see for every take i was trying out different things in some takes i wasn't really sure what to play so i was a little bit hesitant uh in this take i have some slap notes here and there so let's try and compile my perfect take that i think works well for this track let me show you the tool that you need for this the tool is this one it's the comb tool okay this hand tool here many people that use cubase have no idea what this is and actually this video was inspired by one of these people because they specifically asked me how do i do comping in cubase how do i you know create a perfect take out of many vocal takes and all these things in this case i decided to go for bass and let's take this tool now this tool is so easy to use you're gonna have loads of fun with it i find it really really satisfying when i work with the comb tool now what i tend to do is unless i have played completely on the grid i tend to disable the snap okay why because i want to have a little bit of control when i'm separating my different takes and let me show you what i mean so this is the comb tool so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to first decide which take i'm going to use for the beginning so i think i like the first part that i play so i'm going to select c like that and i'm going to select the first take and see now the first take is being highlighted so now if i play this [Music] okay that's fine now what if i want to check what happens on the second take i can just click on the second take okay see i was a little bit hesitant there i don't like this bit so i think this is a little bit too much that's all right that that's that's not what i want i want the clear riff first okay so i'm going to keep the first take [Music] no this is not good let's try maybe this one here let's go here let's see [Music] so as you can see because i have the snap deactivated i can cut freely i don't have any constraints but sometimes it might help to have snap activated to just be able to cut very straight into a bar or into a bead you know so i'm going to do this now i'm going to switch snap on and i'm going to see if i can let's see maybe i can cut see now it snaps that's very very useful sometimes but sometimes if you have notes in between it might be better to have snap offs but you don't you know kind of have to do crossfades and all these things so let's go here and let's see see for example this bit here let's see [Music] let's try this guy here [Music] aha so yeah i would like to have this slap note here i don't want this here it's too soon but here it might add a nice flavor so let's see [Music] so let's see if i want to follow it with this one or i want to go back to take number one [Music] or maybe take two [Music] maybe maybe this one makes more sense for this yeah okay now i want to show you something else see this bit here there's a little bit of a tail from the previous take so maybe for this specific part i can go and edit the cut point you know the edit point is right here but maybe i want to kind of go like this you know and just go to a point where there's no overlap like that and see they all update you don't have to cut cut cut on every single take so let's keep going [Music] i like this pattern here but i think it's too soon it's a little bit more complicated than i want for now so maybe i'm gonna go back to this pattern let's see [Music] okay and now maybe i want to try and see what i can do with these sections here let's see because i want to have it a little bit of development [Music] okay the second take i was still trying this pattern out so i wasn't sure it's not really confident yet so i think i'm gonna go for take three let's see [Music] i'm not sure if i like this octave here let's go to the first take [Music] yeah i like the the first take because i'm not sure about this octave here i played that high note so now it goes without saying that you can still audition different takes for example if i go here i can just switch the takes while i'm playing in real time [Music] [Music] so i think that this is my perfect take so let's play it back and check it out while it's switching between the different takes how seamless it is and how quickly we could build that perfect take with the comb tool let's have a listen [Music] take three [Music] great so this is basically the meat of it right this is the main concept how you can use the comb tool but now i want to show you something else when you're done with this there are a few things that you can do first of all obviously you can close the lanes and now you have a nice single lane that you can see so that you don't get distracted obviously but i'm going to give you a little tip okay sometimes you might want to clean this up and the way to clean this up is you select your audio and then you go to menu advanced delete overlaps in my case i also have a shortcut for this it's alt d so when you do this now you have a clean version of it and the lanes are gone so you've only kept the actual takes that you need but here's my tip sometimes you might change your mind okay there's many times that i've changed my mind and i want to go back to different take and of course you can still do it because everything is non-destructive in cubase so you can open the lanes even after you deleted the material that you didn't need but what i tend to do is i go here and i duplicate the version before cleaning it up so i do this and see it's copy version two then i go back to my main version and then i clean it up so i hit alt d and that's it now i have the clean version but if i ever want to go back to my lanes here it is and here i can go back and edit this and i can go back and forth very very easily as you know the versions in cubase are brilliant and it goes without saying that if you want to record a different take and still do comping you can create a new version you can still keep recording and you can create an alternative perfect tag you don't have to go and record on top of what you've already recorded if you want to start fresh okay so make sure you combine these two features you know the comping but also the versions so when you do this you're good to go you have your perfect take if you want to take it one step forward you can of course just select the audio and bounce in place so audio bounce selection and you can turn this into a single track and i want to do this because my ocd is dropping me nuts now if you don't know about this trick i'm going to take this pencil tool and i'm going to just kind of bring this down a little bit that's gonna cause problems uh when i send this base to a compressor something like this you know come on let's let's treat it you know this is loud you know and we can take care of this before we get to the compressor maybe not so much maybe like that let's see yeah see if you haven't watched the video i'm gonna link it right here because this is a very very cool feature so there you go guys this is how you create the perfect take in cubase how you can do comping very easily sky's the limit i use this all the time for vocals vocals is the number one reason why i use comping because for vocals you might want to get a little phrase that's better in one take a little syllable that's better in another take and you can create perfect takes in cubase super super fast and i find it like i said very satisfying so i hope you enjoyed this video if you enjoyed it i would really appreciate it if you hit the like button if you subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already i would like to see you back and share it with any cubase user you think they might find it useful thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one my friends bye-bye

Channel: Dom Sigalas

Views: 8,612

Keywords: dom sigalas, cubase, cubase comp tool, comping in cubase, cubase 11 pro, cubase 11 tutorial, create the perfect take, vocal comping, how to edit vocals, vocal comping cubase, how to comp vocals

Id: _bNMVnlP5YQ

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021