Intro to Cubase 10: The Basics Part 2!

hey chef Kevin's here and this is the second part of my intro to Cubase tutorials so I'm gonna get a little bit more into detail on some of the tools and other things especially to do with MIDI and virtual instruments in Cubase and if it sounds a little bit like there is a snoring child in the video it's because I've got a snoring child in the studio so without further ado let's get into some of the complexities of MIDI on Cubase I'll show you the drum editor and something called iterative quantize and some other features of the key editor that are just going to make your MIDI editing life a lot easier so as we've seen in the last video I played in this dark pad so let me add another virtual instrument track by pressing I which is my key command so when you first open up omnisphere you just have to click anywhere on the logo and up pops this interface for the virtual instrument and for omnisphere all you need to do is click on this little folder right here not this top folder but the middle folder or click on the plus button to get to the patch browser so some terminology with virtual instruments a patch is just what we call a preset or a sound in a virtual instrument so it comes from the olden days of analog synthesizers where you would have actual patch cords creating sounds so you'd have these little cables called patch cords and configurations of these patch cords would make a sound and the term patch just stuck so we call them a patch and in omnisphere you see that it's the patch browser and so if you open up any virtual instrument you're gonna find some kind of patch browser and so an omni serves case you can see over on the Left if we have the category set to all and all of this metadata is set to all we're gonna see all of the patches inside omnisphere which is thousands and thousands of patches so it's kind of overwhelming and so what they've done is they give you ways to thin things out and every virtual instrument does this I mention this in the last video so if I just go over to pads and strings I'm going to find on the right hand side only patches that are somehow a pad or a string sound which is this kind of washy sound which we've already got this dark pad let's just try one for fun let's try this art and BPM category which is an arpeggiated patch which will do which will cycle through notes for me or BPM which is beats per minute so it'll be some kind of rhythmic patch so let's have a look let's try some of the patches here so once we find a patch that we like and I turn the click on by pressing C and I press record and play or play and then record [Music] with rhythmic patches you want these things to line up perfectly so there's no shame in quantizing these notes just make sure you go in and quantize them or also the rhythm is going to be slightly off with the beats of your song so you really want to fully quantized these kinds of notes so I press Q and it quantizes all of the notes to the grid and then I also with these rhythmic ones I want them to go all the way to the end of each bar and then end perfectly at a bar because they're rhythmic I don't want them to overlap slightly so I can select all the notes and over in the inspector of the editor we can see some other information and if you can't see it it might look like this just do this little drop-down which shows the quantize settings and what we can do right now is click quantize lengths and it's going to quantize the lengths to whatever our quantized value is set at and we can see that this little L right here which stands for length quantize we can have this one independent from the beginning of notes the regular quantized value which is this value right here but I like to leave it on quantize links so that I know exactly what my quantized values are for everything all the time so in this case I'm just going to set it to something like an eighth note or even a quarter note would work fine here because this isn't very complex or a very fast-moving set of notes so now I can hit quantize lengths and it quantizes the lengths of each of those notes so they go perfectly from the beginning of the bar to the end of the bar okay so that's just a little tip for working with rhythmic patches whether it's omnisphere or any other virtual instrument okay so now I can resize this I can turn the snap on one of my students just called this the butterfly and I kind of like that I think from now on I'm going to call this the butterfly so we click the butterfly or the snap on or off and now I can resize this and drag the ends of the parts so that they end perfectly and begin perfectly at a bar so now I can hold option and drag this over don't forget that option dragging is another way to create a copy so I just hold option drag it over let me show you another thing about this option control in Cubase whenever you're on the arrow tool if you hold option down it turns into a pair of scissors so I can click and cut with the option to land without actually changing tools I can also click option and if I hover over nothing instead of turning into scissors it turns into a pencil so now all I have to do is hold option down click and drag and I can draw an empty chunk right on the screen as a pencil tool so it saves me from going to the scissor tool or to the pencil or the draw tool and this works inside the editor as well so watch what happens if I have my arrow over nothing and I hold the option to light up in Seoul and I can draw in a note and if I hold option and click overtop of something it turns into scissors so if you're over top of something it turns into scissors if you're over top of nothing and you press option it turns into a pencil so the arrow tool becomes kind of this three-in-one tool as long as you're holding down the option key and whether you're over something dictates whether it's scissors or if you're over nothing it becomes the pencil so a really quick way to just draw stuff in or to cut things or to resize things without actually changing the tool ok so next I'm going to show you the drum editor I didn't show this in the last video but this is by far one of my favorite features of Cubase and it's very simple and you'd say why is this so great well it's because a lot of programs don't actually have a drum editor and Cubase is drum editor has been around for ever and it is great it's just very simple but instead of looking at something like this Tiger kit as simple MIDI information against the key editor which doesn't really help me for one thing it just shows me notes on the left hand side and with the drum editor we can actually use a template to start from and