Master the Channel Strip in Cubase- Mix like the wind #cubase #channelstrip

and i wouldn't be exaggerating if i said that if you really want to you can pretty much do your entire mix using the channel strip without any plugins hello everyone welcome back dom here and in this video we're going to talk about one of the most powerful mixing tools in cubase in this video i'm going to show you how to master the mighty channel strip right after this [Music] [Music] like i've said on previous videos like the 20 reasons why the cubase mix console is the best mixing platform on any daw in my opinion cubase is a super powerful daw when it comes to mixing it has so many facilities so many different options so many shortcuts to do things that would otherwise take ages one of the things that's built into the cubase mix console that's really mind-blowing and really really sounds amazing and it really can help you get your mix to a point when it already sounds great without even adding any plugins this is the channel strip and that's what we're gonna talk about today but before we get started if you haven't subscribed to the channel please subscribe i would really appreciate it i would love to see you back and if you enjoy this kind of videos please hit the like button it really really really really helps i have this track here that i've prepared i have some really cool sounds on this track by the way i'm using the modern 80s drum kit for my drums if you haven't got this yet please pick it up it's my own signature 80s drum kit it's free i hope that it's still free by the time you see this but yes i have this and i also have quite a few sounds from apollo my new patch up library that was released recently again if you haven't checked it out i'm going to leave a link right here this is a library that took me a year to create so i hope you enjoy it but anyway i have quite a few sounds here at this stage i'm not using the channel strip yet but i'm going to show you with examples what you can do with each module of the channel strip let's have a [Music] listen let's start with the drums shall we first of all when i'm talking about the channel strip i include the eq in the channel strip as well because it's part of the channel strip right here now as you can see we have several modules in the channel 3 we have gate we have compression the compressor can have up to three different flavors we have the standard compressor very transparent very versatile we have the tube compressor which to my ears it sounds very much like an optical compressor like an la2a and we also have the vintage compressor which is a more of a fat like compressor very fast very punchy then we have the eq then we have the tools that can be either a de-esser or an envelope shaper i'm going to show you all these things straight away then we have the saturation section it's one of the most useful ones when it comes to adding color to your mixes we have magneto this is also a plugin in cubase tape saturation and tube saturation and then we have the limit section where we have a brick wall limiter maximizer and a standard limiter now i'm going to explain all these things in detail so stay tuned the first thing that i want to tell you and this is something that many people forget is that you can rearrange the order of these modules very easily if you go here to strip then you can change the order and the way you do this is you just click and drag for example if i want to place my eq before the compressor i can do it like that i can move it around maybe i want to add a saturation module and then maybe i want to place it at the very beginning now i would like to say that the default order of the channel strip makes total sense so unless you're looking for a specific sound or if you don't know what you're doing i wouldn't change it necessarily now this is the first thing the next thing is that you can place the channel strip before or after your inserts which is really really useful so if i click here you can see i can move my channel strip to pre-insert so this way my channel strip comes before the inserts and this way it comes after the inserts it makes sense if you want to have a limiter on every channel just to make sure that you're not peeking then i would suggest that you place your strip at the end of your chain even after the inserts but again there's a lot of flexibility and it's so easy to change things around that you can go by ear and depending on your material you might want to have different configurations let's go and start talking about the channel strip first of all let's talk about the eq you all know about the eq it's a very good sounding eq in my opinion i use it all the time i use it to cut i use it to boost i use it to do some surgical eq tweaking and i'm using it a lot for the pre-gain and the filtering i use these filters all the time especially with my cc121 i can just use my ai knob here and do my filtering very very easily and same goes for the eqs i love the ai knob on the cc121 if you haven't checked it out i'm going to have a link right here for the cc121 video let's listen to these drums and let's hear what we can do with the channel strip okay if i wanted to enhance the snare for example a little bit i would add a little bit of see one db but it's enough the eq is very very good okay that's it perfect now let's move on to the channel strip let's take it one by one first of all the gate let's see what we can do with the gate the gate is a very very useful thing to have i would suggest you have it first in the chain but basically you can use it to remove any noise from vocals you can use it to remove breaths you can use it to remove any noises from