So - after a year or two hiatus from music making, I’ve started getting back into it and decided if I was going have to re-learn my workflows, I might as well do it with the latest version of Cubase, so upgraded from 5.5 to 7.
One of the things which sold me was the new channel strip, probably 80% of the inserts I’ve found myself using are of the variety found in the channel strip, and a more streamlined approach might force me to be more productive, rather than just tinkering with the many different VSTplugins I’ve accumulated over the years.
One of the things I hoped to do was be able to control everything from my Behringer BCF2000 running in Makie Control Emulation Mode.
I bought it on a whim many years back after seeing how much easier/intuative it was to mix on a hardware console (admittedly a Pro Tools HD rig) - but frankly its mostly been gathering dust since I got it.
Anyway, as I’m pretty rusty navigating Cubase, I’ve not been able to find an easy way to control the channel strip plugins from the BCF, I’ve searched the forums and found nothing, however I think I’ve found a way using Device Panels.
I hope someone may be able to point me towards a more elegant solution, but if not here’s what I have so far.
Its a kludge!, but here’s a walkthrough to get started. I’m using Cubase, I suspect this wont work for Cubase Artist.
- Drop the attached xml file (you’ll need to rename it first) into the following path (or similar)
C:\Users{user}\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Cubase 7_64\Panels
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Fire up Cubase and open a project, new or otherwise, and create a new Audio track.
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From the MixConsole, ensure that Device Panels (PANEL) are visable on the rack, and click on the right hand side button on the panel bar of the new audio track to display the available Device Panels.
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If you expand the folder tree, you should see two available panels, named ‘Channel Strip-Basic’ and ‘Pre and Gate’ - If you can’t see the options, you may need to increase the width of the mixer channels.
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Select one of the panels and activate the Noise Gate from the strip.
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On the BCF/MCU, select the channel you added the device panel/activated the gate and press the insert/plugin button on the BCF/MCU (I use the BCF with BCFview app, which emulates the Mackie Control LCD screen)
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V-Pot1 selects the insert slot for the channel, if you rotate the pot beyond slot 8, you’ll access the User parameters (this is mentioned on page 438 of the Cubase Operation Manual)
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On BCFview/MCU LCD - There should be a couple of pages available for the new device panel, goto the second page and using the vpots you’ll be able to access the LC/HC parameters and some of the Noise Gate parameters, depending on which device panel you selected intially.
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If you selected the ‘channel strip-basic’ panel, you be able to activate some of the other channel strip plugins and control them too.
Its not pretty, and not well organised, but its a proof of concept at least. I hope this is of some use to someone.
I think a new panel will be required depending on what version of compressor/limiter/saturation plugin you use, otherwise you can’t control the parameters.
Hopefully Steinberg will be able to incorporate something similar in a future update - the protocols are already in place at least.
Steve
ChannelStripV1.txt (19.8 KB)
It made my cubase crash when I tried to switch pages on my MCU after enabling something new in my channel strip, but I guess I can avoid that by switching to another insert on my MCU before enabling the new module in the strip and then going back to User on the MCU.