How to Create and Save Templates in Cubase | Music Production for Beginners

one of the crucial things when you're working in a door is to be as creative as possible as quickly as possible and one of the most important issues when it comes to workflow is how long it actually takes you to set a project up before you can start being creative when it comes to being creative I'm talking about how long it takes from the moment the keyboard player walks in to the moment they start putting down chords or finding a sound how long from the time the singer walks in to when they can actually start singing and recording a vocal as always workflow is crucial when it comes to being creative instantly the template function in Cubase means we can set up a number of different project templates which we can recall at the start of any session it's particularly useful if you're working in the same studio environment and rather than setting up a template every time you walk in to record a band or an act you can instantly recall a template which has everything set up precisely as you need it's equally important if you're working from home or in a project studio and you're working with a group of musicians or artists who are coming in regularly and you know their vibe you know what they need a good example is I've been working for nearly a minute 20 now on setting this project up and all I've achieved is really for lead vocal tracks to effects tracks a group track I've set up a group folder just so the lead vocals i've named it and I'm only just starting to color code these different tracks now it could take me another 10 15 20 minutes to set up the template alone for the group that I want to record today and that's 10 20 30 minutes they're sitting around nervous waiting to be creative it's way too long and in this video we're going to sort out how you can have templates ready to go so the people can be creative as soon as they walk into your creative space one of the crucial things about setting up a template is deciding exactly what you're going to need what are you go to tracks so for example if I was say recording a demo project with even just one singer I would probably need a number of lead vocal tracks as I've got here a number of backing vocal tracks odd need a reverb and a delay so it sounds ok and then I'd want to send all of my lead vocal tracks and my backing vocal tracks to group channels and I'd want to color-code them all so I can quickly visualize and access the different types of tracks that I've got in my project another thing I always do is move all the tracks that I'm going to use in a project into their own folders on the project window and this really helps because if there's a large track count it means I can just simply open and close the folders to see the tracks that are inside and of course naming them is also very important if they're backing vocals then maybe I'm going to pan them or create some stereo imaging it's always a learning process and you're never going to get it right the first time and look there's always something else you need I think the first time I started with templates it was all just vocals and then I realized that I needed drums and not just one drum track I might have needed one track for a groove in another track for a kick or a snare or a Handclap or something like that so as you start getting into the world of production you'll start to realize you'll go to tracks that a really crucial for you to allow other people to be creative and it's just recognizing this and making sure that you've got it all set up in a template now it's also important to remember I guess that every time you set up an instrument track in a template it's probably sucking some juice out of your computer so you know be aware with every VST instrument and effect that you set up you really want to make sure that there's a good chance that you're going to use this in your actual project itself if not then maybe it's just as important to get the vital components right like the lead vocals and the reverbs and the delays and the compression and then add things like VST instruments after I've selected keep dialogue open which means that I can just keep adding and adding tracks and I don't need to go back and select add new track so I've just added a marker track and a ruler track which is really important because once I start being creative I can start marking out things like the song structure so verses and choruses and bridges and so on if you've got a go-to sample that you use all the time maybe even as a clip gain reference like a kick track snare hi-hat you can just drag it straight over from the media bay and trigger it in the sampler track and that means that it's always there inside that template ready to go you can setup your MIDI tracks which is something Cubase is renowned for and route them to different VST instrument or external instrument outputs it's not just about the typical tracks you may use when you don't have time to actually think about your entire workflow it's also things like utility tracks so things like the chord track the tempo track the arranger track marker tracks and ruler tracks it's also about how you want your windows to be configured and organized we can even activate and set up individual outputs from a number of VST instruments inside of Cubase and have all of these routed and ready to go in the template so that means that our individual kick drums snare drums high hats and Tom's can all be routed through their own individual audio channel in the mix console when it comes to the mix console we can always select a number of channels and add different types of channels like effects in groups as we've seen but also a VCA fader to a selected number of channels and we can also go and link these channels which allows us to link a number of specific parameters and we can also set up that VCA fader to control the volume of this particular link group I specified that every channel in this link group should have the sin's link which means that every time I set up a send for one anything I do to that one channel will also affect all of the other channels so right now I'm setting up a send for the delay and the reverb and that's going to go to those effects channels that I created initially and it's exactly the same for inserts so when I add an insert for one channel it's going to apply to all of them one thing I haven't specified is for the channel strip settings to be linked so right now I'm going and finding a channel strip preset just for that one lead vocal and the cool thing about this is if I know that this channel strip preset works for this lead vocalist I can just recall it every time or if I think that there's another lead vocalist coming in it's just going to be a little bit different I can open up the channel strip settings and I can change a particular element of the channel strip or even just go to another preset so it's just a matter of chopping and changing but as long as you're in the ballpark you're saving yourself valuable time every time you use a template in Cubase I'm speeding this section of the video up but really all I'm doing is naming tracks moving them into folders and color coding for different types of tracks and this is not just so people can be creating music almost instantaneously it's also so I can be right on top of my production when you finish organizing this template the last thing to do is to save it so you can go up to file and just go down to save as template now when we save it as a template there's a few options we can choose exactly where we want to store it and we can give it labels and descriptions but the most important thing is to ensure that it's stored in the right section so I'm storing mine under the production tab and giving it a name of course and once I've finished I hit OK and if I scroll across to my production tab you can see that my new template is there and if I click on open it'll ask me where to store it and now it's going to load that template up so I am ready to start recording it's as easy as that it might take a little bit of time for you to set the template up but you only ever need to do it once and of course if you want to edit it you can go back and make changes and save it as a template again but everything's there just as I wanted it and now I can just get straight into the creative OSs please give us a thumbs up if you've learnt something from the video and subscribe to the cubase youtube channel for plenty more videos just like this i'll catch you there you

Channel: Cubase

Views: 28,183

Keywords: how to create and save templates in Cubase, Cubase templates, music production, music, music production for beginners, DAW, workflow, working fast in Cubase, creating a template, start recording in Cubase, templates in Cubase, project templates, using templates in Cubase

Id: _Wl0YxUwePs

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019