guitar recordings or you can use it to isolate a snare for example or you want to do some drum processing in this case i can make this drum kit a little bit more staccato you know a little bit more short and i can even activate a filter so maybe i want to have my gate being sensitive to the low end see let's sweep the filter [Music] you know why that happens because now the detector for the gate tries to find the frequencies in order to open it and because we're in very very high frequencies it doesn't open it so often but if i move here to the snare territory see i can even isolate the snare almost so you can create some really interesting effects with the gate and it's very powerful using the filter you can isolate specific elements and really really fix problems as well if you want to so in this case i'm not going to use the gate because i like the sound of this drum kit and i'm going to go straight to the compressor let's have a listen and here i'm going to show you the different flavors that we have i'm going to start with the standard compressor first and i'm going to hit the e button so that i can see the big interface that's another very cool thing that you can do you can actually go and check all the parameters of each module okay so let's go for relatively medium attack fast release and i like to turn the makeup gain off most of the times because i want to be able to control the level manually okay so this i might use as a vca style compressor maybe like an ssl or something for my drum kit so you can see it adds a lot of punch it adds attack but it's still a relatively clean compressor if i go to high ratio it sounds very very aggressive and we have all the usual suspects we have the threshold this is where we set the level where the compressor will start working we have the attack how fast the compressor is going to grab these transients hold is a very interesting one and i think it's very useful sometimes it works in a similar way like the release but it's completely manual independent of the level of your signal so for example i can have a very short release but if i open the hold [Music] it will still keep the gain reduction going regardless of whether the signal has dropped below the threshold so it's a very interesting control and i would experiment with it because you can come up with some really interesting [Music] sounds compared to the release for example see they are completely completely different for the release we also have an auto release which is really common for vca compressors and i would say just listen and see what sounds better to you nevertheless i love the compressor in cubase and in the channel strip i think it sounds really great and you can get some really amazing sounds out of it let's move on to the next compressor and that's the tube compressor now this is more of an opto style compressor it's a little bit more smooth a little bit creamier i would probably use it for vocals let's go here i'm going to go to my vocal track and i'm going to use the tube compressor and i'm going to hit the e button so that we can see it in all its glory let's try it out [Music] and what i love about the qi compressor is that it can compress 14 dbs but it still sounds smooth it still sounds creamy now with the tube compressor we also have some more options like the drive this can add a little bit of saturation a little bit of tube warmth to your sound we still have the attack and the release which is not a typical thing for opto style compressors and we also have a side chain filter and if you want to know more about this i've done a video on these compressors i'm going to link it right here now let's have a listen the character can also give you a little bit of air to your vocals i love that so without it [Music] so again we have an auto release if we want to but i think this is a great sounding compressor as a whole very very nice let's move back to the drums in this case i'm going to use the vintage compressor let's have a listen this is like i said a more punchy more aggressive compressor so it works great with drums and for drums i tend to open the attack a little bit drive it use with caution and sometimes i really like to add the attack mode which is the punch so you can hear this compressor is way way more aggressive it has a lot of character a lot of oomph and the great thing is that you can mix it in like all of the compressors with the dry signal so you can really be aggressive with this use it as a parallel compressor and blend it with your dry drums let's try [Music] that oh by the way if you haven't noticed you will see that we can see the gain reduction right here in the view meters in cubase that's really cool and that's when you use the channel strip see now let's blend it in that's without the compressor so even with 50 we get a very very nice pronounced attack it's really really beautiful let's move on to the next thing that we have in the channel strip of course after this comes the eq and then we have the tools now the tools are really powerful they can really really change the shape of your tracks but before i talk about the tools i want to talk about today's video sponsor and that's skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for curious and creative 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release it can make a sound tighter or it can make a sound longer and the length changes the attack length so if you want to add attack to the very very first bit of the transient then you can set it to you know just a low value like nine milliseconds but then if you want to also enhance the body of a snare for example then you might want to turn it up a little bit for kick