Yes, you have to be really careful with group editing because some functions don’t operate on the whole group like you might expect!! Discussed in other threads, but it sure breaks the idea of group editing
Re editing bass and the other tracks. I always start by sliding rather than using any form of warping or quantise because the warping will quite often result in an artefact or odd noise in the audio. Particularly with bass which easily suffers from gurgling and grumbling when stretched. But then bass is always easier anyway because it’s single notes and you can easily take notes from elsewhere, and shorten longer notes without it sounding weird. I do the same for guitar but it’s a bit trickier.
In terms of cross-fades, I switch on the auto-fade + crossfade options for every track. Then I don’t need to worry about zero crossings or clicks. If the auto crossfade is causing a blip then I move the boundary or I do a manual crossfade (using the X key) and adjust to remove/disguise phasing at the fade. Sometimes if I can’t get a perfect crossfade then I hide the fade under a drum hit so it’s not heard in the mix. Also if using cuts from other sections then you might have to match the volume to make sure they fit - the volume handles are great for quickly adjusting this.
Anyway, this is how I do it, but there’s probably others who’ll swear by the audio quantise… (I use this in pre-production, i.e. when creating demos or guide tracks because it is quicker!).
For bass I follow similar approaches. I try to slide the not into place. If I need to stretch a note. I will often cut the audio event so that only that note gets processed and doesn’t pull on its neighbors. Generally bass edits work quite well with variaudio in my experience.
All I wanted to add to this thread is that slip editing is ridiculously helpful for this. When I first used Cubase I thought that slipping audio seemed fairly useless since you can just move the events, but when you have one big event and you split the sections and then just slip the audio around to correct its timing, it’s 100x better than moving the events since it ignores snap and doesn’t cause any changes in crossfades or overlaps.
Aha, yes. slip editing, very useful. I have custom shortcut keys for fast editing so that all the tools lie under my left hand on top left of the keyboard (e.g. `=rewind, 1=pointer, 2=mute, 3=scissors, 4=play, etc) and I then use the Alt and Ctrl combinations as well for the different mouse editing tools. This is very fast for cutting and sliding or slip editing events.
Slip editing is Ctrl-Alt-LeftMouseButton, and it slides the audio within the event. So, if a bass note is late then cut the event on the beat where the note should be and cut again just before the next note (say about the amount the note is late), then slip edit the audio backwards so the note is in time. Just make sure that the next note doesn’t appear at the end of the event (hence cutting before the next note).
