Cubase Do YOU ever listen? (tip)

Cubase
1

OK so a click bait title got you here. This is a tip. :grin:

Do you ever use the Cubase “listen” function? - which is to be found in the Control Room, mixer and (if enabled) in the in the Track List? It’s incredibly useful.
For what follows you should have control room enabled. Everyone should do this, if you are on a laptop on a train. I will assume you have enabled it below.

What does the listen button do?

Solo buttons gives you only the tracks you select to solo.

Dim button, dims everything.

Listen button leaves the levels of the tracks you have selected to listen to, but dims all the other tracks, to a level controlled by a slider in the control room. This is great because, say you want to listen mainly to the guitar tracks x 2. You enable the listen button for these tracks and then on playback, these tracks are heard, but the other tracks - here bass and drums, are not muted but get their levels controlled by the slider in teh control room. With the listen button you are not altering your mix in any way. It’s for occasional use when say you want to listen to a particular instrument or collection of instruments, at a louder volume than other tracks.

Here are a few gotchas to setting this up:

1] Ensure Control Room is set up and routed to the main bus (not covered here).

2] Show the control room in the project window by clicking in top right.

3] If you can’t see the listen bus in Control Room, ensure that you are on the CR tab, (the one with the big red pot) also ensure that you have expanded the “Main” submenu.

4] If your Listen slider is greyed out, then next to the Metronome icon in the control room, there is a square button with a big L. Enable this. This control room button enables or disables Listen functions globally.

5] If, in your track list, you cannot see listen buttons, (marked L ) go to the track list, bottom right where you will find a cog icon. Click on this and move the listen button from “Hidden Controls” to “Visible Controls”. Note that you now need to do this for each track type (as specified in top of this dialogue).

6] The Control Room provides a fader for the listening button, what this does is define the degree to which the volume of the “unlistened” semi-muted tracks are played back at. The Listened tracks are not effected.

7] In the mixer, the listen button can be found beneath the mute button

You should be good to go now, work it into your workflow.

Z

6 Likes
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Well, you got me with your click bait :smile: .

I do use the listen buttons and listen dim, but it took me several years to do so, because it is not very obvious, and the descriptions in the manual are as usual rather sparse.

It might be worth noting that there is also the AFL/PFL button (which is called like that in the manual but not in the GUI), which determines where the signal of the channel with listen mode enabled is taken from: after the fader and panner or before. Usually, after is what you want, if your goal is to listen to a channel in mix context, but just louder than the rest of the mix.

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AFL/PFL?

What and where?

Z :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

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Ah I think you mean listening after or before fader(s). The button is in the control room above the slider for Listening.
:+1:

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Exactly, yes. I did want to put a screenshot in my post, but forgot…

image

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Very helpful tutorial which also adds context to the sparse manual @ZeroZero :+1+:

Another common use case is to listen to FX channels in isolation by using the Listen functionality.

1 Like
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I use Listen a lot, but not with the Control Room in the project window – I want all the horizontal space I can get there. It is on the right side of my MixConsole window, which is (almost) always maximized on my second monitor.

I especially use Listen when comping and editing. Sometimes this is just for the track I’m working on, such as when comping vocals. Other times it is with a few additional tracks that help for reference while working on that track, with the most common example being including drums to get a better feel for rhythmic tightness when comping or editing other instrumental tracks.

The last few days, though, I’ve also been using Listen while tracking, which is something I don’t think I’ve done before. The specific case is tracking individual brass section parts in a pop/rock song using a wind controller. In this case, I want to make all the brass parts (including the one I’m tracking) highlighted in the mix, while also highlighting the drums to help on rhythmic tightness. Also, because the wind controller (Akai EWI USB) is a bit wonky in its controllability (especially the way they do octave switches and pitch bend, probably not helped much by the fact that I tend to only break the controller out a few times a year), it helps me better hear how close my takes are getting to what I want to help me get a feel for when I have enough to stop tracking and start comping.

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Nice try, but I know the Listen mode and use it myself frequently. Thanks anyway for bringing it to everyone’s attention once again. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

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It is a nice feature, but not supported by many controllers. It really shine when you use it with a mixer-controller. Is there any more budget friendly controller than avid that can do it?

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Every controller can do “Listen” using MIDI Remote. Here’s a snippet I’ve posted sometime ago, that could be easily adopted by manufacturers already into MR: