However, the behaviour is the same as when using the Sampler Track. If you start playback between Note On and Note Off the sample gets played from the beginning.
I assume the Sampler Track and Groove Agent use the same underlying engine.
You could try the freeware sample editor Audacity for this task. Select the part in question —> effects —> pitch shift… rinse and repeat.
In Cubase Pro this is builtin functionality but this should work as well.
Did you try the Pitch Correct Plugin with automated Transpose parameter?
She is trying to work only on some samples of a file. The plugin won’t work here.
She could draw the bend manually at the automation lane of the Transpose parameter from 45-51s after the sample started (insert slot of the drone track).
I’d already looked at that, but Audacity offers only abrupt shifts in pitch, not gradual pitch bends. Audacity used to be adding MIDI functionality but that seems to have disappeared.
I’m not looking to transpose a sample’s pitch, but to apply smooth pitch bends over time.
Use the Legato Mode in the sampler to fix that.
@Airlane1979 sorry, if you already answered that and I missed it somehow but what’s missing when you approach it like this:
- Create a sampler track of your long sample
- Enable Legato Mode
- Enable Write Automation on the track
- Trigger the sample, push around on the pitch shift on your midi keyboard
- Edit the newly created pitch shift automation lane to your liking
There are plenty of surgical automation editing tools: when you right click on the line tool you get options like parable etc.
This should enable you to create the smooth changes to the pitch that you are looking for.
I successfully added some pitch bend to the end (around 2.5 mins) into my long sample track as I wanted, but turning on Monophonic Legato mode seems to make no difference if I play it back from just before that point. It still plays back the sample from the beginning but with the MIDI pitch bend data applied to it, which is audibly weird but entirely logical. Cubase Sampler Track seems to have no facility to begin playback apart from at the start of a sample. Ultimately, when I play the whole piece from the start, that’s fine, but it’s not ideal for editing.
Legato mode is for preventing the sample to start over when moving to another note.
If you switch to another note whenever you want the pitch shift to happen, does that come closer to what you want?
Since you know exactly where you want the shifts to happen:
Would it be feasible to cut the long sample into different events and put each one on its own sampler track or groove agent pad?
Yes, those are possibilities, but they are a bit of a faff (creating several sampler tracks, cutting and pasting segments) and I think I can manage okay as it is. There’s no ideal solution apart from buying an upgrade to Cubase.
Yeah, Cubase Pro is amazing, go for it!
But one last possibility: did you try the pitch shift instead of this effect in Audacity?
“Sliding time scale/pitch shift”
Well, no, I shan’t be buying an upgrade. My use of Cubase merely for myself doesn’t justify the cost. The pitch shift in Audacity is for a single step, not a pitch bend. I think the effect you’re referring to is time stretch, which I might use for a different kind of distortion on drone tracks.
I think this effect should do what you want. From the manual:
“ Sliding Stretch… allows you to make a continuous change to the tempo and/or pitch of a selection by choosing initial and/or final change values.
Tempo changes made without selecting a pitch change preserve the original pitch, and pitch changes made without selecting a tempo change preserve the original tempo. By changing only one of tempo and pitch and choosing the same initial and final value, you can use Sliding Stretch in the same way as [Change Tempo] or [Change Pitch] to produce a high quality fixed change. However Sliding Stretch lets you for example set the initial tempo change to -50% while also setting the final tempo change to +20%, the initial pitch change to +3 semitones and the final pitch change to +1 semitones.”
Put the Pitch Correct Plugin on your initial rendered drone track. It supports shifting between semitones, similar to pitch shift in Sampler. However, the result depends heavily on the tonal character of your drone sound. I used it like this in breaks to pitch various audio tracks. E.g. entire bus channels for sort of tape stopp effects.
Or you can try another pitch shifting plugin. There are free ones.
Pitch Correct tries to correct the Pitch. Try changing speed and tolerance parameters for better results. Maybe it works for your drone sound.
I was wanting the distortions of pitchbending an audio sample, so I thought I could use the sampler track to do this, but I’m not sure how.
I’ll be giving your ideas a go, thank you. It’s interesting that free, open source Audacity has a lot more avenues for audio effects than paid Cubase Elements. I might look at open source DAWs.
@clotspond check the latest club cubase livestream on the Cubase YouTube channel.
Greg shows how to use pitch bend with the sampler track at 03:33:48.
@Airlane1979 that might be the wrong conclusion. As MarcoE pointed out, you could use any (free) pitch shift VST to do the job in Cubase Elements directly.
Thanks for that link. It confirms that the sampler track can be used to add pitch bend to a long sample, but it doesn’t explore if there’s a means to begin playback of the sample (to record the bend data) further into the sample than the start.
Hey, that’s actually a neat idea for some experimental sound effects stuff. I did not think about putting this plugin on synths or samples so far. If you tweak the parameters there’s some weird results showing up. Will give it a try. Thanks for the idea.