Intro to Cubase 10: The Basics!

hey it's Jeff Gibbons here and this is going to be a very quick intro to Cubase so this video is going to be using Cubase Pro 10 but most of the concepts will apply to a lot of the previous versions and probably a lot of the future versions as well so let's just get right into it with opening a project so when you open a project in Cubase for the first time whether you're on a Mac or a PC you go file new project and it will give you a prompt to find out where you want to put your project I usually turn off this use default location and I will go prompt for project location so that I can put my projects in very specific folders so let's get right to that I'm gonna hit create empty I usually start with a blank project so let's just find a folder here make a new folder called tutorials 2019 and I'm gonna call this Cubase intro tutorial and I am making this project folder inside a master folder for all of these projects that I'm doing and then I click open for that folder and and the thing you need to understand about Cubase projects is that this dot CP our file is your project file Cubase project file and it goes into a folder that I've just created for this project Cubase intro tutorial and you want to make sure that you make a project folder for every project file that you work on keeps all the other relevant files for that project inside that folder and so it's very important to make sure that you don't just put a whole bunch of projects in the same folder things can you just get kind of messy so keep it clean make a new folder every time you make a new project okay so this is the Cubase project window and you can see that you've got some icons up at the top and there are more icons that you can see just by choosing them by right-clicking in this gray area up here but these are some of the more basic ones that I will stick with down at the bottom we've got some transport controls that like play and stop over here we've got the metronome so this is the metronome click on and off and the key command to turn the click on and off is see this is what a blank project looks like on my other screen I've got a mixer and you can press f3 to access the mixer quickly and there's also a way to see things in this lower zone so if I look great on this icons over in the top right hand corner I can see show/hide lower zone if I click that button right there this lower zone opens up and I can see the mixer in that window if I want and I can hide that window as well with command option B is the key command for that so if I leave it at the mixer it'll stay there and if I leave it as the editor it'll stay as the editor as well and later on and we'll see what the editor does up at the top of the Cubase window you can see there the ruler this shows you the grid that you are working with so right now our main grid is set to a musical time base if I click on that and I change it to seconds you see up at the top that the grid now shows us minutes and seconds so if i zoom out far enough here I can see this is one minute right here and if i zoom in you can see seconds and then milliseconds as well I usually am working with music so I leave this set to bars and beats and that makes sure the ruler is set to bars and beats up at the top we also have a few other things that are important down at the bottom we've got our tempo which is 120 beats per minute so if I press play with the click on I can hear it clicking at 120 beats per minute and we can also see the time signature right here so if I double click right there and type in 3/4 we now have a 3/4 musical base for the ruler settings up at the top it's like if my song was in 3 4 or 6 8 I can do that right there and we can also have time signature change throughout the song if we want but we're just going to keep this at 4/4 and we'll leave this at 120 beats per minute for now this line right here shows you where you are in the song so I can click up in the ruler up to move that around I can click at the beginning there's all sorts of key commands you can create to to get you back to the beginning I have a couple of key commands set up so that I can press comma and it'll take me right back to the beginning if you are on a keyboard that has a numeric keypad which I'm not here you can also just use these transport controls and if you press play if you press stop again it'll take you back to where you just started from and that's a feature that I like a lot so if I want to get back to the beginning I need to stretch out my transport a little bit down here so I'm going to go like this so I can see a little bit more of the transport just with this one little divider right here so now I can get back to the beginning by clicking that little button right there and then we also have fast forward and rewind controls now as well as a loop function which works between these little white flags called locators so if I put my mouse up in the very top portion of the ruler so you'll see these little white flags here and if I stretch them out you'll see that this right flag keeps jumping to the next bar and that right flag is called called the right locator and this is the left locator and I can set up points to loop between with those locators so if I press play jumps right back to the beginning so that is the locators and the cyclic control on the transport down at the bottom next thing we should do is just add a track so that you can see what a track looks like in a project and one thing you can do is just right click in this empty area right here called the tracklist right-click choose add instrument track up pops this little dialog which lets you choose what virtual instrument you want to add so I am going to just choose one of the default ones that come with Cubase so let's go down to synth and this shows all the lists of all the virtual instruments that you have installed on your computer let's look at one of the ones that comes with Cubase let's look at retrologue and I click add track and up pops Sherlock so now that I've got retrologue open I can play it on my keyboard so just so you know when you're working with virtual instruments if you just click on a lot of them you will find some way to load patches for them in this case if you just click on the retrologue - right here they'll find a list of patches and in this list of patches what you can do is just look for different presets for this synthesizer [Music] trying to learn dark choir pad and you can also search for patches by subcategories so let's try synth pad and I'll pop all of the patches that are synth pads [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay let's stick with this dark choir pad I really