Intro to Cubase Stock Sounds: Cubase Elements 10.5 to Cubase Pro 10.5!

hey it's Jeff Gibbons here with another Cubase video and in this one I'm gonna go over some of the stock sounds in Cubase all the way down to Cubase elements so if you're using any of those top three versions of Cubase these sounds will be available to you and other sounds if you're getting the higher up versions and in this video I want to show you how to access those sounds what you can do with those sounds and then also how you can use some of these sounds without even using a MIDI keyboard so if you're just trying out Cubase for the first time maybe you've got the Cubase Pro demo or the cue base elements demo this video will be a great way to get you started with the sounds and if you're new to this stuff completely you'll definitely want to check out my Cubase basics of the videos and I go over a lot of the interface Basics in that one so I'll put a link to that in the description otherwise let's just get right into it and see how to access some of these sounds and everything I'm showing you can be taken so much deeper but this should at least get you started fine sounds drag them onto a track and then also start looking for patches in the synthesizers and in Hallion so let's have a look at what we've got here is our blank Cubase project and I'm just going to show you a couple key commands that I set up for myself and all you need to do is go up to edit and then two key commands and here I'm using Cubase elements so everything I do here of course will be able to do on the other versions of Cubase and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna sign a key command for an instrument track so I'm just gonna type an instrument right here properly and there we go we can see instrument add track pops up you can just double check that that's what you're doing so I'm going to go for an insert track I was assigned I to that and just disregard what this is actually assigned to and just hit assign and okay so now every time I press I I get an instrument track and just one key command that I use all the time so press I for an instrument track and then at the top is where you're going to choose the instrument that you want to work with so in this case let's start out by looking at what we get with Hallion song essy and how the ensoniq se is the scaled-down version of the program called Hallion Cubase is flagship synthesizer sampler it's got everything kind of built into this one device and you can buy other libraries for it from other manufacturers but in this case we're just going to use the Halion sonic se and the stuff that comes with it so I'm just gonna click add track and here is Halion sonic se3 so this is the very scaled-down version there's a version above it called Holly and sonic which just allows you to load sounds and then the flagship version Hallion which allows you to you know add your own sample libraries and make your own samples and stuff like that so it's a very complex instrument but this one is is the scaled-down simple version of it and it comes with a whole bunch of basic sounds so let's figure out how to access those so this is the first window you're gonna see and you click on this yellow bar right here to get to the different content that you have installed with your version of Cubase I have a bunch of other things on here so let's just go to se artist and see what we've got so now we can see I'm loading sounds just from this one content set and then you'll see the category on the left a subcategory character stuff like that to thin out the amount of patches that you're seeing down here once you find a patch if you like a patch you can give it a rating here so that you can filter your own results via your own rating we'll start out with maybe a synth pad so I'm gonna go to the synth pad category and then I'm going to go over here to the different patches that I've just shown up so all you have to do is double click on the patch and that will load up the patch so let's have a listen [Music] and with each patch that you load you're gonna see a bunch of quick controls right here that you can access that change certain parameters of the synthesizer so I've got a keyboard hooked up so I can just play it if you don't have a keyboard hooked up there are a few options so go up to where it says studio and go to on-screen keyboard which is option key on a Mac by the way I'm on a Mac so if I ever say command I just made control on a PC an option I think is alt on a PC so if I press option K up pops this little on-screen keyboard which is gonna allow me to play notes via this keyboard right here so if I want higher notes I can just click up a little bit higher so you can see I can play upper notes on the higher Cordy part of the keyboard and then I could those are all my white notes and then I've got the black notes in between and if I go down to the the Zed or the z key I got the same thing but down the octave [Music] so gives you an option to place some keys at least hear some sounds you can even record information into Cubase using this so let's just try that [Music] okay so now I just recorded a track again if you haven't watched my Cubase basics goes over recording and stuff like that make sure you watch that I'm going to assume that you have some basic understanding of the the ways to navigate Cubase alright so I've just recorded some MIDI information with this little on-screen keyboard I can go in there double click on it and then edit that MIDI information by the way I always like to have my MIDI editor look a certain way I like to change it so that I see pitch instead of velocity by different colors and then I also like to zoom in a little bit more so I can see the note names so just zoom in right so that you can see the note names and then I am good so right about there okay so I'm going to go through these different patches and try them out I'll make sure the option K is up so I can just play some sounds from the keyboard okay so the next one analog pad [Music] doesn't sound anything like a pad but I kind of like it I'm going