Cubase 12 - Comprehensive Workflow help/suggestions/illustrations please!

Today is the day!

Hi all. It’s time. Time for me to get organised! Any comprehensive easy to follow help would be greatly appreciated.

Firstly I’ll apologise in advance for this post, as might be a bit confused. I’ve come to realise that in order to as for help, you might need some help in defining the help you actually need! Turns out this is an iterative process itself, so I am probably going over detail below which isn’t really necessary other than to get it straight to myself as to what is needed.

What do I want to be able to do/ The goal.

I’ll start at the end…

Essentially I want to create songs and/or do remixes of my own creations and existing material/songs by other artists for my own satisfaction.

I’d want to make my home recording setup more productive, I am hoping that I can emulate someone’s workflow and quick tips and processes from experience to allow me to get my projects off to a quick and structured start , so that I don’t lose creativity or the will to progress an idea.

Hopefully, this strikes a chord with someone, who had the same issues and solved them.

Ok, some detail.

Background.

I have been dabbling with Cubase on and off for years, way back from the days of the Atari ST. Truth be told I probably found it easier to a finished, midway decent something in the early versions, as there were only one or two ways to do something. Now I am stuck in that bittersweet state of having so much functionality, but overthinking the ways to use it, ending up giving up early.

Why now?

I have in truth very limited keyboard and guitar skills (can play some chords and runs), but I think I have a very musically creative ear and timing. I know how I want things to sound, but get frustrated in knowing how to achieve it with the tools available.

Cubase 12 with its enhanced chord functionality and in particular the audio to Chord functions and multitrack varioaudio stuff means I don’t really have an excuse anymore, time to get my sh*t together!

Even in the couple of days of having Cubase 12, the new chord functionality, has reignited my interest, and being able to jump straight in at the point where I have a palette of chords to play with has been a gamechanger (so far).

The major thing I have realised is, I tinker !

And for me, and the way I work I can see that’s where the good stuff happens. Unfortunately, that usually results in this stuff being lost as I struggle to get these tinkerings recorded in Cubase as something I can use without requiring loads of time to structure it, sync up tempos if they have be recorded adhoc in a project at first.

A major help would be to follow the workflow of somebody else, roughly trying to achieve the same thing.

My current Top 3 stumbling blocks when starting an informal project of creative session are.

1.) Tempo & interpolation issues.

A significant amount of my idea triggers to do something come from either coming up with a catchy hook on the fly or doing a mental remix/overlay of a song I hear. What I’d love is some clear guidance on the workflow to sync up any adhoc material to a project tempo. This is currently taking me way too long, then the inspiration is gone.

2.) Organising and grouping parts together, cubase has gone throughmany ways to do this over the years from group tracks, then back to just having it all down and manually muting the parts you don’t want, just want to fast forward to what people feel is the is the best way/method right now.

3.) Managing VST content/library. Some tips from experience on how people manage their workflow around this.

Just so you know what kind of equipment I am working with, I’ll list it below. I have some legacy stuff like a Roland VM-7100 mixing console etc, some akai samplers, rack synth modules, but I am more than happy/prefer to do this all through VST’s in the windows environment instead

Equipment:

· Fast windows 11 PC

· Cubase 12 (11 & 10 & 9 etc)

· Beringher UMC404HD sound interface

· Boss RC 505 Mk1 loopstation

· Shure sm58 Microphone (with additional USB interface)

· AKAI MPC Studio Black

· AKAI MPK49

· AKAI MPD218

· Studio Logic SL 880 88 Key Controller

· Rocktron Banshee 2 Talkbox

· DJ decks/controller etc.

· Alesis Nitro Mesh Kit

· Roland SH101

· Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar.