How to write music in Cubase [Easy Tutorial]

hello everyone this is Nathaniel bloody year and I'm gonna be teaching you guys how to use Cubase I know personally for me when I started using Cubase it was extremely difficult to get into the tutorials online from the official like Steinberg people was confusing as hell it started off like teaching you how to waveform edit first or something like that it was kind of weird it was I don't know it didn't teach you the layout and it was really annoying to get started and I had to learn everything on my own because the tutorials were just that confusing so to all you people that are wanting to learn how to compose music using Cubase and all that stuff here you go so when you first start it up it's going to give you a screen like this I'm just gonna have all these little tabs here what you're going to want to do is go to recent right here and click on continue it'll start up a new project it'll prompt you for a folder location just to save all your files and all that stuff um it's not really a big deal just press Continue pick a folder or make a new folder and press ok and this is it this is what its gonna look like here is your window you're going to double click on the window to make it fullscreen and here you go this is it this is Cubase its this is really it this is what it's going to look like your complete da W the whole layout first first of all and I'm sorry I'm not really good with giving tutorials but I'm short this is probably going to be easier than the alternative to go ahead and just jump straight in to load in an instrument all you're going to have to do is click on just hover over this section right here right click it and then go to add instrument track some people go to add MIDI track but I find this it's a lot easier and a lot less confusing so just click on add instrument track and it'll pull up this window and it's going to ask you for a VST instrument by default it's going to give you no VST instrument but you can click on it and then choose what you want if you note my instruments are going to look a little bit different than yours because I've removed some of the ones that I don't like and edit a few things that I did like so by default you're going to have Hallion one and monologue and embraced ER and Holly on Sonic se Halion sonic se is really good for starting up has a lot of good sounds for it being free so just go ahead and click that and right here the count is how many of that track you want so you could have as many as one - I don't know nine nine thousand I don't know but for right now I'm just going to put three that's a good start up I'm gonna just add the track it's gonna take just a little bit to load in hopefully me doing this tutorial isn't going to be too incredibly awkward anyway after you add that is if you add any instrument it's probably not going to play any sound because think of it like this it's like when you do that it's like picking up a book but you can't read it because it's it's not opened you have to go to a specific chapter and a specific page so basically to do that to pick up the individual instrument and fine-tune it you're going to go over here and go to edit instrument you're going to click on that and this window is going to pop up it's going to be different for every single instrument library that you pick but for what what we're wanting this is what it's going to look like for a highly on Sonic se2 choose a different instrument you're going to go to this black space here and it's going to categorize everything usually usually it will if it's not then just click on this box right here and then go to filters and it'll filter things out for you by category subcategory and all that stuff for right now let's just use a piano that's a really simple thing to use acoustic grand piano is a really good starting instrument a very good neutral sound for I don't know just composing you can pretty much exit out of this this window right here now because you already have your instrument set up you can fine tune it of course add more reverb change the sound of it the the width the sound all sorts of stuff like that but you don't really need a focus on that right now now that you have that set up and if you have a keyboard in you can just go ahead and start playing really so so really your instruments already set up if you don't have a keyboard and don't like orange you just don't like playing live you can actually manually an input every single note it takes time but it's very accurate there's no timing issues there's no latency or lag so it's pretty amazing to start doing that however you can either use a drawing tool you can click on here and then just drag how big you want to make a file or you can drag this thing right here arm and just double click in the middle of it basically what this thing is right here is it's your export length it's how big if you export it the whole file is how long the file itself would be you can obviously do things outside of that or before it but if you export it right now it would only export the music in between these two markers so you can do that I guess I don't know I'm really bad at this but it's okay to start editing the actual notes and everything you just double-click inside of there and you're going to see a new window pop up here's like I'm trying to teach you guys stuff and there's like crime behind me and sirens and stuff it's really annoying but you're going to see a few