to leave that track because I might want to play with it later I'm just gonna go through and find a bunch of sounds to start with before I actually start making some music so let's call that one age answers and now I'm going to press I for and oh if you want to key commands to work you got to get rid of this on-screen keyboard and so I'm just gonna option K to get rid of that now I press I and another Halion sonic let's close this one for now and look for some more sound so I still need a synth pad so let's go to synth pad and go to we'll go to the let's try this trip because that one is included as well I've got a bunch of patches here let's try that one Oh double click option K to hear the sound [Music] I'm gonna take my tempo of my project down so again tempo is right here just double-click I'm gonna put it at let's say 85 beats per minute [Music] it's kind of neat double-click on another one and by the way if you're trying sounds out and you're trying to use this little on-screen keyboard and you accidentally press a button like the e key that's going to switch the interface of Holley and Sonic and just so you don't get confused if you need to get back to where you just were and so just press the e key again and it'll switch it back here and from now on if you want to edit it click on the Edit tab and you won't lose all the other controls so just be aware of that if you're using this little on-screen keyboard in order to try out notes so I'm not finding the kind of pad that I want and so I'm gonna thin it out even further and go to warm pad sounds sorry some of these out [Music] all right let's go with moving background that one's a nice one we'll leave that one right there moving background okay so now I've got a pad I've got this kind of plucky sound let's load one more patch I'm gonna load up a bass sound so I'll turn off that for a sec go to add track Halion sonic and let's go to let's put it on the artist again we'll go to bass and I'm just gonna go to synthetic or synth bass let's do that and then let's go to soft that might work let's try this one too low let's just go at the portamento base for now alright so that's a bunch of Hylian tracks that's before we get into using those let's try looking at some of the loops that come with Cubase and Cubase Elements and stuff over here I've got this media side panel so if I turn this off right here we can see the right zone I turn that off if it's not on for you turn it on by clicking right here on this little button up in the top right corner and once that's open all you want to do is get over to media and it might look like this for when you first open it up and here we can choose things like virtual instruments and we can see the virtual instrument on our computer we can see effects so we can see loops and samples and a whole bunch of other stuff so let's start by looking at the loops and samples and we're gonna look at only the loops and samples that come all the way down with Cubase Elements and so now once you've done that you're gonna see these different libraries show up let's start with the soul assembly and you're gonna see all of this information show up down here all of these are different audio loops that we have in this library and so for audio tracks this is a little bit different we're going to be taking a loop and putting it onto a track to play with different types of categories I can look and see we've got beats we've got bass electric high hats all sorts of different loops so I'm not gonna mess with that just yet I'm gonna just go through and see what we've got [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so as you preview each loop you get a little play button and a stop button down here we can pause it we can cycle it we can turn the volume of the preview up and down right here with this little slider and right now we've got autoplay on so we're just going to here the the loop right when we click on it and what this button does is it allows you to hear what the loop would sound like at the tempo of your project otherwise you're going to hear it at the original tempo which was 130 beats per minute projects at 85 and if they're too far away it's gonna be time stretching things so like 140 beats per minute and at 85 beats for a minute project it's probably not going to sound great you're gonna get some weird artifacts and stuff like that so I would recommend just looking for loops that are closest to the tempo of your song that you're already set at and if you're not set it's something that I guess it doesn't matter to start with but let's go through and see if we can find some drum beats to start with so or maybe a Rhodes thing would be kind of cool too let's see [Music] good if I like something then why not just drag it onto a track so click it drag it right onto a track and now I've got that little chunk of audio on my track [Music] [Music] okay let's go through and see if we can find some more sounds to put in here [Music] just one sound each it's not really a loop it's more of a sample I like that too I can drag that on and then this one as well then I could compare them so I'm just gonna chuck them in there and then I'm gonna mute them to see which ones I like better [Music] let's go back to this one and press play a little distorted a little too crunchy for me that a lot let's just try that okay and if I don't want these ones then I can shift click on both of them and then right click and choose remove selected tracks do you really wanted to do is yes I really do so please don't war me again all right this little line right here is kind of cool I'm gonna drag it in and we can see that this one's in B minor and this one is in F sharp minor so we need to make these match up somehow and so if I look at my keyboard I can see that F or that B minor is 1 2 3 4 5 semitones away from F sharp minor so what I need to do is transpose this I can either go 5 semitones down or I can go one two three four five six seven semitones up so let's try five semitones down minus five in this little information line so this information line gives you the