I’ve read the manual, and tried a few searches on here, to no avail. I want to experiment with layering string samples and for a more natural sound, thought I’d try to de-tune one of the layers by a couple of cents. I can’t figure out where this is… I swear I remember doing it years ago
Ok solved. That time it only took about half an hour - not bad? I swear, just the act of asking the question in here often causes a solution to be found…
I am using pitch bend in the controller lanes! Dead simple. So now I have 4 layers - 2 in tune, 1 up and 1 down. It has created a much thicker, more natural sound, just what I wanted 
Nice, I wouldn’t have thought of that! Thanks!
There is also a pitch shift plug in (one of Cubase’s) as well. But much more control from the automation lane I would imagine, where one can use the pencil tool to draw as detailed a pitch shift envelope as they like. Very nice!
Glad to be of help! I’m enjoying the flexibility and ease of it. I’ve also learned that 100 cents = 4096 midi pitch bend units. So it’s a bit fiddly to get an exact number but I think somewhere around 200-300 pitch bend units is what will work with my violin section layers. I wonder if that seems like a lot? 1 cent would be about 41.
Somewhere in the depths of Cubase (project setup?) you can choose how many MIDI pulses per quarter note, maybe one of them will have the math work out better for you.
But even if not, if you get almost exactly close enough, after rendering to audio you might be able to choose a pitch shift algorithm that can handle getting you the rest of the way without noticeable artifacts.
But in the end … a little off from perfect is what you’re aiming for with detuning, right?
Yes! Absolutely and am enjoying the process immensely. This’ll be the last step before making them into audio tracks and that will be a nice change. Midi is annoying, sometimes. Too many weird and unexplainable things can happen…
Another thing to add realism to the detuning is to have a plugin varies the amount of detuning continuously but ever so slightly. I have a separate program that does this, but I’d bet it can be easily built using standard Cubase MIDI inserts.
I was wondering about terminology.
I think of offset moving things on the time line.
So I would move it one way or the other a couple of ticks.
I would raise or lower the pitch so many cents.
But offset is used in lots of other scenarios so not sure.
There’s a micro-tune preset on an effects unit i use that gives you the original pitch then adds 4 more pitches to it.
+7, -7, +14, -14. You can also set separate volumes and pans for the other pitches. Lot you can do with that.
I prefer using 3 and 7 as my numbers for vox or guitar usually.
Tacman, (I;m a tad late in replying to this) I think I agree with you about the terminology. When I just looked back at this old post I thought it sounded unnatural… ‘offset’ does make one think about sliding things along a time event.
Since we invested more money in string libraries this year, it’s no longer been necessary to play around with the tuning, in fact these libaries have a detuning option inside the player, so they are a delight to work with!