different things you're going to see this keyboard layout also called a piano roll and you're going to see this horizontal thing which is your measures its how long the note is is held so up up and down is the pitch left to right is how long it's held right here in this window here is your velocity which is basically how hard the note is hit so if you're playing the piano it's how hard you hit the note if it's a violin it's how strong you use your bow it's pretty simple but basically that doesn't really matter right now to start getting into things all you have to do is zoom in all these numbers here are the measures so if you have four beats in a measure this is measure 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 etc etc you can actually change the time signature in this box here if it's not up already just press alt K and it'll pop up and you can edit the time signature and this box here to change it to 3 4 time 5 4 4 4 etc you can even change the tempo right here by clicking on the tempo and just dragging it or just double clicking and typing it up this button right here that says click is your metronome and if you click on here this little pause button it's like a pre click so if you press record it'll give you a to measure metronome it actually starts recording which is very helpful if you like recording live but all that aside now basically it's really simple you can of course go up here and change how long you can make the note and stuff but quite simply you can just go to this note right here click on it and then drag it out that lasts from one whole measure or I can do four beats per measure or so on and so forth I can go up here and change how many like it changes how much you can edit if you go to one one all you can do is do one measure one whole note but if you go in you can go to half notes quarter notes eighth note sixteenth so on and so forth it's relatively simple I'm just gonna go to eighth notes because that's a really good thing to start off with I think actually like composing something in front of you guys would actually help you guys learn it easier so really I'm just gonna use a Zelda song or whatever because it's simple you guys know what it sounds like cetera et cetera I'm gonna do the temple theme from Super Smash Brothers slash Zelda - it sounds like so really all that is just eighth notes so I'm just gonna input it in here and you can press alt a to highlight everything an alt D to duplicate it because the next three measures is pretty much the same thing with a notes change too bit so I go up one up two and then back down one so already it's you dis completed four measures of music so you can just press spacebar to play the music or you can press this little play button to play it [Music] so all that sounds pretty good I guess for the instrument that it is you can actually change how hard it's hit with the velocity I already talked about that a little bit down here you're going to see all these little bars and stuff you can click lower to make the note softer or louder so I'm just gonna keep it maybe at 65 or so 80-ish will sound pretty good and I'm just removing the metronome and I'm going to speed up the tempo to maybe 150 bpm to those that don't know what bpm means it means beats per minute so now it sounds like this and basically this whole section just repeats over and over again so I can either highlight all that impress ctrl D to duplicate it over and over again or I can exit out of this and grab this right here and bring it over there and then just duplicate it that way that way I don't have to go in and that way I don't have to go in and edit every single thing that I want change I can just edit it by section so if I say oh I don't want 4 measures I don't want 4 sections of that I just want to play twice and I can select two of those and then just delete it or I can duplicate it over and over again as many times as I want so now we have one thing already made of course you can add different things to it change it however you want but I think that's pretty good for right now we'll just go to a new instrument um just a little bit of diversity to it uh let's go to strings strings is a pretty universal thing I don't know ensemble strings let's do that double click it and then I'm just going to make a whole section like that and I could exit out of this now and basically it's the same thing it's it's actually really easy from this point on now that you know what you need to do it's just a matter of experimenting as stuff I think this is how it looks I'm not I actually can't read notes very well so I do everything by ear so let's play it [Music] yeah that sounds I mean as good as it's gonna be if you wanted I kind of want this to be one octave lower so one way to do that is you can go to MIDI up here you'll see MIDI you can scroll down to transpose setup you can click on that and you can transpose it up or down however much you want I'm going to transpose it down one octave so now will sound like this and this part repeats once so we're already set up I'm just gonna delete these extra things here the good thing about Cubase is that you can change the instruments very easily since we already have this the note data already written out we can just change what we want to assign it to easily we can either go up here and change the instrument this way or we can honestly just drag it to a new section so honestly I can make this the piano part and this the string part