I am using Cubase for many years now… and I am still missing something.
Well maybe you already made it and I don’t know about it…
Let me explain what I still miss in my process of creating music. Lets say you are working on a whole album with 10+ songs… so naturally you will use separate sessions for each song. OK, now we have 10 or more sessions and it’s time to mix them all. At this stage I always have a great need to have most tracks (drums, bass, maybe even guitars or even vocals) adjusted exactly the same regarding the plugins, EQ, pan and volume settings. I would really love to see in Cubase the option to adjust all 9 sessions after the 1st one with 1 or 2 clicks…
I am aware of the options to copy/paste settings on each channel or export track archives… but this all takes too much time… There should be something easier where one can save and copy whole bunch of track settings and routing or even full sessions with one click.
If Cubase team needs some help with detailed suggestions I am willing to give more input on this…
And then what? You still have to import all the audio files which already exist in another session…
So far the easiest way is to temporarily delete all audio files,
export the audio tracks and import them into new session where
the audio files of another song are and move these files on the imported tracks…
If you mean song "A’ is at 1:00 and the stuff you would paste into a template made from song “A”'s empty porject, but Song "B’s data is at 7:00 then use paste at origin.
I mean, the tempo changes in the middle of the song…
…your suggestion would not work well as the files would get
out of sync when pasted into the template session.
I’m not entirely clear how you’re starting out. Are each of your sessions in a separate project to begin with? It sounds to me that you may be at the point where you can export the audio of each of your sessions, either as a stereo mix or individual parts, and import them into a new project where you can apply the overall stuff you’re looking for.
…this approach of yours is possibly unique…to you…?
My simple reasoning is that some (most??) of us use different instruments and arrangements e.g. guitars, keys, basses, etc per song, hence a copy~paste of a complete mix arrangement is not very practical.
Typically common parts are saved as templates per channel and complete mixer setups as starting points.
Where I may be misunderstanding you is that appear to mix a bunch of sessions in ‘one’ go, instead of recording and mixing as you go along…which actually may be more ‘natural’ ? These sessions are different songs or versions of the same song?
When you mix a metal band practically all drums, bass and guitars have exact same settings through the whole album, maybe even vocals… so in such situations a feature to simply copy paste all settings from another session would be very handy… don’t you think?
Very often I’m copying settings between tracks (therefore Cb projects) on an album - yes, I find it good to at least establish a basic sound for each instrument and then deviate from that as necessary. Usually I do this by saving track archives, other times it’ll be via fx presets.
But I can’t think of another practical way of sharing the settings across different session because pretty quickly I end up wanting things slightly different, e.g. a fatter snare sound, or some things get automated, etc.
Perhaps an optional ‘Lock to Preset’ button on the FX so that when you change the preset on disk and load another project then the preset is reloaded? Should probably have a question dialog to check that’s what you want to do when loading with say Apply, Skip, Unlock buttons.
This would be analogous to the ‘Use global setting’ type tick boxes found in various places.
I’ve always found the following to be the easiest way (I import the 2nd project into the 1st, then delete the contents of the 1st)…
Open the 1st Project
Open the 2nd Project, and Activate it.
Set L and R Locators to the start and end of that Project, then, Edit menu>Range>“Global Copy”.
Go back to the 1st Project, Activate it, move the Play Cursor to some convienient place, then Edit menu>“Paste”
You can now verify that everything has been placed where you would expect, trackwise, then, if all is o.k…
Set L Locator to the start of the 1st Project, and R Locator to the start of your imported 2nd Project, and place the Play Cursor at the start of the 1st Project.
I think you’re asking for Cubase to be different animal here. What I think (you mean) it would entail is separate mixing procedures beginning at different points on the timeline. (Wavelab is their tool for compiling albums)
AS for being time consuming sometimes getting an album finished is just that no matter what tools are used.
Job preparation and end-detail always involve time consuming in any area of art or craft. (some experiencing bugs may have a titter at Steinberg’s end-detail on that observation)
Nice idea and would be good if it happened but I suspect the programming overhead would be rather large even for todays computers. Could be wrong.
