I must be thick or something, but I think I read the whole manual, watched all YT “Cubase secrets” videos, tortured Google AI and had Claude Cowork research it for me “as long as it takes to find a working answer” (It ended up spending my plan daily limit every day, searching for hours, and I gave up after having it continue the assignment after a week). I still cannot figure out the answer to a very simple and a very common workflow step that literally everyone must be doing effortlessly. The problem comes up regularly, and I spend hours per clip to align it. Yes, guys, hours to move a “target” clip without time-stretching or anything smart like that on one track to time-align without phasing with a “reference” clip on another. There must be a better way, but I couldn’t find it, even if it were to save my life!
I have voice recorded in a well-treated room, with a close dyn mic and a far-field cond, with about 0.7m distance between them. I needed that because the song grows from nearly in-your-ear intimate to the full scream. I take the signal of the close one, add the far one to the mix and reduce the close one as the voice grows stronger, and use only the far one when the close mic gets its capsule overload beyond nice saturation. The slow moves are to avoid abrupt switching of mics — this sounds very jarring. Vocals are recorded in one take, it’s a short but emotional song, it works only when the singer completely “in it” beginning to end. I was fortunate to find this voice, and have more than one full-length take that makes the song work, emotionally. A little time correction needed on some, but I want to mix the dry stem first from the two mix, then correct it when needed — I cannot do the correction, the song is too “live” to kill it with quantization, every timing tweak needs judgement, and to judge, I need to listen in the context of the full song mix. So. my only feasible path is: Sample-align → Route to sub-buss with rough delay and reverb → Sub-mix and bounce the mics, according to song loudness → Listen well the whole song mix → Decide on time corrections. I simply cannot start with non-time-preserving alignment, the song wants it to be the last step, not the first.
So, the problem is, I need to sample-align both tracks precisely; otherwise I get either doubling on loose alignment or phasing with a tighter alignment. Perhaps the same problem exists on drums, but most of my drums are fake (like Groove Agent fake), and when I mix live drums, they come from the drummer as nicely aligned WAV files, as long as I start them on the same sample.
When I select 2 clips, I can display both of them in the bottom editor overlaid. This is where I can progressively increase zoom and align just any transient — the sound travel delay between the mics is constant. But I cannot move a clip by samples without moving another selected clip, and if I select only the target clip I want to shift in time, the reference clip disappears from the bottom editor. The only way I found to do the alignment is repeat this terrible algorithm until they are aligned:
- With time ruler and grid set to “samples”, estimate the shift in the bottom pane with both clips selected.
- Select only the target clip, and change its “Start” time in samples accordingly.
- Select both clips again, increase lower pane zoom factor. Go to step 1.
After 20–25 repetitions, I arrive at the approximate ±3 sample start value. The rest I can do by ear, targeting the disappearance of phasing.
Is there a way to somehow either make it so that both clips are “locked” visible in the bottom pane, while selecting only the target clip in the upper, project pane (where clips do have the start time)? Or maybe there is a much simpler way to achieve what I want? How do you sample-align good-timed performance that may not even need time-tightening, but requires a perfect alignment of 2 mics? Or, like the drums case, some 8‒12 mics? Overheads are always “late” in time compared to one inside the kick drum, after all, low-freq kick is the most prone to phasing, and still people somehow align them perfectly? How???
I feel very dumb being unable to figure out this basic functionality in Cubase for years, and losing hours when the problem happens. I mean, I perhaps am in fact a little thick, since the workflow must be so simple that no one even finds it worthy mentioning in any instructional video, blog or anything, so please explain that to me in some details I can understand. Thank you folks in advance! Sorry about the long writing, I just wanted to explain I don’t know how to do something so very basic that you rarely even think you’re doing it when you do it. Yes, it’s this bad here. Help!!!