I mean it won't sound good but you can do it you see so it's really easy to change things the way you want it to I'm gonna change the the right hand to may be strings staccato if I can I don't know if I have it on here maybe Pizza kado would work here we go I think I work pretty good okay okay the first thing that I noticed is that that's really really loud and I don't want to be that loud you can go all the way over here to the left and you'll see this little triangle I guess I'm gonna call it a door stopper that's the volume control you can slide it over as much as you want or you can use your mouse scroll on the number or just double click it and change it to the value that you want it to I'm gonna set it pretty low case okay you see it's already set up it sounds relatively good I mean for a short song one cool thing that you can do is if you want to repeat something over and over again to loop it and just keep adding things to it so you can hear it and add more stuff to it and develop it the way that you want to you can go over to this thing right here if it's not up already you can press alt K until it's the short version of it and you can press this button right here it'll cycle through anything that is highlighted in this blue thing so you can play it and I'll just cycle through you see and you can do that with any amount of music that you want and if you're done with that then just press the cycle again I'm pretty sure that you guys already know all these icons and what they mean aside from that one because that one's a little bit weird so I don't really have to go through all that all this stuff will be here doesn't really matter I don't even know what they mean to be honest and they really they really haven't helped me any so they must not be very important I think that's pretty much all the basic stuff and of course you can add different instruments it doesn't have to be from Halion sonic se it can be from anything really I've added I've already told you that I've added different libraries and stuff one of them being from contact 5 it's contact 5 it's kind of like a player I guess you could say kind of like how there's different ways you can play a video file like you could use Windows Media Player or QuickTime or something this is a different player for different instruments and I'm going to I don't know use a plucked grand piano because that sounds really freaking cool so it it's a lot of different things like what you want it to sound like and stuff the mood that you need and stuff like that like this is a very good fantasy almost medieval types sound [Music] but anyway I'm not gonna go into all that stuff basically now that you know how to compose stuff now you need to know how to export it exporting means you finish your song and now I want to turn it into an mp3 or WAV or whatever so that other people can listen to it and so it's not you can put it on your mp3 player or whatever or online basically all you have to do is make sure that everything that you want to be exported is in this make sure that and I did this before make sure that your thing isn't inverted because that's like saying I would like negative eight bars of music so make sure that you have everything exported the way that you want it to um press file go to export down here and you're going to see a lot of different things you're going to see MIDI file audio mix down and all the rest of this stuff doesn't matter audio mix down it's the thing that most of you guys are going to want to worry about basically just type in the name that you want demo stupid that's not how you spell stupid but it's okay I'm gonna just go with it demo is super Zelda Zelda thingy and then you just go down to the path and the path is just basically where you want it to end up so you can say desktop I want to send to the desktop press save choose the file type that you want to be saved as MPEG 1 layer 3 is an mp3 file so you can do that that's probably the best one to do you don't have to really worry about id3 tag what that is is basically the extra information like who is written by the album track number all this stuff and if you want to you can press insert id3 tag but usually it doesn't really matter if you want the exported mp3 to be put into your project file you're going to just click on this you're going to click on audio track import and to project audio track really most of you guys won't really need that so you can just unhighlight that and press export and it's done that's very simple what MIDI you can export as MIDI as well if you have a friend that composes or if you don't have really good instruments and you have a friend that does and you want them to kind of send them the the notes and everything and they turn it into a full orchestra or whatever you can send it as MIDI file um and just do the same thing that we did before so it's really simple that's pretty much basically everything that you need to know really um there's a bunch of other things that you can do but that's more you you don't really need to know about that yeah I think that's it thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed it then start writing music alright talk to you later bye

Channel: NathanaelPlatier

Views: 126,582

Keywords: Tutorial (Media Genre), Steinberg Cubase (Software), Software (Industry), Electronic, Industry (Organization Sector), How-to (Website Category)

Id: FsdM3VsIp64

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 25 2014