Anyone been using Cubase since the Pro24 days? If so, have you tried recreating old tracks you did using that system (with hardware connected synths and FX), using Cubase 15 and it’s huge VST library. If so, how pleased were you with the results?
I wonder if it’s worth repurchasing all that old gear for “authenticity”, or can you live with the “reproduction”?
Hi David, and welcome to the forum!
If you’re looking to reproduce absolutely everything, including the old skool workflow (and the associated grief when something isn’t working correctly), then yes, you could spend a lot of money on old kit – it would be endless fun – but to me, it’s a bit like when people yearn after vinyl, having either never experienced, or completely forgotten the utter frustration of of scratches, skipping, mains hum and turntable rumble.
In my experience, once you get old tracks into Cubase, you’ll probably find it’s impossible to not improve on them, given the facilities you now have. That will mean things sound different, and maybe not have the same vibe as the original … your mileage may vary. It will also depend on what gear was used originally, for example, stock DX7 sounds are now readily recreated in software.
A hybrid approach is also possible, for example, use an external synth to send arpeggios via MIDI to Cubase, but feed that into a VST instrument that sounds very close to a much better synth that would have been simply unaffordable at the time. You could also build custom racks of modular synth hardware, twiddle knobs and record the audio into Cubase for mixing and mastering.
To get back to your original question, yes, I at one stage played out my Pro24A tracks and captured them via MIDI into Cubase – but although I never felt the need to recreate them then from scratch in the new environment, I did add audio tracks subsequently.
Do let us know what original hardware you would like to recreate the sound of … there are many very, very good software versions out the now, many of the free or at least inexpensive.
Thanks, very helpful.
I suppose part of the issue I have had is that modern software seems to focus on “capturing” the sound of the original equipment, but the recreation us ‘old timers’ may be seeking goes beyond that.
I remember well the limitations the equipment imposed upon us, compared to the ‘professional’ stuff we were listening to on CD, or whatever. And that definitely impacted how the songs were structured, played, and recorded. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but is the software losing some of the magic created by those limitations?
I was using helping in a studio with pro 24 which then moved to Cubase. I’ve owned Cubase since the early 90s. Some sounds I find I can’t replicate but to be honest I’ve bought a lot of vsti’s which are so much better. I do everything in the box except for vocals and real instruments. I don’t use the stock plugins that much except for retrologue and the orchestral library, which is far better than the old strings on synths. I also use SD3 for drums which nothing in the past could reproduce. I’ve redone a lot of old songs but totally revamped them and nit tried to replicate them.
Hey, thanks for that mkok. Sounds like you’ve really maintained a lineage for some of your output.
S suppose the question I still have is,
Are you happier with the modern reinterpretation, or has some of the original ‘magic’ been lost in the process? Even if the recreated synths are ‘better’?
Nothing really stops you from putting some limitations on yourself.
For example, in the 90s, I only had a handful of synths, but I knew them inside out. I try to do the same with VSTs and not get lost in buying plugin after plugin.
Having said that, I do think that hardware, with its physicality, has an influence on what you make with it as well. For example, an analog synth with lots of knobs that you can actually touch is just not the same as the VST of the same synth, even if the sound is the same. On the other hand, I certainly don’t miss hunting down ground loops and stuff like that 
That’s a really, really difficult thing to quantify – and how to differentiate between “lost” and just “different”?
For example, I have one track that I think never sounded better than the original, which eventually only existed on a cassette tape, but that’s probably as much because of the hours invested in learning to program things like the FB-01 and the CZ-1000 and trying to perfect imagined sounds, as it is about the technology. But would I recreate it from the start (and I do still have the hardware somewhere)?
Well, I have done to some extent, and it continues to be a side-project to fill in the occasional Sunday afternoon, but that version is really another thing in its own right, a different thing, and so am I, in the meantime. On the technical side, I found sounds in e.g. Retrologue and HALion to replace most of what the FB-01 did, but the CZ-1000 could only be replaced by Oli Larkin’s excellent VirtualCZ and entering my patches numerically from the handwritten notes I kept. Would I want this version to sound exactly like the original? No, it’s moved on, as have I – but I still enjoy playing around programming the CZ-1000, and if I come up with something interesting, I transfer the patch to VirtualCZ!
Forgive me if i’m interpreting any of your responses wrongly, but it seems like those of us who have original material that has stayed with us over the years, do have alternatives if we want to bring those tracks back to life in some new way. However, as in my original question, it seems we may HAVE TO live with how our reproduction feels and sounds.
And I don’t want to feel compelled to say to myself ‘It must be better’ just because I have a wealth of resources I could only dream of 30 years ago
No, not at all … I know I wrote “you’ll probably find it’s impossible to not improve on them”, I should have more correctly expressed that as “you may, like me, find it hard to resist ‘improving’ on them” – implying yes, potentially “dis-improving” them.
It is absolutely possible to accurately recreate older recordings if e.g. the original MIDI is still available, and using the same hardware synths/drum machines/sound modules.
Nice reply ‘Soundman’