info on whatever you are clicked on so because I'm clicked on this chunk is telling me all the pertinent information for that chunk and by the way if the information line isn't showing up all you have to do is click this top right corner and where it says setup window layout make sure info line is turned on to see the information line and in that spot I can go and transpose it very quickly and easily so I go minus five and then let's have a listen to that [Music] [Music] it's funny because it feels a little bit late so if I want to move this over you can see that each of these the attack of these sounds it's a little bit late I'm just going to turn the snap off and resize this chunk so it starts right here I'm just gonna move that over see if that works that kind of works for now let's see what other sounds we've got let's try a different library so I'm gonna go over to get to a different library I just click this little back button right at the top here and let's go over to hip-hop vault for a second and we'll try [Music] [Music] try one more drum loop out of here so let's try it dragging this one in and turn out the other drum loop that's pretty cool let's duplicate that so in order to duplicate a chunk click on it and press command D as long as it's starting exactly at the right spot it will just copy it back to back for now let's just try something else out let's go over to my other tracks that I've made my how the in tracks and by the way if you want to change the colors option click on this top corner this little symbol and that's where you can change the color of your tracks alright so I'm going to go up to my base and see if I can come up with a baseline for this and then let's put our chill Sol roads back on for a second okay so for a baseline I need to figure out some notes that are gonna work so I'm gonna go option K pull up my keyboard again so there's F sharp right there okay so I figured out the notes that I want to play one this D and then a B and then the f-sharp so I've got a period M and then a G okay here we go so let's start this out I am going to press back to the beginning to press press stop and then I'm going to press record but it doesn't give me a count in so what I can do all I need to do is go up to transport pre roll and post roll and use pre roll and that's going to give me a little count in so now I will get two bars as long as I have this press this little click button e right over here and turn on click during count in and now when I press record I get two bars and I can see the information now as MIDI information as you will know from the other videos and I can just press Q to quantize these to whatever the grid is well my grid looks like it's pretty close to sixteenth notes so I press Q that should be a c-sharp right there and right there I'll just fix those two notes and just press return or the enter key I think it is on PC to close the editor and then now I've got a nice little baseline chunk I'm going to turn the snap back on that's J by the way snap back on and then now I can resize this if I want to now let's try another patch out let's go to this moving background press option K from a keyboard you know what for this one I don't even need to play it because I've got a little bass line in there that outlines the chords that I want so if I hold option and drag this bass line up now I double click on that and I've got a D chord to start with a B chord and then F sharp minor and then an a so I'm just going to get rid of these extra notes for this pad because I need this just to be very simple and then I'm going to take this up the octave and to take anything up an octave or take it up a note you just press up or down arrow take it up an octave press shift up and then now I hold option and drag this up and I get an octave it just made a copy I'm going to also put a note on the fifth of the chord so the fifth of a chord on a D is going to be an a so I'm just gonna option drag this down now this whole thing is gonna be moving in fifths let's see how that sounds and it should sound pretty good [Music] awesome and if at the pad I kind of want the notes to go all the way to the end of the bar so what I'm gonna do is select the notes and go over to the inspector for this track and see where it says length it's actually already on length I'm gonna quantize the lengths I'm gonna go fixed lengths but first let's set our length to a quarter or to a whole note so it fills up the whole bar and let's see if that works there we go fixed lengths and now it's made all of these notes exactly a bar long alright so I'm gonna set my quantize back to 16th notes because I probably want that later on option K [Music] playing with the keyboard as a MIDI player is not ideal so I would definitely recommend picking something up but let me see if I can pull this off I got my fingers on on the notes that work for this this song and go back to beginning just by pressing a stop take me back at the beginning press record [Music] [Music] okay wow what a challenge it's worth a try though you're really committed so now I press Q and I can see the notes that I've displayed so now I can go through and and mess around at these to be honest if you're if you're new to this kind of stuff you might be it might be easier for you to just pencil notes in and and go go with an easy key like a minor which is just gonna be all the white notes right so start learning about some chord progressions I do have videos on music theory as well so if this stuff is all kind of Greek to you then you'll want to go check that up for sure there is other things you can do let's let's load up piano just for fun I'm going to go to Helen and sonic well go to a piano patch and let's go to acoustic piano and let's just try this one it's probably something pretty decent actually you know what would be better than a real piano would be an electric piano so if I go to piano and then go to let's see if we've got other if I can't find it in one library let's try it in a different one let's go to the basic and see if they have piano and then we're gonna go to