like it and by the way I was just arrowing down on the keyboard to go through those different patches okay so once I've got a virtual instrument loaded there's other ways that we can load virtual instruments as well over in the right zone we can also select virtual instruments which is a really cool way to do this and they've got some new functionality in Cubase 10 but let's not worry about that right now so we're gonna call this dark pad and I can add another virtual instrument just by pressing I is my key command for adding a track and I've just made that key command in the key commands menu so I click I and I'm going to go to let's go to a drum one let's go to a groove agent and hit add track okay and then same thing here I can just click where it says kit one and up pops my presets so let's try let's see eight fit kit maybe it's kind of fun let's try this one that's pretty cool drum kit so I'm going to go with that let's figure out the tempo that I want to put this drum beat into my project so I'm going to go up to project beat calculator and you start tapping the tempo that I was just playing at so one two three four I'll tap spacebar one two three four I'm at about 82 beats per minute so I can actually chuck that in right there or I can go down and just change it right here let's go 82 beats per minute and press return and then now I can play that in so in order to play and record something in Cubase so once I'm ready to record what I usually like to do is just start recording right from where the project cursor is I press record and I make sure I give myself a bar of nothing at the beginning of each project then I press record all right so there's a fun little drumbeat in there I'm gonna double click on that now and see what I've got so I can look it at the notes that I just played in this lower zone there's also a way you can see it in a separate editor I do like working in this lower zone it keeps everything kind of connected and I can usually leave my mixer on my second monitor but let's have a look at the notes that I played and see what I need to do to fix them so once I'm in the editor we need to look at how my notes line up according to the grid which goes with the beats that we're playing at and you can see that I've got notes in here that should fall right on the downbeat we've got some that are on the first eighth note in between each beat and then I've got some that are sixteenth notes as well so if I were to set my grid to eighth notes this note right here would have nowhere to line up to so what I need to do is make sure my grid is set to 16th notes and then once I'm in here I can do something called quantizing which is where we take these notes and line them up push them to the appropriate line on this grid so watch what happens if I select these notes command a and then I press Q and the notes all move over to the closest 16th note which is perfect so now I can look at this sometimes you'll have notes that get pushed to the wrong sixteenth note if you were just a little too early or too late let's have a listen to this cool so there we go we've got a little drum beat played in and you can see how hard I played each note in this controller lane at the bottom which is showing velocity information so velocity is just how hard did you hit the note and we can adjust that of course I can make the notes these notes down here louder just by clicking right there and and I can fix things as well I can move things over if I want to high hats right there I could use the pencil tool to draw in another high hat so if I turn this little icon called snap right here on what it'll do is it it will only allow me to draw notes in according to the grid if I have that turned off if I have the snap turned off I can draw a note in wherever I want it doesn't have to line up to the grid I like to keep the snap on most of the time so I'll leave that set right there and now we can hear this extra hi-hat and maybe I want two of these little claps right here and by the way instead of going up to this pencil tool if you're on the arrow tool you can just right click and choose the pencil tool right there or you can hold option and have the arrow turn into a pencil which is the way I work all the time so you'll see my mouse magically turning into a pencil whether I'm in the editor or whether I'm up here as well I can draw new chunks right up top okay so that is working inside what is called the key editor so this window right here is the key editor and by the way if I click on this and I press return it will open up as well so there it is and I press Enter or return closes the window or you can press command option B to get to that lower window so there's different ways to get down there and you can make your own key commands for that as well so let's try playing something with the dark pad and we'll play something along with this drum beat okay so I'm gonna get myself one bar and press record [Music] all right so I've just played some notes in and let's have a look at those it's one little blip right here which I didn't mean to play so I'll draw a box around it to select it and then delete it and then I'm going to select these notes and press Q to quantize and that's it so now this those notes are quantized as well you can see that if I undo that you can see that these notes did not line up with the grid initially but if I press Q they will automatically move and if nothing is selected it will just quantize everything I can also resize the ends of notes by mousing over them and dragging them out so just like that I can have them all be perfectly one bar along each so that is playing notes in we now have some information on the main page which I can also mouse over and you'll see these little boxes appear and if I grab that little box and move it over I can resize it so I can do the same thing right here grab this little box resize it and then do the same thing on this one grab the box resize it and grab that box and resize that and now I can select these two chunks of information and I can press command D to duplicate them or I could select them and then hold option and drag them over you know always find yourself drawing boxes around things to select things whether you're in an editor or whether you're on the main page so that gives me duplicates of the information that I've already played and if I want to I could go I could do something like glue these together with the glue tool here and then I could go back to the arrow tool to double click on them and see that I've got eight bars of this phrase now and maybe I could change things up the second time around or whatever I want same thing with the drumbeat maybe add some