name each one of our notes as bass drum snare drum Handclap whatever that is you know you can rename each one of these sounds and see that in the editor I'll show you that in a second and then the most important thing to me is if you want to change the velocity of say this hi-hat hit right here I have to go in and select the note and then I can adjust the velocity in this information line I can double click and type in 90 don't forget that the values of velocity start at zero and go up to 127 so those are the amount the possible states that you have in MIDI and in Cubase so we have 128 possible state 0 to 127 and if I want to change the velocity of just this note it gets a little bit messy I can I can just click on it and then now you can see that I'm just adjusting the velocity of that note right here and not adjusting the velocity of this note right here but we'll see what the drumette editor does for us in a second so if I go over to my tiger kit track and I click on the left hand side in the inspector so I have to make sure I'm clicked on it and I go over to the inspector and right where it says no drum map I'm gonna click there I'm gonna get a drop-down menu that says GM map what's gonna happen when I click on GM map is it's gonna load up a basic general MIDI drum map general MIDI was something that was agreed upon probably back in the 80s and they sort of decided where a standard set of sounds would be and so they said bass drum would be on the C snare drum would be on the D another snare drum would be on the e they sometimes call that the or they call that the electric snare I think and then it went on we have Tom's and then we had high hats closed hi-hat open hi-hat etc so that the standard set of sounds and what that does is when I double-click on this now this tiger kit we can see I've got bass drum side stick hand clap closed hi-hat open hi-hat over here right so thing you need to understand about this is it's not going to necessarily line up with the draw sound that you're playing with that depends on the manufacturer we're working with I think a groove agent kit right now I can click this isn't the - doesn't look like a toaster but it's the same button that is the toaster on the main page so if I click this I can see what virtual instrument I'm using I'm using groove agent right now and so we can see that this isn't a side stick that's a kick drum right so it says side stick so we can just call this kick - because that's kind of what it is you don't even have to rename as if you don't want to I don't I often just leave it and I will know that this is the kick drum and the snare drum but if it helps you even go for it so this is kind of a clap and if we see if I use the pen drum stick tool here not the pencil but the drum stick tool I click there and sure enough that's a snare drum as well so I can use the drum stick tool to get rid of notes also so I can just click and get rid of them enter them and delete them with the same tool okay so a hand clap is fine this here if I click over on the left hand side of the drum editor you can hear the sound that you're clicking on so there I can hear the bass drum here I can hear the hi-hat and so on so that's the way to hear the note is just to click on the far left hand side of the drum editor and the great thing about this is if you click on the closed hi-hat track I can see all the closed hi-hat notes that are in my little beat here and then I can see just the velocity for those notes and the thing that makes this easier is now I can just go in and I can adjust the velocities of just the hi-hats I don't have to go and select the notes like I would have had to do in the key editor and I can go through and I can adjust the velocities of every other hit or something like that right so now I can have this beat that has some more variation in the hi-hat part [Music] okay so let's just try drawing a drumbeat in from scratch I am going to just move this Tiger kit over and I'll show you how you could enter in a drum beat from scratch one thing I was telling my students is entering in a basic rock and roll drum beat is probably a great place to start especially if you're recording yourself or some other musician on acoustic instruments that has never played to a click track before that can be a really awkward thing for people playing to this beeping thing and unless you practice to the metronome like your piano teacher told you to it's going to be kind of awkward so what I suggest is that they start with a simple rock and roll drum beat and the most basic drum beat you could have would be kick time on one and three and snare drum on two and four and then you can put high hats in at sixteenth notes or at eighth notes or at quarter notes and that would give you a really basic drum beat to play - so let's just punch that in in the drum editor and I can do that once I've got my drum my GM map turned on if I hold option and click and drag I create my little chunk I double click on that and then now I open up the editor and I've got my locator flags on the left and the right of one bar so that they'll just cycle between those two those two locators and then I can start entering it in my drum beat so let's go on my kick number two I'm going to put a drum kick drum in on one and three and then a snare drum or a hand clap on two and four so then I can go to my closed hi-hat and set it to eighth notes and drag this across so what I need to do is go to my quantize setting and set this to eighth notes and I also need to make sure that my grid type is set to use quantize and then now I can hold option and just drag along the closed hi-hat to enter in my very simple hi-hat part so let's have a listen to this okay let's try adding in a closed hi-hat or an open hi-hat maybe on the last eighth note there we go let's try making this more interesting let's put the quantize or the grid let's put the grid two sixteenth notes and start adding some bass drum maybe a sixteenth note before this snare and then maybe you could even try a sixteenth note after a snare let's see what that sounds like hey let's put some more kick drum in maybe right there let's try getting rid of this kick drum that's actually on three play it and play around with it a bit let's get rid of that one and try doing a couple bass drums just after this beat and then let's put this one back here and try something like this I kind of like this right there that's kind of fun let's try making the hi-hat a little bit more complicated and let's put in some high hats on sixteenth notes and then what we're going to do is we're going to adjust the velocities of just every other hi-hat note