What is the purpose of Audio and midi parts just write on the track …
Also make smart selections so you select the midi note off messages outside the selection.
as it is it makes things a little more complex
It is time for events to ask for their rights and march in the forum Square asking for liberation from their blocks .
For looping, “ghosting” and saving mostly?
Also, it’s much easier to select several parts when you want to move them around with a rough gesture, rather than a super precise and meticulous range selection every time.
I’m guessing you don’t understand how the smart tool works (lower vs. upper half selections)… And you don’t know that it can be disabled.
I’m not talking about that
You can combine several audio events in an audio part, to move them around.
Uhh basic general editing? What were the purpose of splicing blocks back in the day?
Numerous benefits…
Just a few examples…
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Easy to copy/cut/paste/move sections of a track’s events on the timeline, or among different tracks/lanes.
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An extra layer of event ‘Grouping’ to take advantage of stuff like Project and Track ‘logic editors’.
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Version tracking. You can keep several different versions or takes right there together on the same track. Expand it to ‘lanes’.
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More easily keeping up with different cycles when recording in cycle modes.
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Phrase stretching/shrinking/retrograde/groove templates/etc. I.E. Determine a cue point you want to hit on the timeline, and stretch or shrink a part so it seemingly ‘slows down or speeds up’ in order to fill your determined time-slot/space, and hit your timeline cue perfectly. The same can apply for things like quick dynamic scaling.
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Editing/scaling entire phrases or ranges of events contained in the ‘part’ with fewer steps.
Different parts can be expanded to ‘lanes’. Lanes can be extracted or merged into new tracks easily, and vice-versa.
Sometimes you might want to easily merge lots of MIDI or Instrument track parts into a single part on a single track. In contrast, sometimes you might want to expand a track out to new parts/tracks based on channels, notes, etc. You can use the Merging and Bouncing features in the MIDI menu to change this stuff around as needed. If you want very specific extractions/merges (I.E. extract every note higher than middle with with a velocity greater than 64 to a new track…) then you can use the MIDI ‘logical editors’.
With MIDI and Instrument tracks you can take advantage of yet another lower level ‘container/group’ type called ‘VST note expression’. I.E. group a bunch of VST or CC events in a way that they effectively attach themselves to an individual note as opposed to floating freely on a controller lane. Such controller events would then ‘move/scale/copy/paste’ with whatever note they are affiliated with.
As for audio parts…the event groups and features are a little different from MIDI/Instrument tracks, but the ‘concepts’ are essentially the same. Parts make it much easier to slice/dice and move things around, copy/paste, stretch/shrink, tag/name things for Logic Editor batch processing, and a whole lot more.
If you didn’t have these ‘event groups’, in theory you could just use lots of ‘tracks’ nested in ‘folders’ instead, but you’d have a lot less power and flexibility in your workflow, and you’d probably end up needing a lot more ‘copies’ of similar or the same data on your hard drive. You wouldn’t get as much ‘undo-redo’ ability. You’d be forced to ‘fully commit’ to editing decisions sooner, with fewer options to instinctively ‘roll back several steps’ if you don’t like how things are going (or, manage your own space hungry backup processes to ‘roll back’ to a point before your ‘oops’ moment).
Example…with parts, you can have a single wav of several seconds. Maybe it’s just a violinist playing a C major scale in whole notes. You could chop that into 8 different parts using the scissor tool (one for each note of the scale). Technically, all of the ‘parts’ are still pointing to the same ‘single and continuous audio file’. Even if you copy and paste the part to several different tracks. Even if you drag such a part into something like Groove Agent or HALion. It’s still coming from the ‘one big file of the violin playing the scale’, yet you can treat all these parts in your projects as if they are individual samples for each note. You won’t need to physically make new copies of each note unless at some point you do a ‘destructive edit’ to one of the parts.
If you did do a destructive edit to one of the parts…at that point Cubase can sort it out, and only re-create the ‘short sample’ that it needs in a new wav/aif file. Of course, Cubase has features to force a complete ‘separation and trim’ of audio files, and trash anything in the pool the project isn’t using; but, until you’re ready to commit to something this permanent and undoable, ‘parts’ allow you a lot more freedom in ‘undoing’ things, and you require a fraction of the memory/storage space thanks to ‘parts’. Your system demands (particularly memory and storage requirements) can be much less thanks to the way Cubase ‘parts’ are designed.
