I like how you’re using the program and I’m glad to hear it works well in that kind of application. Cubase’s routing is logical, but it took me some time to get things right and I still have a lot more to learn about the program.
I go with the tried and true Ray Charles system, which is, “Yeah, but how does it sound, baby?” I think Cubase sounds good. Pro 'Tools on the high-end, A-list studios is impressive, but I think it’s possible to get excellent results with Cubase with ITB mixing and mastering. I hear some great tracks people are doing with the program.
Good luck with the band and your on-going projects.
I’ve read the comments here and I just have to say there is so many biased comments here. Us hip-hop producers are sound painters? Ridiculously offensive. As a fairly new Cubase user I can honestly say I have fallen in love with Cubase. It has flexibility I’ve never seen in any other DAW but I would never recommend it to my fellow “sound painters”. Cubase falls on it’s face in many ways. There are reasons I still have to rewire it with what I feel is an inferior DAW. Cubase has many shortcuts and such that are so non intuitive it’s maddening. Control click to reset a fader, I right clicked so many faders looking for a reset option when I first started. Beat designer is supposed to appeal to my market of music but it’s really weak in comparison to the offerings of other sequencers. It can do a lot but it’s really weak and implemented poorly. There is no undo for everything. There is no bezier curve automation. Going through menus to do what other DAWs offer right in your face. As mentioned before if you didn’t grow up with cubase it would put you off. I know very few Cubase users in the urban music market. Those that I do know I would consider the better ones of the people I know but Cubase is clearly not aimed at this “sound painter” market. Not with the way it implements things. It’s menu driven interface and it’s non touch non vector based GUI looks old. Between that and the fact that I had to pay just to demo it is enough of a reason to see why it isn’t popular for genres of music with a big focus on digital instruments is obvious. Then you add the weak offerings of plugins to this and it’s obvious who it’s catered to. Groove agent is sub par at best. Groups of pads, I can get unlimited pads in battery. No round robin. Who would even want that? What if I want to create an entire bar in beat designer of 64th notes. The coloring doesn’t adjust to reflect it. Why would I do that? Cause we make flams manually in these genres. That’s amateur mistakes for a DAW to lack of they want to appeal to us. I’m sure Cubase is popular, just not amongst us and for good reason. Not because we lack talent (which was clearly implied) but because it just isn’t aimed to be popular amongst us. One thing that isn’t fair it’s to judge a person’s musical ability with a guitar based off of their ability with a drum machine.
If the dongle does not go away, overtime I may ending switching to Logic Pro X. I strongly believe that Cubase 8 is a better DAW than Logic but this dongle requirement is a PITA. I don’t mind buying a DAW once and paying around $500 for it because this kind of S/W is expensive to develop and I want to contribute to financial health of this business.
But having to buy a lesser version of the same product to use on my different machines is getting old. In my case I have Cubase 8 with the dongle running on a desktop machine. The dongle is out of easy reach. For my MacBook Pro, I purchased Cubase Elements 8 since I didn’t want to move the dongle nor have it hanging off the laptop for fear of breaking it. The next thing I needed on the MacBook was my full copy of Groove Agent 4 – but that also meant moving the dongle.
At this point I starting investigating an alternative DAW for the MacBook. I purchased 2 $100 iTunes gift cards for $75 each and used this to purchase Logic for $150. I will still use and upgrade Cubase but Logic will be my go to DAW while using the MacBook - mainly because I can’t accept the dongle nor buying multiple copies of Cubase for different machines.
How many others have a similar story to tell. I want to purchase the product ONCE and use if anywhere without a dongle. I don’t mind requiring an Internet check to insure that it is running only once – but something needs to be done otherwise over time the faithful like myself will be gone.
I often wonder whether the cost of protection, development, dongle etc does them more damage than good. The loss to piracy might actually be less. Many like to buy to fund development.
If the dongle does not go away, overtime I may ending switching to Logic Pro X.
It’s a matter of how to look at things, my look is that you don’t loose the dongle, in fact the dongle gets bigger (200 x).
The dongle is shiny and heavy
I have had other products with challenge response authentication/activation and have had so many issues regarding changing hardware/software combinations, I speak hard out: I like the dongle for the reasons above.
