Therein lies the rub. For perspective, I first started using Cubase at V9.5, having used Cakewalk SONAR (and before that Pro Audio 9) for upwards of a decade and a half (I’m thinking roughly 2000 to 2018).
While I’d tried a much earlier version of Cubase (SX or SX3???) back when I started using Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (this after coming from Passport Designs’ MasterTracks Pro Audio), that version of Cubase was both extremely unintuitive to me and extremely unstable on my system. I’d also used Samplitude LE a bit around that time, but, while it was very stable, it was also super unintuitive. This was just before Pro Tools LE came out – I’d seen demos of it, and those looked good, but it wasn’t yet available, and I was wanting to get something “now”. I also tried a demo version of Logic (which was working on the PC at that time), but it also didn’t work for me, but when I tried the demo version of Pro Audio, not only was it highly intuitive (for a Windows user, which I was), but it was super stable. I initially thought I’d just use it for MIDI, and maybe pair it with Samplitude for audio at a later time, but it turned out Pro Audio worked pretty well for the audio side of things, too, at least when paired with some third party plugins (DSP-FX initially) to fill in some missing pieces.
I went through lots of generations of Cakewalk’s SONAR, even beta testing V2 through V6 (and also writing for a Cakewalk-focused ezine for a number of years). But then Gibson discontinued Cakewalk products (in 2018, if I remember correctly), and the future looked to be up-in-the-air, so I was looking for other options, and I decided to test drive as many other DAWs as I could, starting with MOTU’s Digital Performer, and including the latest versions of Cubase, Samplitude, and Studio One, with the possibility of trying Reaper and others in the future. (The ones I picked first had to do with short-term crossgrade deals aimed at Cakewalk users who’d started looking elsewhere.)
My goal was to try one project in each DAW I was considering to see what worked for me. I eliminated Digital Performer pretty much right away – for one thing, I couldn’t read their tiny fonts. Cubase 9.5 was next, and I recorded an entire song there, but it was decidedly not very intuitive. Studio One came next, but it didn’t do lots of things I needed it to do, and it wasn’t very stable for my needs. I never really got around to doing a project in Samplitude because BandLab bought the Cakewalk intellectual property and made Cakewalk for BandLab an option (and free), but I was finding I was more efficient for things I spent a lot of time doing when using Cubase, despite all my years of using Cakewalk/SONAR.
I’d already read the entire Cubase manual from front to back, but there is only so much you can absorb from a hugely long manual without much actual hands-on time, and, to be blunt, the names Cubase gave things were often extremely unintuitive compared to common usage by pretty much everyone else (and I started back in analog tape days then ADAT before getting to the computer). They also didn’t keep to Windows conventions on UI in many cases, and I was a diehard Microsoft products user.
I ended up taking a bunch of Groove3 courses on Cubase, in addition to doing a lot of googling every time I’d run up against a wall. There are features that I thought were missing in Cubase that I used a lot in Cakewalk, where I hadn’t noted those from reading the manual (there was just too much information to absorb), but that I “discovered” through the courses. There were also conventions Cubase uses that just are not intuitive no matter how you skin them (e.g. reversing how the mouse wheel works in scrolling from pretty much every other Windows application, and the “H” and “G” stuff for zooming in and out, not to mention just lots of ways they name features so you have pretty much no chance of finding them if searching on common terminology for those features).
BUT, as time went on, I got more and more productive in Cubase, and there is certainly a huge amount of depth in the functionality, and I still learn more and more as I go along (after having pretty much standardized on Cubase for all my new projects as of V10.5 and having used it exclusively since V11). I suppose I’m used to lots of the idiosyncrasies now, but I still do wish things were just more intuitive as I still find myself not knowing where to find certain things, even ones I’ve used a number of times, just not frequently enough to make them stick in my memory.
Heck, there are still new things I encounter that I didn’t know about most every time I’m looking into how to do something or just come across a new (to me) Cubase video, like this one that I found when googling Cubase audio editing after seeing the start of this thread:
I definitely do wish Cubase were more consistent, both within itself and with respect to more general application conventions (for Windows in my case, but I suppose for whatever operating system it ran on in a more general case). But it is certainly powerful, and way more so than what I actually use, partly because I still haven’t plumbed all the depths of things that might actually help me.
I haven’t used Pro Tools, but many of the videos I’ve seen of it give me the impression that there is a lot more unintuitive work to do (e.g. in setting up FX/aux buses) there than with Cubase (or Cakewalk), and I am much more MIDI oriented than pure audio oriented (my only audio in most projects is vocals).
Reading through this thread, I definitely feel like the key is asking the questions to get help on how to efficiently do things in Cubase. There is decidedly a steep learning curve, but, once you find out how to do the things you need, it can be very efficient. (Of course, there is usually a choice of multiple ways to do any one thing, so finding the one that suits your own workflow best is part of getting to that efficiency.)
(I actually was first exposed to the Internet, or Usenet as it was called at the time, back in 1982 when I started working at Bell Labs, but it was more like the mid-90s when it started to be closer to what it is today in terms of the web. I think I had my first real personal Internet account around 1995.) I believe I started with MTPro around when Windows 3.0 or 3.1 came out. My first computer-based MIDI sequencer was Texture, probably around 1986 – I’d used a Korg SQD-1, a hardware sequencer for a while prior to that. It was 8-track analog tape alongside that, then later ADAT, but I was probably already using MTPro by the time I got my ADAT (mid-90s).