something like that I'll show you a trick where we can do that a little easier in a second [Music] and what I can do here is I can solo the drum editor from the rest of the song by pressing the s in the editor and then I can also click this button right here which solos just the closed hi-hat another thing you can't do in the key editor so another reason to use the drum editor let's turn the click off now let's adjust these velocities even more now here's another cool trick let me go back to adjusting the velocities and I'm gonna select every other note here all right watch what we can do within the key editor I can mouse over this velocity laying down below I get this little square that pops up right here at the bottom let me zoom in so this little square right here all I have to do is click and drag down and now all of those velocities go down and I can adjust them as it's playing to get just in the right spot whether it having to select each one of them again or maybe I want them louder or watch what I can do as well I can bring this up and then I can click over on the left hand side of this selection you'll see another dot and watch what happens I can grab that and I can do a little ramp of these notes of course that would be useful if you had everything selected let's take it back to something like this and what if we wanted all of these hi-hat notes to ramp in a little bit more I could grab all of them now and you see how that works kind of scales the notes down keeps everything relative and then now has this nice ramp up the velocities this is another one of my favorite features of editing with Cubase and this is stuff that you don't find in a lot of other programs as well so these kind of functions make editing MIDI in Cubase so easy and is one of the main reasons I continue to use this program let's have a listen to that let's take off the solo of the single instrument which is the closed hi hat because it's selected here all the drums and that's add maybe some other instruments in there let's try this I don't think it's a Tom that's kind of a neat click let's put that in other one that's pretty cool let's try another israil let's just click on one and then now with that one selected if I draw a box around it I can just arrow down on my on my keyboard and try out some of these other sounds let's put a little tambourine hit every once in a while yeah I like it on the offbeat's kind of like that let's do that okay that's fun little drumbeat know what I like to do is select that little drumbeat copy it over with command D or I could just drag it out I right-click to get my glue tool and I can select all of them with the glue tool and then just click on the first one and that glues all of them together now i right-click on my mouse just to get back to the arrow tool double click on that and now I can see this four bar phrase of drums that I've made and then maybe what I do here is add a little bit of variation in this drumbeat so let's have a listen let's maybe add a little snare fill right here and then maybe something else isn't a lot of Tom's in here so it's kind of a non-traditional drum kit but let's go like this go clap and then let's maybe make this a little more intense let's try something like that and then let's add a little crash cymbal or something so I'm going to arrow down until I find something and actually it lines up with the crash cymbal so here we go skip ahead there's a fun little drum beat let's go with that have a listen to it in the context of the song okay that's pretty sweet let's get rid of the old drum beat or move it over I'm gonna duplicate this whole thing and duplicate this drum beat as well now let's make a new track I'm just gonna show you one more thing we'll go to let's go to prologue and I'll hit add track and with the prologue I'm looking for a bass sound so again I click in this black empty slot right here and I go to where I find synth bass and then I start clicking on patches and seeing what they sound like so we'll try this tribal bass patch I've gone through and just found a decent one [Music] [Music] okay so I played a couple things in there I'm gonna press shift star to get the recording back up that's called a retrospective record so let's double click on that and we can see the notes that I played I know this one has I gave it a little bit of a swing when I was playing and I don't want to quantize the notes exactly because that will get rid of some of the feel of what I've done and so it's but instead of leaving it unquantified an iterative quantize has changed in the latest version and in order to turn iterative quantize on we go to this little thing right here click on that little button in the quantize menu now that I've done that when I press Q it's gonna quantize everything a percentage closer so watch what happens when I press Q you see this note is slightly off this note is barely off and this note is off by a larger amount what happens to them each of them gets moved 50% closer so this one now almost looks perfect this one is still slightly off and this one is still off slightly but is much closer than it was before let me undo that let's see it again redo undo and redo so if I press Q again it's gonna do another 50% quantize to get things 50% closer so in theory you'd never actually get there but I'm sure that's not if you kept pressing Q but I'm sure that's not the case if I press this button right here open quantize panel you can see what the iterative quantize setting is set at so I said 50 but it was actually 60% so it was moving the notes 60% closer doesn't really matter I usually leave that at 50% and so that way I know that I'm quantizing things 50% closer to where they should be and it's just a nice way to keep the human feel of these notes that were played but a tidies things up just a little bit so sometimes I will just iterative quantize sections so if I like something but I get to a spot that's a little sloppy just select those notes press Q and as long as this button is on right here you're gonna iterative quantize only those notes so so I think that's probably good for this tutorial I will into some other complexities in future videos and I'll go over audio recording and effects and things like that so thanks for watching and make sure you go to Gibbons creative dot CA to see what else we do and hit that subscribe button

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 48,302

Keywords: Cubase, Cubase Pro, Cubase Pro 10, Cubase Basics, Cubase Tutorial, Cubase Intro, Steinberg, DAW, MIDI Editing, Drum Editor, Virtual Instruments

Id: IlZUHrmzer0

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2019