automation

Cubase
1

This has nagged me for a long time and there’s something I’m missing about how automation works.

Let’s say I make a pass through a song, write some automation, and then decide it needs a little, or a lot of tweaking, or even just start over on the automation.

I go back to a section and bump up the volume on a lead vocal a bit and let go of the left mouse button. The fader jumps back down to the previous automation level that was written “downstream” of where I’m at. Not what I want. I want the fader to stay at that position until I move it again i.e. overwrite the previous automation completely.

The only way to beat this is to hold the mouse on the fader until the end of the song - or erase all the automation for the effected area of the track. Maybe I could live with that if I didn’t have multiple vocal tracks I’m trying to automate at the same time.

I’m sure this is not a bug but a lack of my basic understanding of how automation works but a search of the help file and the forum hasn’t turned up anything that helps me or I don’t know how to ask/search for what I want.

Is there a way to “decouple” the R and W buttons so when I want to just completely write over the previous automation Cubase isn’t trying to “read” the previous automation at the same time.

What am I missing here?

2

Hi,

There is a dedicated mode for this in Cubase, named Latch. Click to the “Touch” button in the Project window, and select Auto-Latch here. Now, the latest value overwrites all other values until the end of playback. Once you stop the playback, others values (behind the cursor position) are kept.

If you want to delete all events to the end, you can stop playback. Then, while the Automation track is select, use Edit menu > Select > From Cursor To End. Automation events are selected. Delete them.

3

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for. I won’t be at my computer until Sunday night and I’m looking forward to trying that out.

4

Tried Latch Mode out and it’s the piece I’ve been missing all this time.

Thank you Martin.