Midi VS Instrument Tracks : Which ones should you use? #cubase #cubasefaq

hello everyone welcome back dom here and on this video i'm going to tackle a question that i know many cubase users have so in this video i'm going to talk about when you should use instrument tracks and when you should use midi tracks coming up [Music] [Music] so to begin with let me say that if you asked me this question five or six years ago i would give you a totally different answer that what i'm going to give you now but i had quite a few emails i've had quite a few questions also from some friends of mine and they've been asking me when should i use midi tracks and when should i use instrument tracks and should i use many midi tracks with maybe one halloween instance and one highland sonic instance and route all of them to a single instance of hallion sonic with a different midi channel or should i use a separate instance as an instrument track so let me give you my honest opinion on this i've done many tests and i've come to a conclusion so let's first of all speak about what is an instrument track and what is a midi track and what's the difference so let's try and create a midi track so a midi track let's call this synth okay this is a midi track let's create it and let's go and add it as you can see a midi track is what the name suggests it's just a midi track if i play on my keyboard i'm not gonna hear anything emitted track needs to be assigned to an instrument either software or hardware so that it can produce any sound at all so in this case if i for example route this to my let's say sub 37 i'm going to be able to record my sub37 i can play my sub37 through my complete control midi keyboard if i set up an audio track and go for my sub 37 here let's call it sub let's record something so i'm going to record midi and i'm also going to record audio from my sub37 [Music] okay so now i just recorded midi and this is how it plays back so i just recorded in real time my sub 37 without even being there so this is the number one reason why i would use midi tracks it would be to control hardware synthesizers for example the sub37 my montage my ob6 all those external synths okay and then of course i can record this and if i want i can edit the midi obviously and then i can record it after i've done any modifications to what i played if i have to be completely honest nowadays that would be the only reason why i will use midi tracks now let me create an instrument track okay let's create an instrument track and let's create a hallion sonic instrument okay like this and let's load a nice instrument from highly sonic let's load the vibrant stage i love these keys so let's play this okay the whole point of instrument channels is that they're super convenient they provide both the midi part of the channel and the audio part of the channel so in this case i can of course trigger my software instrument [Laughter] you know using my midi keyboard so that's all midi but if i hit the e button on my cc121 or you can hit it like this you will see that i also have the audio portion okay so this is also an audio channel and why is it also an audio channel because we also have the inserts we have the strip we have our sends our cue sends and i can say i want to add let's say a delay maybe multitap delay and let's load a preset so immediately i can process my virtual instruments i can do all these things i can record midi you know i can start just dialing in some notes here for example okay all these things so instrument tracks combine both midi and audio and i would use instrument tracks 99 of the time unless i have to deal with outboard synthesizers the big argument that i know many cubase users have you know there are there's a camp that they say you should use multi-timbral instruments like contact helium highland sonic you know instead of using instrument tracks because let's say that i want to have this instrument now if i want to add some drums i need to create another instrument channel another hylian sonic and then maybe i want to load i don't know maybe an electric bass okay and now each one of these channels will have their own discrete midi and their own discrete audio so if i go back to my ep there we go we have our piano there our electric piano and here i have my bass [Music] okay and they're both in a separate hallion sonic instance okay so some people say this is taking too many resources so instead what you should do is you should go to vsti here and instead use rack instruments okay so when you add a rack instrument here let's use holly and sonic again just so that we are consistent what cubase does is it asks you do you want to create a midi track assigned to highland sonic and what you should actually say there is yes create so now what we have is we have a midi channel that's assigned to channel number one and this will play any sound that we load here so let's load for example the electric bass again now let's load something else here maybe i can load an eagle okay just a piano sound this one still plays the bass sound but now if i create another midi track okay another midi track and let's call it piano this didn't load any instrument but i can assign it to halion sonic okay this highland sonic here and as you can see i can assign things here so this is the first silent sonic this is my retro that i have on top and this is the last hall in sonic this is this one so now if i assign this to channel 2 this will play the piano then if we go