drums you might find that you need to turn it up a little bit more for snares it depends on the snare let's have a listen [Music] see the difference now i'm affecting the hi-hats a little bit but then i get more and more of the body of the snare of the kick drum and all these things of course use it with caution don't overdo it because it it sounds really good and it's very easy to overdo it there's always this output gain control here so if you find that your levels go a bit out of hand because we're adding a lot of attack you can just tame them like this now let's try the release or tight and this is the sound that i want and these are some of the sources that i have in the modern 80s drum kit and these are tools that can be very handy when you're mixing so let's enhance the attack a little bit i'm going to keep the release where it is and let's listen the next tool is the de-esser now the dsr is really straightforward i can just activate it and let's try it on these vocals you can set the frequencies here so you can set your low frequency low range and high range and we also have a threshold how much gain reduction we're going to have for the s's and also the order threshold the other threshold is really useful if you want to get to the sound very quickly but if you want you can also deactivate it and use the actual threshold control which is what i tend to do most of the times let's have a listen see it grabs the assess so when you hit the solo button you can hear this range and when you hit the difference you can hear what the de-esser does what it removes from your sound let's have a listen so this actually helps you set the frequency range and this shows you what the dsr does [Music] so again try not to overdo it i would play with a threshold until i see there's a bit of gain reduction and then i usually tweak the reduction so that it sounds [Music] natural [Music] simple it's a really effective de-esser really good to have it in the channel 3 without opening a plug-in the next thing that i want to show you is the saturation and i'm going to keep going with the drum kit because i think you will be able to hear quite a bit of the color of its saturator the first one is the magneto magneto is one of my favorite plugins in cubase and this adds this kind of tape saturation this tape sound to your tracks again it's very easy to get tempted and added on every channel and you absolutely can it's going to sound great but of course trust your ears see if it works with the music now let's play so as you can hear it makes the sound a little bit more round it gives you this kind of tape characteristic if you've ever passed anything through tape you will know the sound it's not like everything changes but you can hear the transients become a little bit smoother you get this natural tape compression it's beautiful there are quite a few things that you can do here first we have the saturation this is how you much you drive the magneto2 with this control we can set the lowest frequency that the saturation is going to be applied to for example if you want to leave the low end alone you can just go and turn this up and set it to i don't know 400 hertz a thousand hertz but this is something that you really need to listen and determine what sounds best let's try it personally i love what the magneto does to the low end so i tend to keep it quite low next we have the high frequency adjust this allows you to enhance or reduce the top end of the signal and this kind of emulates the loss of top end that you might have with tape everything becomes a little bit smoother but if you add top pen to this it also sounds really nice let's try it out hear that and the high frequency does exactly what the low frequency knob does but for the high frequencies so if you want to leave the high frequencies unaffected by magneto then you can just set your limit here and if we want to listen to these two controls we can just press the solo button and now we can hear how they sound [Music] so you don't have to do any guesswork with magneto everything is laid out in a very very nice way and it all makes sense i think that magneto is one of those processes that you cannot really make it sound good it's always going to sound better and if you add it to drums to vocals it's going to give you a very nice color if that's what you're looking for because not every style of music works well with tape the next is the tape saturation and this i tend to use for sims i tend to use for vocals it's really nice it adds a very nice top end it gives presence to the sound to me the tape saturation is a little bit more aggressive especially when it comes to transients so like i said i'm using it a lot for synths let's go and use this for this brass sound that i have here that comes from apollo let's go here and play it [Music] i love it for seeing sounds like this it makes them come alive it makes them fuller it makes them get their place that they need in the mix so i love that tape saturation along with tube saturation actually are really really nice on synths let's try this tube saturation for this synth [Music] and it also breaks up really nicely and this is one of the ways that i like adding volume to my individual channels instead of doing this you know i prefer to add saturation i prefer to add harmonics i prefer to add color to the sound and as you can see it sounds really nice it's thicker it's better and you know again you have to trust your ears sometimes you might just need to ride the volume but i prefer to impart any changes in the most effective way like with everything that i showed you we have a low filter and we also have a high filter now the last thing that