Intro to Cubase 10 The Basics Part 3: Send FX, Insert FX, and EQ

Jeff Gibbons here with another Cubase basics tutorial send effects are short for auxilary send effects and they've existed for a long time ever since engineers had big recording consoles with lots of tracks going through these things and they all needed some way to access a reverb effect or other effects reverb was the most common one and it still is the most common one so the way it worked is they could send a portion of each track to this one device so big studios didn't have to buy if you had 48 tracks on your console you didn't have to buy 48 separate reverb devices for the entire project all you have to do is buy one reverb device and then use the console to send a portion of its track over to that reverb device having this ability not only did it save you money when you purchase the reverb devices are not having to buy all these reverb devices it also made your entire project have the same reverb device you could then go over to the reverb device and change the size of the room and instantly every track that's outputting to this reverb device would sound like it's in a smaller room or a bigger room or whatever you want it to change so why does this matter to us in the software world well the truth is we don't need to use send effects and you could get away with using an insert effect on every single track with its own special reverb and sometimes we do that but for the most part when you're mixing you want to place all of the tracks in your project in a certain of space and so send effects are the way we do that and if we do that and we make one send effect available to the entire project we can create a space that's unified we can send a variable amount of each track to this reverb device so that you could have more reverb on perhaps the voice and less reverb on the drums you could have less reverb on the main vocal and more reverb on the background vocals so they sound like they're farther away these are all tricks that we use when we're mixing with reverb benefit is you can then go change the size of that room for the entire project on one reverb device so that's why we're still using send effects and in Cubase the way we do it is we go up to project add track effect so in this little window we need to choose the effect that we want and I would say two of the most common things still used as a send effect today are reverb and delay so we could go to the one of the reverbs that is available to us in Cubase and I'm just gonna stick with the reverence one for now and the configuration I want to keep this stereo because it gives us a stereo reverb and then we don't need to worry about the rest but let's go give this a name so I'm gonna call this Rev verb and then I'm gonna hit add track so you can call it whatever you want but once you do that the reverb pops up I can move this out of the way for a second and when we go to our mixer or when we press the e button for any track and over on the right hand side we can see the sends under the sends we click in this drop-down menu and I can see the Rev verb that I just made and you won't see a show up here until you make an effect track under project add track effect next thing I need to is turn the power button on and I could turn this slider up or down to choose how much of this overdrive kit I'm actually sending to the reverb so what I need to do now is solo this track so I can hear the reverb and let me just pull up the mixer so you can see what happens when I do that so there's the mixer right here and watch what happens when I press solo we can see that my overdrive kit is soloed the output is solo because we want to hear the output but also this new purple track this fader this purple fader over here that says reverb is also soloed and this is what an effect track looks like in the mixer so you can see that it shows up in the mixer almost like an audio track or an instrument track but if we look up top we can see that there is actually an insert effect on here and that insert effect is the reverence that we chose initially when that dialog came up you can go to this tract here I could press the e button for it and you could add other effects on here to the reverb so let's say you had a delay you could actually put some kind of filter on that delay as well so that all of the delays would have some kind of crazy filter on it as the echoes are happening but for now you'd probably just want to keep it simple keep the reverb on there and that's it and this is also where you can go and make changes to the reverb itself so you can hit the e button for the reverence the reverb right there and pop it up and change the preset if you want and with this reverb called reverence this is cue basis or Steinberg's version of a convolution reverb so we can hit this Browse button right here and I can go down to I'm gonna go down to let's try the Japanese Concert Hall this is probably one of my favorite reverbs in reverence and I can go back over to my drums for a second and I hit the e button for the drums and I can see that I've got a little bit of reverb going to the drums right now so let's have a listen to this now as I move this up more and more of the drums will go to that reverb I like it right about there just a little bit of reverb on the drums really notice it on the on the snare hits or whatever and you'll really notice it on s's on voice if you have voice in your project let's go to the drum pluck and this is a groove agent kit that's taken from the bouncy vibrations pack that you can buy from Steinberg online it's got some neat little sounds in it so that could use some reverb could use some echo too and we could put some delay on it here as a send effect let's try some reverb on that let's have a listen so one thing you'll notice is if you didn't have any reverb on the track when you first solo the track and then you go add reverb just the way I've been showing you you still won't hear anything and that's because when you initially solo the track Cubase knew not to solo this reverb effect track be because it wasn't being accessed at the time so now watch what happens