back to my first channel this one this will play the bass piano okay here's what the problem is with this approach this was the normal approach back in the day with the cubase sx sx2 three cubase four until we got the instrument channels right what happens is if you pay attention this is the output so i have the midi here which is completely separate and then i have the actual audio coming out of the highland sonic instrument so if i go here see this is the outputs then if i go to this one same output which means straight of the bat i don't have control over separate audio channels for these two instruments if i record midi on both of these channels they're going to be in the same output which is 99.99 of the time not what you want so in this case what you want to do is you want to go to your rack instrument here see this is my harley and sonic and here you should start activating outputs and guess what you have 16 outputs corresponding to the 16 midi channels that we have here so let's add another output and now i have to make sure that for the piano i'm going to send it to output number two and how do you do this it depends on the instrument but in hollyon you need to go to mix and you need to make sure that your first one is on output one which is the main and the piano for example i can set it to output two and now if i play those you will see that number one and then if i play this one it will play here and this is also showing up in the mixer but you see it's eight says main hs out two and all these things you have to rename all those outputs i think you can probably tell by now that this is a very slow approach this is the way that it was like years ago you know that was the normal way but this is a very slow approach some people argue that you should do this because it will allow you to save a little bit of ram a little bit of cpu etc etc right in my experience after having done tests over tests with field music where i have like full orchestras really really intense projects i found that actually if you had multiple instrument tracks your computer runs better especially if you have a multi-core machine which is most computers these days because you spread the load into different processors especially with some instruments that are a little bit quirky you know there are some vst instruments that don't know where to distribute the load so they only load one cpu so if you have multiple of them it's more likely that your computer will not suffer when you play too many tracks so yeah the other reason why i used to use rack instruments in the past was when we didn't have multiple outputs for you know our instrument channels let me explain if i load let's say a groove agent sc okay and i load let's say a kit which is an acoustic drum kit i always always want to have every element of the kit in a different output for example kick drum snare hi hats and so on and so forth so again in this case before we had multi-out instruments everything would be in one channel but nowadays what you can do is you can go to your groove agent and activate again multiple outputs which means i can assign my kick drum to output number one or i can activate all of them and these all live right here see now i have all the outputs and of course if you're using something like group agent you can say okay please export mixer to cubase and not only it activates the outputs for you but it also renames them for kick snare see toms your overheads [Music] so overheads and room how cool is that so i hope that helps you understand when you should use midi channels and when you should use instrument channels now in the comments down below please let me know do you use midi channels in a different way that maybe i haven't thought about i would really like to know because for me it doesn't make any sense using midi channels unless i'm using outboard instruments okay so i would say just keep your life simple use instrument channels you will be happier and you won't have a problem you can process and you can add effects you can add reverse compressors eqs straightaway and then if you feel that your project becomes really heavy then you can freeze them or you can run it in place so really cpu and ram is not really a problem and you always have the option to go back and change your sounds because you're not tied to one single instrument that contains 16 sounds you have every channel separated so i hope you enjoyed this video guys i hope this answered this question that quite a lot of you had i know this because i received quite a few emails also some of you called me you know who you are if you enjoyed this hit the like button it really helps subscribe to the channel and hit that bell notification icon it really makes a difference so that you see when i upload new videos share it with anyone you feel they will find it useful i'll see you next one take care and make some great music

Channel: Dom Sigalas

Views: 36,567

Keywords: midi vs instrument tracks, should I use instrument or midi tracks in cubase, cubase instrument tracks, cubase, cubase 10.5, cubase tutorial, cubase 10.5 tutorial, cubase 10.5 pro, dom sigalas, dom sigalas cubase tutorial, get started with cubase, cubase faq, cubase instrument track vs midi track, cubase instrument track vs rack, cubase instrument track multiple outputs, cubase instrument track no sound, cubase multi output instrument track, cubase cpu optimization

Id: qfM3nWD5XPo

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020