Excellent post. I know the term “sound painter” was used perhaps derisively, but I kind of liked it. What’s wrong with painting with sound? To me, it’s just another approach to making music. Acid Pro had that idea working well, but that program never really sounded good to my ears. Abelton Live seems to be a superior product for working with loop based music making. In Cakewalk’s Sonar I believe they have a nice paint roller tool. so you can just roll copy midi and audio loops. Cubase has “folders” and it’s a great way to build grooves and trac
I do think Cubase swings very nicely. But I don’t think Beat Designer the strongest way to approach drums and percussion in Cubase. I think the best results are obtained by using Groove Agent (whatever version one has) and playing or step-writing/programming in the parts. The Pattern Player and Auto Accompany features are interesting. Working with MIDI tracks may be newer way of working for you, but I think it’s the how Cubase does drums best. BTW, I like the Round Robbins because it adds variety in some cool ways. however, I’m sure there’s many ways to get identical or nearly the same results in other ways.
One thing I really like about Cubase is how flexible it is with handling note velocity. I could do a whole post on that.
In the instrument called Transfuser2 from Air Music, they have a whole set of interesting groove templates based on “Cubase” style grooves. So, it seems pretty clear that Cubase has had some significant influence in loop-based or electronic instrument/sample based music making.
The Drum Editor in Cubase lets you quantize individual drums. You can also do a track with all the drums, then dissolve by pitch and change individual sounds that way – quantize, effects, etc.
Anyway, I hope it works out for you and that you start getting results you’re happy with. Keep Painting!
The best way for me to do drum parts is to do a bar bones drum Part (very simple with maybe just a snare back beat and hihat) copied and pasted the length of the song. Then I come back after the lead melody and some important riffs and hooks are in place and add the rest of the kit. I pretend I know how to drum AHEM! and play along the song on my knees until I have it mapped out in my head, left hand snare / right hand kick. Now I can either record the entire song in one go or in sections if it’s not a simple song. After that I quantize that rather hard. To me velocity/dynamics seems more important to make the drums come alive than timing. Maybe I’m strange? When that is done I add toms fills and remove some snares to get kick, snare and toms cooperate where needed. After that I do hihat/ride by drawing them in some editor by drawing. Then I play along record and crash cymbals and finally I go through all of it to make sure the “drummer” has no more than two hands and two feet haha! It works flawlessly in a program like Cubase, mostly because I’m used to it and it’s a pain to do it in other programs. I also use the MIDI modifiers to add random velocity and position and to me it sounds just as good as if I had meticulously adjusted or recorded all of it. It’s close enough to sound drum-ish to me!
Great working method. I’m much the same and that kind of detail is what I think we like about working with MIDI and digital audio – so much flexibility and choice, sometimes it’s too much and I end up in an hours-long tweak-a-thon I didn’t really need.
Great tip about not having to explain that your drummer is from another planet where the have five arms or six legs. I like the double-drummer sound and layered loops, but if you want to it sound like a person, he has four hands, like all good drummers do! I often think about the playing of drummers I’ve heard or known and think about that person’s playing when doing a part. “How would so and so have played this?”
One of my biggest problems is just sitting and listening to how good a Groove sounds and not getting on with finishing the song.
Popularity depends on how you define the audience, warez leechers, young or old, calling themselves hobbyists or aspired producers are not the tier 1 audience. Those guys go for what they can find on torrent sites.
Between profesionals, people who make an income with a DAW as daily tool, and paying userbase Steinberg and AVID are leading.
Steinberg Cubase is no a “no dough” product, So it’s limited to a paying userbase.
I love drums and rhythms so I know what I like and I know how to get it. I have a fairly clear vision of what I think would fit and doing it as described is a reasonably fast process for the most of it. No, it’s a very fast process! I change my mind haha! CTRL+D for hihat/ride is faster than real time, kick/snare is about real time but may take a few rounds to get a good take, plotting out accents on cymbals doesn’t take long. What I sometimes can get stuck on is fills with toms and poopies. Avoiding the obvious and get the dynamics right so they sit in the mix without resorting to compressors or other methods is what takes time. Getting velocities right gets faster over time though, so it’s mostly avoiding the obvious left. But nowadays it doesn’t take long to get a reasonable drum track together. It’s also kinda fun to poke around with so I don’t mind.