if I take the solo off and put the solo back on now you see this reverb effect track is so load let's have a listen to that so let's put lots of reverb on that I would normally go through an ad River to the rest of tracks but let's not worry about that right now but let's say I want to add one more track let's just add project add track effect and let's add a delay so I'll go to the mono delay keep things simple for right now and we'll call this mono due today and add the track and in here I'll show you one of my favorite delay settings that everybody should know about when you're first getting into the stuff and that's the dotted delay so so I'm gonna put on this track right here so first thing first let's put our delay add a half note and then I'm gonna go to the e button for bass lead go over to the send effect and make sure that the mono delay that I just made is on and turned up so let's turn it right up there's half notes okay let's pretend it set it to quarter notes there's quarter notes and then let's set it to you know six eighth notes now the fun one that you know you should know about and don't have to use it every time but it's used very very often and it's very popular because of this rhythmic complexity that you add when you use this method is to use the eighth dotted or the sixteenth dotted the T just means triplet and what we want to try is this dotted one so let's go to an eighth dotted and then sometimes it'll be sixteen thoughted depending on the speed of your project but in this case I want eight dotted instead of repeating the note every eighth note it's going to repeat it every eighth note plus a half of an eighth note which is a sixteenth note so it's kind of like moving it over three sixteenths sometimes you'll see that on some delay so let's have a listen to what it's doing but but but but but so that's what's happening when we use that to get a little more technical I could go in and look at this so if I draw this in just to show you visually what's happening when I said it's like adding an eighth note plus a half an eighth note here's an eighth note so right because there's a quarter note right there so this would be a quarter note this is an eighth note this is a sixteenth note if I go back to eighth note for a second and add a half of an eighth note that would just be one more sixteenth note so now to see that in note form let me just let me just copy this up and let's have a listen to that so that's what's happening with this delay it's going duh duh duh listen to it again so that's the dotted note delay setting I'll show you what it sounds like on this project if we go over to the drum pluck thing here hit the e button go to the drop-down and go to mono delay turn it on and let's have a listen to that one so just add some complexity to it in this really simple little little track there if I go and do this to the drums let's try a little bit [Music] you know actually kind of works having it on a little bit but this is of course is just another trick in your toolbox so that is send effects now to talk very briefly about insert effects so you understand the difference between them insert effects are any effects that are inserted completely onto the signal path of your track so that's pretty much everything else let me show you what I've done to these electric guitar tracks let me hit the e button right here and over on the left hand side we see inserts so if I click the little drop down I can see all sorts of effects I've got all of my effects in here and I am going to go for the distortion category because that's where I've got some of cue basis amp simulators and so the amp simulator makes it sound like my electric guitar here was plugged into an actual amp with a microphone on it and all I did was record the microphone directly into the audio interface and it sounds it sounds pretty weak without it so let's have a listen to it it's just clean electric guitar no effects no amp let me hit the e button for this go over to my insert side I'm gonna click the drop down menu right here and I'm gonna click oops and I'm going to click distortion and I'm going to choose VST amp rack so this VST amp rack is Steinberg's virtual amp rack and we can see we've got all sorts of things in here we've got amplifiers different amplifier imitations we can sort of tell what they are based on by the look of them or the name we've got cabinets we've got post effects all sorts of post effects we've got microphones that we can choose to be on the amplifier itself and then a couple of routing things as well as some settings including the tuner how they recommend using the tuner the tuner is great you got a nice big tuner down here at the bottom and yeah so you don't have to touch any of these if you're a little freaked out at first you can click the little black area and you pull up the presets so let's just try this first one in here 60s in London so if I press play crank up the game crank up the bass take down the Beast [Music] brightening it brighter more you crank up the game the more distortion you have we'll just leave it right there this guitar track is now running right through that VST amp rack it's the great thing about working with programs like this is that you can record your electric guitar dry and you can choose an amp listen to it work with it for as long as you want come back a month later and decide you know it's too much Distortion change the amp entirely change the effects entirely and you don't have to re-record the electric guitar so you just you can plug your electric guitars edit them get them perfect and then you can change the sound completely at any point I love that feature and I use that all the time so the last thing I will show you here in this video is just EQ and the EQ window is also in this channel settings so you press that e up pops the the channel settings window and we've got this big thing right in the middle here that is our basic EQ that comes with Cubase and this EQ is great it sounds good and it's extremely powerful we see the frequency range from left to right which is 20 Hertz all the way up to 20,000 Hertz the full range of human hearing