variation let's just talk a little bit more about the layout of Cubase and get your brain around it so to change name I just double-click right here and I can rename the track and if I click this little icon in this area called the inspector I can click this icon and see the virtual instrument again so we call this icon the toaster and that's just an easy way to get back to the virtual instrument that you're working on and this patch is called ambush of Tigers so I'm gonna call this track Tiger KITT and if you press shift return if I just press return the track name changes but this chunk of information does not change so if I press shift return after I'm done typing it will also change the name on this chunk of information which is helpful to be able to see exactly what you're looking at when you have a project full of information another thing is they change the way to color tracks in the new version of Cubase so if you want to change the color of your track click on your track and go up to this little color menu and you can change it to a different color so let's go to a bit of a yellow track and then now if I press f3 to get to my mixer I can see that the orange track is orange in the mixer and the yellow track is yellow in the mixer while we're in the mixer just a couple other basic things this line right here it does left and right so I can have this dark pad come out of the left speaker or the right speaker and if I command click goes right back to the center and then I also have solo and mute for these kinds of tracks so I can mute one of them listen to the other one by itself or when you have a whole bunch of tracks obviously that makes a lot more sense so that's probably enough for the basics of the mixer for right now this is the inspector as I was saying over on the left hand side and if I click on a track I get detailed settings for each track so in order to see this dark pad virtual instrument again I would have to make sure that I'm clicked on that track and then I can hit the little icon the Edit instrument icon and up pops the virtual instrument you can make some changes to your virtual instrument and maybe change your patch entirely and then go back to working on it and then just talk quickly about the tool is up top we've got the arrow tool as I said which is the most important one when you're moving around and if you mouse over objects that's when you get these little squares that pop up and then in those you can grab those little squares and resize things or you can grab this square right here and what it does is it makes a copy just by grabbing it and moving it over so I'll delete those but there we go there's that little dot which gives me that copy as well I can resize this track to make it a little bit or this chunk to make it a little bit bigger so that's the arrow tool or the object selection tool I just called the arrow don't worry about range selection for now but pencil or draw is another way to draw information in so if you don't feel like playing your drum beat in you could draw a chunk go back to the arrow double click on this and then start entering in drum information by hand so let's see let's find a drum sound here there we go so we'll start we'll put in it's gonna sound great so you could draw information in as well oh let's get rid of that chunk and the eraser tool erases things the split tool splits things the glue tool glues them back together the X tool is for muting things if you want to try a different version out you could try muting something and see what it sounds like without that information in it but you can always unmute it at any time or you could cut something and say what happens if I take the drum beat out at the beginning and just mute it and then have the drum beat come in at bar six and then a couple other icons that are just kind of confusing for right now so don't worry too much about those this one feature right here is definitely something you need to get your brain around and that's called the snap feature and the snap function is very important because it determines how you move information around on the screen so with the snap function off I can grab this chunk of information I can move it absolutely anywhere I can resize chunks anywhere I want but in this case most of the time I want to have this snap on which restricts me to moving to certain specific bars so you can see right now I can only resize things to bars and that's perfect so when I cut stuff I can only cut exactly at bars what that means is it keeps all of my music exactly on the beat and when I move things it's exactly on the beat and if I want to get more precise I can change the snap setting right over here two beats so if I set this to beats now I can move things out by beats and if I set it to use quantize it will adjust to whatever this quantize setting is right here which is at sixteenth notes right now there are times where you want to turn the snap off so say if you want to have the beginning of a chunk of audio maybe a guitar strum that comes just slightly before the beat you don't want to chop that off so you want to make sure the snap is turned off for that so you can resize that chunk just a little bit earlier anyways we'll leave the snap on and set to grid and then I will usually leave this actually set to what called adapt to zoom and what this does is as you zoom in right now it's snapping to eighth notes if i zoom in more it's going to snap to 16th notes if i zoom in even more it's gonna snap to looks like thirty-second notes if i zoom way out it's gonna snap to beats they're zoom out a bit more now we're on half notes and zoom out more and now we're on actual bars this adaptive zoom feature is a fairly new one I think was in the last version of Cubase and it's pretty cool so you just leave it on and you can kind of forget about it but just zoom in a little bit more and get more precise with your snap setting so that is the snap setting adapt to zoom that's some basic information about quantizing notes how to get virtual instruments into your project and how to start recording so that you can have some fun so I'll be making some more videos get you going a little bit further on some of the details of Cubase when you're just getting started so go to gibbons creative dot CA to check out more about what I do and subscribe to this channel so you can keep updated when I'm posting new videos thanks for watching

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 182,722

Keywords: Cubase Pro 10, Cubase, Cubase Basics, Cubase Intro, Cubase tutorial, Cubase 10, DAW, Digital Recording, MIDI, Virtual Instruments

Id: nbluesCJP3Y

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019