electric piano and then pull up a basic old electric piano there we go so now with that piano patch loaded here is another way that you can get information into Cubase without having a MIDI keyboard let's get that one in color and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go project add track and I'm going to go to a chord track I'm going to drop this on top and I'm gonna leave it to set too I'm gonna leave this chord track set to Halion sonic se0 one which is this one which I can rename roads so now with this chord track what you can do is you can enter in some chords to play on your track so I am going to hold option and click right at the beginning to draw something in and that's how you always draw something in Cubase whether it's drawing a chunk over on an on a file whether it's drawing a note hold option you can click and drag and the arrow will turn into a pencil and so now that I've got something entered in right here I can double click on that and I can choose a chord in this case I want it to be F or I want the first chord to be D major and then the next chord option click the next chord is going to be a B minor chord so I click on that and I choose B minor and you can also put this kind of stuff in through MIDI you can choose complex chords like 7th chords and slash chords by choosing a chord over here if you want a slash chord and then the next one option click double click on that one this is my F sharp minor chord let's make f sharp minor seven just for fun and then this next chord option double click or option-click and we've got an A major and we'll just leave that one a major so we can make these ones 7th chords if we want to make them a little bit more interesting we can even make this one a D major seven there it is so there's D major seven this little J I said pop up ok so let's have a listen to that and see what it sounds like [Music] I'm gonna take that aja answers and just turn it down for now okay so now that I've got this chord track working for my roads track here's a neat little trick you don't even have to record anything all you have to do is select the chords right here and drop them on to the roads track and I instantly get all of those chords put on to the roads track so now I can take the glue tool glue those together double click on that and then here is my chords for this little tune [Music] all right so one thing you could do if you were really not musical is go find a chord progression find it find your favorite song and figure out what the chords are D B minor F sharp minor a or whatever drop those into a chord track and then make an instrument track that you want say roads and then just drag those chords right down to that track then you could go look for loops that are in F sharp minor or if they're not in F sharp find a loop that's an E and then move it up two semitones so that it is in F sharp let's pretend for example that you don't play the keys at all and you just want to use this chord track to make a bass line as well I'm just gonna delete what I've got in there for my bass line drag this right onto the bass track this is gonna sound terrible because it's got chords for the bass which we don't want we just want to bass line so all I'm going to do is select all of the top information all the top notes so that I'm left with just a simple bass line and then now that's going to work with the song I think that first note is a little too low so I'll select it and go shift up the octave shift arrow up and don't forget to mute the core track because it's still sending MIDI information to this bass track which is not going to sound good so I'm just going to mute that and play alright so you're seeing how I can get information from the core track for other places so all of these things I'm showing you were just kind of scratching the surface there's ways we could take the chord track make it much more complex and use it in more complex ways this is just gonna get you going and you realize how much you can actually do with Cubase elements it's quite astounding so the last thing I want to show you here is just groove agent so I'm going to press I for an instrument track and I'm going to go over to drums and go to groove agent s II hit add track and in here I am going to load drum sounds and groove agent is just Steinberg's flagship drum program looks a lot like battery from Native Instruments and it's got some really really deep editing that you can do with loops so you can drag a loop in there you can assign it to different keys I do have a video where I'm using only stock Cubase sounds for an entire song and I go over chopping up the loop with that song so make sure you go watch that video I'll put a link to that as well it's actually on the Steinberg website right now but with this one what I'm going to do is just show you how to load up basic drum kits in groove agent and then maybe load some drum beats from there as well so let's click on right where it says kit one to pull up your touch browser and then here what I can do is click all instrument sets up at the top and see the different libraries that we've got let's just try production grooves so we'll go production grooves and then we've got urban hip-hop category right here and then let's see what two different kinds of sounds we've got I'm going to double click on one and now what I can do is click the little arrow to get to the next kit or back and forth so now with groove agent you've got these little pads and each one of them has a sample and when you click on the sample the sample is loaded up in the little sample editor right here and you can do everything to these samples in groove agent it is even in that groove Asian se there's a full-blown version groove agent and this is just the groove agent se this the simple scaled-down version and you can just do so much with this basic version it is it's pretty astounding so let's find a kit that we like that's actually pretty nice that cloak conspiracy wonder might just come back to that now it's got a little too much of vinyl for me right now let's go back to that