Sometimes hihats can sound a little dead unless you take good care of them. Then I record maybe four bars of one MIDI note e.g. F#1 for closed HH and get the velocities right for the accents. I use Superior Drummer and there are a bunch of hihats more or less open that I can distribute the hits to, to make it sound a little more alive. Then I pull the Part in the Project Window to length and go into the Editor to duplicate the four bars to fill the Part up.
The problem with short notes is that they don’t align with the bars when you use CTRL+D so here is a little workaround. I do this in the Key Editor because it allows me to also draw a note from the start to the end of the last bar. Then I select the long note and all the hihats and hit CTRL+D and now I have eight bars of hihats and two long notes all aligned with the bars. It’s easy to get 32 bars by just holding down CTRL+D. Then I double click with SHIFT on the first long note and all oft them are selected and I hit Delete. This works for other stuff than drums of course but drum hits usually are the worst because they have no useful length to edit.
Then again there is no point in overdoing it. Real drums are real drums. It maybe looks like I use a lot of time for this but nowadays it’s a fast process. In the majority of songs the drums are edited in half an hour and a big chunk of the rest in around an hour. Sometime I go totally overboard though
Great suggestion about using the long-tones for guides. I’ll have to try that. My next “learn more about” project is the Groove Agents Automation, particularly for the ornamentation offered in Acoustic Agent. My next upgrade will be to Groove Agent 4.2 or whatever it is when I’m ready.
BTW, I completely agree with what you said about velocity being so influential on how a part sounds, swings and sits in a mix.
When I bring up a kit, usually the HHats sound too low in level, but then when the part is starting to work, the HHats often go back to near the original levels the preset offered. Equal loudness contour is ultimately my friend.
Anyway, as I said, my next mountain is Groove Agent Automation. I’m on the foothills and see the potential “up there” and I’m looking forward to become more adept with the automation features GE provides.
I don’t know Superior Drummer, I’ll take a look at it.
So – to stay vaguely on topic – is Cubase becoming “less popular?” Not with this user.
I can certainly say that Cubase is on my do not every buy again list, unless they can figure out how to get my copy to work again. A few years back I had the opportunity to go ProTools and chose Cubase because of my familiarity with it. This version 8.0.3 is a total let down. I have a 5ghz AMD fx 95-90 processor, a brand new everything else and I can only run one and occasionally two VST’s, on a Win7 64 machine, and that is completely unacceptable. I do no understand how everybody else is able to get their products running without flaws but Steinberg can’t seem to. Cubase is the erectile dysfunction of the industry now.
And Don’t You Delete My Post, I know you do that kind of stuff from time to time.
there are plenty of CB8 users who are feeling the agony of spending 90% of their time trying to Google computer tweeks only to find out that the tweek doesn’t work.
I just want the program that I paid my hard earned money on to work… exclamation point…
Why is that too much to expect… question mark…
And don’t put out a version 9 that fixes the problem before fixing mine… exclamation point…
I can certainly say that Cubase is on my do not every buy again list, unless they can figure out how to get my copy to work again. A few years back I had the opportunity to go ProTools and chose Cubase because of my familiarity with it. This version 8.0.3 is a total let down. I have a 5ghz AMD fx 95-90 processor, a brand new everything else and I can only run one and occasionally two VST’s, on a Win7 64 machine, and that is completely unacceptable. I do no understand how everybody else is able to get their products running without flaws but Steinberg can’t seem to. Cubase is the erectile dysfunction of the industry now.
Man, believe me there are numerous people running C8 without problems (I’m one of them), I advise you to do some troubleshooting and if you’re not technical, call in help troops.
I’ve seen some AMD systems in the last years, and yes most are really low in terms of performance while their specifications (those everyone reads) are technically speaking formidable. But they are just specs, often aligned to what benchmarkers want to have. A bit like what is happening to the german diesel cars nowadays. I guess it’s something in the architecture that is not optimal, or it is the way you are using your system.