so 20 Hertz being the lowest frequency 20,000 Hertz being the highest frequency and then over on the left hand side we've got decibels so zero decibels up to plus 24 and all the way down to minus 24 and so this is how we can boost free specific frequencies by a certain amount of decibels left side you've got filters and we've got a high cut filter and a low cut filter and so these would cut frequencies entirely so if I go high cut filter and drag this down like this watch what happens to the drums sometimes what we'll do is put a low-cut filter on anything that doesn't need to have super low frequencies so the low-cut filter is often put on especially on female vocals where you know there isn't gonna be any frequency content below like 50 or 60 Hertz put a low-cut on there and if there's any plosives those pop sounds that get really base on the microphone you can put this filter on and it will get rid of those and you won't hear in in the mix so low-cut filter is great on some things you got to be careful that you're not getting rid of important parts of the voice or instrument if you are putting it on on a male voice or on instruments but that's the low-cut filter cuts all the frequencies past a certain point so you can turn it on and off with this little power button right here and then the next thing we've got is four available control points for EQ and so the first thing I don't need to understand about this type of EQ is the curves so you've either got a shelf like this shelf right here and I can click and drag up and you can see the shelf it starts boosting at a certain point and then goes all the way up to reaches that point and then stops there and continues all the way down to the left side or to the right side if it is a high shelf unlike a filter you can just do this a little bit or a lot a filter will do it entirely so that's the difference between a low shelf and a low-cut filter so these are our two shelving eq's on either side and you just click dragon have a listen so let's see what happens if we give a general boost to the low frequencies and to the high frequencies on these drums or cut and I love how Cubase several versions ago came up with this visual of what is happening with the frequencies that you're listening to so we can see all of the frequencies of this drum kit laid out right here and you see those two different lines one showing you where the frequencies were and one showing you where the frequencies are now after your change a very cool feature so those are the shelving eq's in a nutshell there are some different versions of these shelving EQ s don't worry too much about those let's have a look at the next type of EQ which is this bel type EQ and so if I click on there we can see we've got parametric one or parametric two and again the default is parametric two if I look at parametric one it's got a slightly different slope and the way a parametric EQ works is you have three controls you have gain frequency and bandwidth or Q and so we can see these three controls right underneath here we've got gain right here showing how much we're boosting or cutting so positive or negative and then we've got the frequency itself as the next one so where we are choosing the frequency and then we've got the Q or bandwidth and I can grab this little slider right here and make it either really narrow or really wide so really narrow is 12 and really wide is 0 so let's take it back somewhere in the middle and by the way if you hold shift and click on this little control point and then drag down you can play with this the Q value without actually touching this slider so shift and that changes the Q value Q stands for quality factor by the way anyways so if I hold shift drag this up now let's have a listen and see what this is doing so that's very basic EQ settings as well for you but also very important so have a look at the EQ try it out understanding where to put EQ on is a tough thing because there's no right answer for it you know it's it's up to you but there are times where things just need more bass or less bass or boost in the high frequencies the other thing I like about this is you can see the notes so I can see that this is a B this is a C sharp 1 this is an e you know at 83 Hertz this is an e if I go all the way down to 40 Hertz that's the low E on a bass guitar right so I know that I can boost that frequency in the song so or maybe you have a problem where the e in your bass track and you're in the key of E it's sticking out is resonating way too loud in comparison to everything else well just go and turn down that one note and now whenever that bass synth gets to or bass guitar gets to that note gets reduced in level so those three things send effects insert effects and EQ our song production essentials having some grasp over those things and knowing the basics of them is very important and I highly recommend trying these things out on your your songs put a reverb on your project try using some of the send effects and then go and check out the EQ and see what happens if you start playing around with the EQ maybe you make your piano track a little less bright and you make your guitar track a little less Basie and maybe those two tracks fit together a little bit better they might not sound as good on their own but put together you're now giving each instrument a bit of a niche so things like that are how you want to start playing around with an understanding EQ so I hope that was helpful for you hit the subscribe button for more videos in the future and thanks for watching

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 44,988

Keywords: Cubase, Cubase Pro, Cubase Pro 10, Cubase 9, Cubase 9.5, Cubase 8, Intro to Cubase, Cubase AI, Cubase Elements, Nuendo, Cubase Pro Tips, Cubase Basics, Cubase Tutorial, Best Cubase, Jef Gibbons, Gibbons Creative, Cubase Lesson, First Cubase, Cubase vs, Cubase tips, Basic Cubase, Nuendo Tutorial, Cubase Beginner, Send FX, Insert FX, EQ, EQ Tips, Send FX Tips, Cubase Send FX, Aux Send, Aux Send Cubase, Insert Cubase, Cubase Teacher, Cubase Master

Id: eTlrE43L4Vs

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2019