cloak conspiracy and what I could do now with this one is I could go option K and I could try using the keyboard and I need to take this monitor button off my bass there we go so I can play those in I can draw them in with the pencil in fact that might be the easiest way let me show you that as the basic way to use groove aging what I'm going to do is I'm going to close this window right here and we'll go over to my groove agent rack give it a color and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to option drag a chunk right on the screen right here and I'm going to go over to the left hand side where it says no drum map this is the inspector I'm going to choose the GM map and what that does is it shows us drum names over on the left hand side instead of notes like we're used to with the key editor which is one of my favorite features of Cubase that's been around forever and let me just show you how easy it is to enter in a basic drum beat with the drum editor so with the drum editor now I can see these names on the left they don't necessarily correspond with what the sounds are so you're gonna have to go through them and what you could do is just option click or use the drumstick tool option click from the arrow and then now with this note selected I could arrow down to hear the different sounds all right I like that kick so let's try something out here I'm gonna try my own little beat see if I can find any just click to you erase them actually know one side sticking with snare here we go let's go with those ones right there [Music] and I'm going to mute the other drum loop that I've dropped in here right here just gonna mute that one here we go I don't know what there may be something like that that sounds fine for now and then let's go to a hi-hat whoops of course I could have said that to a post and drag it across but whatever I'm going to make some of these high hats a little bit softer with the velocity down below actually gonna make them a lot softer because I don't want those let's see barely audible and then I need these kicks to be a little bit louder okay Simon press Enter or return to close that editor and then now I press command D to duplicate this over and I've got a drumbeat that'll go through and if I don't like that KITT I can very easily just come up here and try a different drum kit out let's try that [Music] one [Music] [Music] if you're really not into programming drums have never done it before let me just erase this and show you one more thing you can do with groove agent that's really cool so if I click where it says pattern what I get here is some different drum grooves hold this and down as you see if I hold down these different pads we get some different grooves and there's all sorts of stuff we can do with that as well but just to keep things really simple if I just click and drag this pad right on to my groove agent track I will get that drum pattern [Music] so there we go I've got a simple drum beat put down on my track ready for me to use and the cool thing is I can go in and manipulate this unlike a audio loop what I can do here is double click on this and make this you know less complex or whatever if I want to so let's see how I could do that [Music] this extra snare maybe I want that to come only every couple times let's get rid of that extra kick too and then maybe make some of these more important kicks a little bit louder maybe make that one a little bit louder [Music] and maybe this one right here a little bit louder and then I'm going to get rid of I'm going to quantize those I'm gonna get rid of this the rest of it and then hold command D and just copy that over so now I've got a bit of a simplified drum beat that I just stole from the pattern in groove agent [Music] so these sounds just come stock with Cubase there are more sounds depending on which version you have but there's so much content in here but there's no reason you can't start making music right away with even the simplest version of Cubase once you've got all of your different sounds in there of course you're gonna want to start mixing so if you press f3 that'll pop up the mixer I like using the mixer in its own window but it is possible to use the mixer in the lower zone all you have to do is click this little lower zone button or it's command option B as the key command and down below I see the editor for what I've got selected but if I just choose mix console I'll see the mixer down below as well so command option B or f3 to see it on its own so there's the mixer and of course now I can go in and start doing some things like panning some of these instruments so that they're not all right in the middle change the levels I can hit the e button for them and start doing things like EQ and all of that good stuff so and of course I go into detail on some of these in the Cubase basics videos I've got three of them up already and more to come so that should give you a good start a good understanding of what you've got with the things that come with Cubase there are other things as well we've got some virtual incidents we didn't look at some synthesizers and stuff like that but as you can see there's a lot of content that comes with Cubase even in some of the lowest versions of Cubase so anyways I've got a lot more Cubase videos for you to check out and more coming maybe I'll dig into some of the complexities of these simple instruments in future videos so hit the subscribe button and thanks for watching and we'll see in the next video

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 44,070

Keywords: Cubase, Cubase Pro, Intro to Cubase, Cubase AI, Cubase Elements, Nuendo, Cubase Pro Tips, Cubase Basics, Cubase Tutorial, Best Cubase, Jef Gibbons, Gibbons Creative, Cubase Lesson, Cubase vs, Cubase tips, Basic Cubase, Cubase Beginner, Cubase Teacher, Cubase 10.5, Cubase Pro 10.5, Cubase Artist 10.5, Cubase New Features, Cubase Update, Steinberg, Cubase Stock Sounds, Cubase Included, Cubase Loops, Cubase Instruments

Id: zz3n2dy6v8I

Length: 39min 27sec (2367 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020