Hi all! I have a question regarding Hitpoints in Cubase 12 Pro. What is it really that makes Cubase detect a hitpoint in places like the screenshot attached, and is there anyway to avoid it?
I’m mainly recording and mixing metal, so a lot of hitpoints. The recording is clean, in the screenshot I have even used some pre-processing to try to isolate the kick even further (including re-bouncing it to detect the new hitpoints)- but Cubase still seems to detect hitpoints in all the wrong places nonetheless, even in places where there’s absolutely no visible or audible sound.
Threshold, Intensity, min. length and beats have 0 impact on the results here.
I’ve been recording and mixing since 2008, but never quite found a way around having to do the extremely tedious manual editing for 99% of all the hitpoints. I’m relying heavily on hitpoints to midi to enhance drum sounds with samples of the actual recorded drum kit, so accuracy is extremely important, ballpark doesn’t cut it.
I think it would be helpful to show an example of what you’re talking about. Could you post a screenshot showing the actual hitpoints?
Personally when I use hitpoints (which doesn’t happen too often) I tend to play with the Threshold setting quite a bit and locking hitpoints. Manually adding hitpoints after this is usually required.
could you upload a short snippet of your audio or send it as a pm to me? Best would be to put it in an empty project with all your settings and try again, that this project is showing the same faulty behaviour.
Can’t find a way to DM you, but here’s a zip file Kicks.zip (1.3 MB)
. I tried putting these two files into a new project, same result.
Kick Clean.wav:
No processing done. As you can see, not only are the hitpoints being located at different parts of the transient (Hit 1, 2 and 3 are basically correct, hit 4 is not) but it’s also completely off at times (Hit 5). Multiply this uncertainty times x00 of hits in one song, and you’ll understand my brain bleed for a whole album. I also have another track with a kick-in mic, but the results are the same. That said, I understand getting all of them right might be hard because of audio interference, flam etc. So:
Kick Processed.wav
This is EQed, compressed and gated in order to try to help Cubase locate the hitpoints more accurately, but as you can see (Eg. hit 3,5) Cubase detects hitpoints where there’s no audio.
Would be interesting to better understand why this might be happening, and if there’s a possible workaround.
Extra: Would also be interesting to hear if any improvements are in the works. Is there any way for the application to somehow “learn” from where the user is locating the hitpoints and re-calculate based on that? Since recorded audio is so vastly different, using only a holistic “1-fits-all” approach might not cut it. But then again, maybe I’m the only Idot out there using it to this extent. *
Probably closely related to this topic, automatic tempo detection is barely usable (and super buggy if sample rate is anything other than 44.1).
Hitpoint detection and automatic tempo detection/mapping algorithms should really be improved or even completely replaced as soon as possible with something more modern and accurate. Logic Pro is one example that does very good job in these areas. Nobody expects 100% accuracy, especially on complex materials, and manual editing will always be necessary here and there, but the state of the art is significantly higher than what Cubase 13 has to offer.
*