i want to show you is the limit section and the limit section i think it's a little bit underrated with the channel strip let's take it one by one first we have a brick wall limiter this is very straightforward what it's gonna do is wherever we set the threshold it's not going to allow any audio going over this threshold we also have a release an auto release works pretty much like the compressor so let's have a [Music] listen now the reason why i use this i use this as a safety net if i get too excited and i start adding a little bit of volume to my channels this will let me know because first of all i will see it second i will hear it that the sound is getting you know limited and i'm gonna be like okay i have to check my gain staging i have to check how i'm going to compensate for the volume because i'm obviously going a little bit over actually i would encourage you to try and do this for specific genres of music because cubase has some tricks up its sleeve but i'm not going to open this can of worms at this stage but this is what the brick wall limiter does the second one is the standard limiter and the difference with this one is that you can also boost so if you want to add a tiny bit of level at the very end of your chain you can do this it also has a release we have an auto release and the output so let's have a listen again very useful especially if you're mixing genres of music that require a lot of loudness you know adding a limiter on every channel can help tame these little peaks you don't want to overdo it with a limiter you want to only limit like 1db that's enough so that you can push all your channels so that you can make your mix louder if that's what you're looking for now speaking of loudness the last limiter mode that we can have here is the maximizer and the maximizer does what the name says it can make your tracks loud and if you hit the e button here you can open the interface as well now for the maximizer i would probably go for the modern algorithm for most of the times because i think it sounds more open i think you can get way louder with the modern algorithm compared to the classic and we have a mix knob we have a soft clip so you can incorporate some clipping into your sound the output recover release maybe i'm gonna do a video about this because this is a little bit too deep for this video but again try it out see what works the main star of the show of course is the optimize knob and let's try it out on these drums [Music] so you can see i'm peeking roughly at the same place but the perceived loudness is much higher you know you hear those drums way louder with the maximizer again like i said use it wisely don't use it on every channel unless you're really going for an in-your-face i don't know super aggressive dubstep or hard style sound i don't know you know it depends on what kind of music you're creating the tools are there now it's up to you to use them wisely and make the best out of them but what i'm trying to say on this video is that with all these tools that we have here with the channel strip it's very easy to get your mix to a point where it's already sounding incredibly good and i wouldn't be exaggerating if i said that if you really want to you can pretty much do your entire mix using the channel strip without any plugins and use insert just for your reverbs for your delays for any special plugins apart from all these things that we have in the channel strip and it goes without saying that if you've created a chain that you like a lot and you want to reuse it again don't forget that you can go here and save your channel strip preset you can use your category section character you can write a comment do a rating and of course name your preset and then you can reuse it again and again and again and that's really really useful if you build your own library of presets with a channel strip and if you're feeling a little bit adventurous and you want to experiment you can also load any of these presets and just tweak them away or just use them the way they are they're really really awesome i can guarantee you can create a killer mix with a channel strip once you've mastered it and i hope that this video helped with that and if you learned something about the channel strip today i would really appreciate it if you hit this like button down there subscribe to the channel and share this video with any cubase user that you know that doesn't use the channel strip so much because it's an awesome tool i hope you enjoyed this video thank you so much for watching have fun with the channel strip i'll see you the next one bye bye

Channel: Dom Sigalas

Views: 39,938

Keywords: dom sigalas, cubase, cubase channel strip, cubase channel strip compressor, cubase channel strip gate, cubase channel strip vs inserts, cubase 11 channel strip, cubase channel strip tutorial, cubase tutorial, dom sigalas cubase, envelope shaper, channel strip explained, channel strip vocals

Id: tluosGEG71U

Length: 32min 59sec (1979 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/_nooneofconsequence]

He and Chris Selim/Mixdown Online are truly the best teachers for Cubase I have ever found. So thorough. I have yet to come across an issue that they haven't covered.

[u/wasinanaym]

This is a redundant comment but I feel the same, he helped get me enthused about starting from scratch again after a 5 yr hiatus that caused me to forget everything. Dom is great. Chris is great too. Still learning new things from both of them every week.

[u/mev5me]

I would give away my kidney if Cubase was opening the Edit-window in the lower zone. It is such an obvious decision. That would have made more sense for the channel strip