Please forgive me if this already exists. I am new-ish to Cubase and learning more and more everyday.
I am learning composition at a later age in life. I am working in Cubase as a platform for working out ideas. Having been a Dorico user since day 1 it was available, working in Cubase has many benefits moving away from worrying about notation when just test out ideas.
My idea would be to create an Idea Panel. Where the user can open up the panel, create a new idea, and record an 15-30 second musical idea.
This idea panel would always be available to see, and perhaps hold as many as 300 ideas. And it keeps composer like me, with a way to play around with musical themes and ideas, and then save them. And come back to them at some point in the future.
Just a thought, as it would save me a multitude of files that are 5-20 seconds long that only have 1 idea, waiting for me to come back to at some point in the future.
That would be really nice. THough there are ways to achieve
Do you know about MIDI loops, Render in Place and File>Export>Event? These show up in the Mediabay, and with a bit of config are readily accessible in a list where you can listen to the file
Midiloops contain midi and the VST instrument all bundled in one file
Render in Place saves an audio file
If you play around with this you might find what you need. Post a reply if you want more direction.
Let me play around with trying to learn some of that on my own, before I waste your time with you giving detailed information. MIDI loops might be an idea that works best from me from your description, as I am wanting the MIDI data to be saved. VST information is maybe a plus, but not a requirement.
Audio files don’t help me too much, as I am more interested in saving the MIDI data.
I will come back if I need more help, if you are willing to share ideas.
It’s a very simple implementation, with almost no options. I believe it’s made for this purpose, though the name of it doesn’t indicate as much, since there’s no loop really involved at all.
This actually is very close to what I want. It’s a great idea, I only wish it would save the time signature with the export. However, I think this is very close to what I would be looking to do.
Thank you for pointing me in this direction. You are correct, the name is name is a little deceiving.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I fiddling around and coming up with musical ideas.
I mocked up a potential look for how the panel could work.
Select a MIDI Event and select to add it to the Idea panel (perhaps a button at the bottom of the panel, or something in a right click)
the Idea Add Panel opens.
Some information from the current project can be added (name, date, etc.) or auto-added (tempo, time signature, Instrument name only).
The MIDI data and information is saved (minimal in file size). In the future when someone wants to use the idea, they drag it into a project. Perhaps the tempo and time signature can be copied at the same time to that location in the project. Then the user can find the instrument from the textual description that was saved. Or if it doesn’t add too much to the file size, then perhaps it retains a “link” to the instrument and loads it when dragged into the project.
I just use a “Sketches” file directory and save a full Cubase project file for each idea/sketch within that one directory. Using a descriptive file name helps.
To record various ideas in words within each file, Cubase has a “Notepad” for each project, and a separate “Notepad” for each Instrument or Midi or Audio track for specific track notes.
The file size for a Cubase file with one instrument track (i.e. Halion Sonic) with 24 bars of midi chords is ~0.3 Megabytes on my machine. Another Cubase file with 50 bars and 10 instruments coming in and out (synths, drums, etc) is 2.5 Megabytes. At those rates I can put over half a million “sketches” on a 2 TB drive.
Note that I’m referring to quick midi sketches here - adding audio, video, effects, etc can quickly generate much larger files.
I’ve thought about other ways but for me there’s value in being able to just open the thing and immediately have whatever I had in my last session with it.