It’s never bad to have some head room to group/ungroup things in either direction (Smaller Russian Doll below to subgroup lower level babies, and a larger one above to contain the whole family of Russian Dolls in the same home, etc.)
The larger your projects, the more helpful it can be to have plenty of potential parent/child depth throughout the project.
It’s also helpful to understand that Cubase can do most things ‘non-destructively’. Until something changes about a given ‘event’, many different tracks can point to the same data. I.E. You could double a bass guitar track, and both copies of the track will initially point to the same wav/aif file. Another copy of the file isn’t needed until you do a permanent ‘destructive’ edit to one of the tracks. Quite a few things you can do non-destructively, in real time without needing to clone a new copy of the wav/aif/MIDI part/whatever. Parts can contain information about ‘real-time’ edits, while the hard data the part is pointing at is the same for many tracks. I.E. Double a recorded bass track, shift one an octave higher, run each through different real-time effects on the mixing console. You can experiment with this and don’t have to bounce out an actual new audio file unless you need to recover some processing power for your machine later on. Later, you might commit to a hard copy of your ‘editing/processing’ and mute/hide your ‘experimental phases’.
All of the different grouping and sub-grouping levels assist in keeping up with and sorting out tracks that have non-destructive edits on them, vs those that have truly ‘hard bounced’ in ways that you can’t easily ‘undo’ (if at all).
Just scratching the surface here…the purpose of so many possible levels for grouping events can grow with you. Everyone uses them a bit differently. We all develop our own workflow and understanding of how the program works best for us. It’s great to have all this grouping power!
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You can use specific commands for these
All these can also be done without parts blocks or CUBES? Cubase?..
Based on Cubes Hmmm.
OK, but it’s how Cubase has worked since version 1 on Atari ST.
Folders or Groups/Tracks/Parts/Events
I couldn’t live without MIDI “ghost” parts. Although I’m a decent piano player, I often tweak my parts in the Cubase Key Editor, cleaning up durations, velocities, etc. The thought of doing this multiple times for each part in my song would drive me insane. I don’t know how people can work in a purely linear DAW with no ability to create ghost parts (or “aliases” in Logic-speak). I suppose they can play better than I do and never need to change a note here and there after playing in a part.
Not necessarily easily or quickly. They exist because they facilitate improved workflows.
Seems pretty unlikely that Steinberg is going to toss out a 30+ year old architecture because someone on a forum can’t sus out what it’s good for.
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What would be the benefit of not having parts?
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yes that someone however insignificant can have his opinion right?..
There is always a first time for everything
sometimes you get stuck in habits and after years you realize that it was wrong
All these parts grooming resizing etc…
It’s the inherent design of a non destructive DAW, you manipulate the blocks which allow you to slice, copy, chop etc. but the underlying data remains unchanged.
So it’s not habit but indeed the very purpose of the software.
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Why not the events straight , what is the purpose of having an extra layer of take care baby sitting the part’s borders .
Different musical forms are often arranged by blocks over time (horizontal or linear time line) whether the structure it is something like intro, verse, chorus, bridge - or a symphony with string, woodwind, brass, etc. parts (different parts for orchestration vertically and horizontally). It is easer to use regions to organize musical events especially if you want to selectively change the tempo, quantization or pitch of regions (blocks) - or re-order the arranegment blocks. It would be more work to go into a single “region” containing all the musical events and manually select just the guitar, drum, etc, parts and move them around. So regions are (non-destructive) containers for events that help to visually organize and edit the arrangement of a musical form. Some DAWs are a bit more free with how you can organize regions per track. In Reaper, tracks are not so strictly typed, i.e., you can have MIDI and audio regions on the same track (there is no MIDI or audio track type). In Logic the region inspector and a regions properties are not tied to the track it is on, i.e., click on any MIDI region in the project and and you can quantize it independently from the track where it lives w/o using a piano roll like MIDI editor.
It can also work the other way say I’m not into Musical blocks but a free form style
There is nothing preventing you from mixing together all your audio parts - and recording them into a single audio region - or summing together all your MIDI parts - and recording them into a single MIDI region. I’m not exactly sure how you would do it in Cubase, but I’m sure you can merge all your seaparate audio regions and midi regions into a single region if you wanted to. Retrospective recording is there in Cubase, Logic etc. to always be recording in the background if you want to record improvisations first, and then audition/edit them later. It’s just that recording everything into a single audio or MIDI region can require more editing work depending upon what the final arrangement is going to be.