On the other hand, it is true imho that cubase corehandling is very good when handling big projects, but when working with a few vst’s it can give some odd readings in terms of blowing ASIO in to the skies due to a single core overusage. Adopting the workflow to the way a system should be handled can give you lot’s more power then you have noticed for know, since even a amd 9590 can handle a lot more then two vsti’s.
Try to balance your system, e.g. try to start with a template where the most used vsti’s are loaded by default, so the multicore kicks in by default, and let cubase/OS-combination do the core handling. Do not overtweak. Don’t stack everything up in to a single multitimbral vsti and do not try to let the system do what you want, but follow the logic of the system, and you will be happy again in no time.
Everything is working very fine here, taken those prerequisites in to account. And i can have a huge amount vst’s active, even on a laptop.
Well, to be fair, the OP did mention ‘The Netherlands’ - 3 times in fact, and it seems clear to me that he was speaking specifically about that country.
I completely agree with all this. And I think this is the best point regarding the ‘kids’ - Cubase is an ‘Advanced Music Production System’ - not a toy, but a world-class software suite.
I would think that scares some away, whereas in my case, it not only attracted me, but caused me to switch from 2 other rather popular DAWs, which I didn’t even reinstall when I wiped my drives clean and started fresh from square 1.
I wanted a sophisticated, feature-rich DAW which offered many MIDI tools.
For those who simply want to drag & drop loops, there are probably easier ways to go than Cubase, although we all know it can be used for that as well.
Since this ‘level of difficulty’ is akin to little more than ‘copying and pasting’ things like a sentence or paragraph in Microsoft Word or Wordpad, [and even easier than that, in fact] then anyone can do it, which would then mean that just about everyone on earth should be considered ‘a musician’. Maybe an arranger - but even that would be a stretch.
But personally, unless someone can actually play at least one instrument - and to a listenable level at that - I’m die-hard stingy to hand out the well-earned title of ‘musician’ to just anyone with a computer mouse, monitor, and DAW software, whether rightfully paid for - or not.
Meanwhile, I just happened to check that first poll on KVR and Cubase [Windows] looks like it’s number 2.
I fell onto this post by chance.
I have had Cubase on my PC for 3 years now and I am still struggling to find my way around it which brought me here. Of course I have not been working on it on a daily basis over that period of time as unfortunately I still have to hold onto my day job to pay the bills, and the time I have left available to devote to my love of music is rather sparse these days.
I equipped myself with the Focusrite (scarlet Solo studio pack) and Cubase came as part of the pack.
Over the Weekend I had another attempt aiming to succeed at doing a recording of my guitar. As always I ended up spending again quite some time re-learning the few steps I had felt so proud to have overcome at my previous sessions and soon after hit yet another wall.
Recording my E guitar with no effects, through a mike placed in front of my amp, I had thought would be a simple affair. But I am still not able to achieve that. I try YouTube vids, googling it, and it seems impossible to find a step by step set of instructions easy to follow to complete such basic tasks.
I watched the tutorial (YouTube Vids) that are very informative, too informative as they tend to start showing the viewer how to navigate a project screen and all the functions so much so that by the time you reach the end of it you forget all that it covered.
I have only recently joint a Forum (http://www.strat-talk.com/) of fellow guitarists which includes discussions on recording where members share their views on all DAWs currently available and I was surprise to find I was the only one who mentioned Cubase. I am yet still to find a user who can answer my questions. If Cubase deserves to be known better we need people like yourselves to be more present on such social networks, to be more aware of the need of the users/potential users and make it easier for them to get to the information they seek at the time they look for it.
I have only joined this Forum yesterday and I find it extremely difficult to navigate for a new comer. It does not look welcoming at all, and makes me feel I am not at all supposed to be here.
I suggest some of you visit the likes of the forum I refer to in the above. That should give you some clue as to why the popularity of Cubase is down to a dwindle. I am above all a musician and not a sound technician, and that will determine the use I would make of such software. I feel so far that Cubase is focused to a group of users I am excluded from. I think that is at the root of Cubase’s drop in popularity. It seems to become the instrument of choice to the initiated few.
