Lane/comping workflow advice

Cubase
,
1

I use the Lanes feature to record vocal takes and will end up with, say, 20 lanes.

I then do splits at the track level (thus automatically splitting all the lanes), and use the comp tool to select the best takes.

So far, so good.

I then do clean-ups/micro edits of the selected takes, which usually includes shortening the starts and ends of each take (audio event) to get rid of unnecessary noise before/after the vocal take.

When I do this, the problem is that when I shorten, say, the end of a selected take, Cubase will instead play the end of another lane where the selected take was shortened, defeating the purpose.

Right now, I have two tedious ways around that:

(1) Mute all takes in the lanes above and below the selected take. This works, but it also means if I end up selecting (or even wanting to audition) another take, I have to then unmute that take. Annoying.

(2) Select all takes in the lanes above and below the selected take and shorten them more than I shortened the selected take, so that there’s no spillover from them. Also annoying.

This is such a basic vocal comping workflow that there has to be a more elegant way to do this in Cubase. Right?!

Does anybody have any advice/suggestions for that?

2

Me too. When it comes time to top and tail, it can reveal another take, and sometimes I don’t notice right away. I try to first adjust the lengths so they are all the same, and when I trim, I select all of them and trim all of them together. But it’s not a great solution, so I’m watching this thread.

1 Like
3

My recommendation is to bounce when you’re done comping. I like to create a new Track Version (duplicate), select all parts and Bounce Selection. Then I make edits on this version if needed.

1 Like
4

I also start out the way you do, cutting things up (usually in phrases in my case) across the whole track, as close as I can get to a breaking put that will be the same across all takes, even if it might not be the best for any given take, including extra space at the end of phrases before big breaks to make sure the longest phrase ending is kept, which may mean extraneous noises in other takes.

While I’m comping, and selecting individual sections for each part, sometimes having to cut things up more finely to deal with issues, I may be adjusting the clip boundaries based on the clips I select, and that may make issues in other areas for phrase boundaries, but I don’t worry about that, for now.

Once I’ve got an entire song section (e.g. verse, pre-chorus, chorus, etc.) comped, I move the selected clips up to another track with the same processing on it (I’m usually using some processing in the course of doing my comping to help me review the parts, for example an automatic tuning plugin to help me both minimize any minor tuning considerations, since I’ll be manually tuning later, and exacerbate any more significant considerations, since that may change which takes I pick for some parts). If I need to comp doubles from the same pool of takes (which I pretty much always do for background vocals and occasionally for parts of lead vocals), I’ll then comp the next set from that same section. If not, I just mute the now selected parts in the just-comped song section in the original track so I won’t hear those when playing back. (I might note that I usually comp from the end of the song forward, partly because I want to pick take components that flow together well, so I’m listening not only to the takes I’m selecting at the time, but how they flow into whatever is immediately after them.)

I’ll typically finish comping the entire song for the part(s) I’m working on from a given pool of takes before doing any editing on the comped track(s). Once I’ve finished that, I disable the original track with the (now unused) takes and move it to a folder with any accumulated changes (in case I need to change my mind much later in the production process – e.g. I’ve sometimes needed to do this when comping decisions have ended up making for artifacts in later stages).

Now I go to the track with the comped part and do fade/crossfade editing, any volume adjustments, clip envelopes, possibly restoration processing (e.g. if there are clicks, I might use RX to deal with that), etc. I’ll be adjusting clip boundaries during this process to optimize it for the selected clips, and the transition points may be quite different from what they were in the original set of takes. Once I’ve done all that editing, I’ll generally bounce the clips into song sections (after having made a backup of the track with the edits intact to put in my old tracks folder “just in case…”), which are what I tend to like to use for subsequent work (e.g. using VocAlign to tighten background vocals and/or doubles against the lead vocal).

I guess the bottom line with respect to the original question/issue is that I don’t do any of the heavy lifting on fine clip boundary changes while working in the track with the pool of takes. Rather I wait to do that on a separate track, where I can optimize any changes for the clips in the comp. And, of course, if I need to comp more from the same pool of takes, I can adjust boundaries for what remains as needed while doing the further comps and again do the heavy lifting later.

1 Like
5

Thanks! That probably won’t work for me since I often go back and select a different take here or there as I’m doing the final mix (and as my bandmates add their feedback), so I’d like to preserve the original multi-takes/lanes.

6

Thanks! I’ve tried pretty much the same workflow, and it’s a decent compromise. I’d still love to just do all this work in the original multi-take/lane structure (the fewer “duplicated” tracks, the better), but perhaps that just isn’t possible, and this is the next best thing.

7

Great question. I work with a similiar process as @rickpaul.

First do the general comping of getting the right takes in the right place. Don’t worry too much about crossfading yet (as this messes up the difference between the lanes).

When I’ve got the right parts in the right places, I duplicate to a new track version, and name it FLAT. Then I do the process called “delete overlaps” or maybe it is “clean up lanes” or maybe both – can’t remember from the top of my head! This then only applies to the newly duplicated track version, the one I call FLAT. So I can always go back to the previous track version to get all the different takes. I have created a macro for this process, so on my setup, it’s all done with one press of a button.

With the new FLAT version of the comped track, I proceed with deleting spaces and apply crossfading. It is then much easier to handle. If I regret something, I can always go back and get a certain section from a specific lane in the previous track version, use the Range Tool to select and copy what I want to copy, select the new FLAT track version again, and then paste in the exact same place. The FLAT version then gets a new lane for that specific piece of audio, but that I can live with.

8

I’ve never considered it a compromise – I used to do the same thing in SONAR before switching to Cubase (mostly at the point of 10.5, though my first version was 9.5). The main difference back then was that I just deleted what I didn’t need from the leftovers as I went along.

It is only very recently that I started backing up the extras while the project is active (I do delete them at the point of archiving a project). That is mainly because there have a been a few times where I found artifacts I can’t fix down the line somewhere. In such cases, I could go back to an earlier copy of the project, find the needed pieces and bring them into the active project, or just import a track from the project at that point then do the work within the active project. But I was finding myself needing to do that a bit more frequently (mostly due to considerations relating to some new tuning software and/or noise reduction-related issues), and I decided it would be easier to just create folders with meaningfully named older versions of the tracks and save things at each major milestone so I can very quickly go back to any stage to resurrect small pieces if I find something too late.

In general, I treat destructive, and the ensuing fade editing, time alignment, and tuning as destructive editing, but the backups from different stages of that editing allow me to deal with any emergencies that might arise from editing mistakes or oversights. And, at the end of the project, it’s very easy to only backup what is needed instead of having lots of extra pieces lying around unused. (There is also the benefit that the underlying audio files at that point are independent of the DAW since there are no big audio files with a lot of extra stuff in them where the clips are formed by pointers to offsets in files as opposed to from the raw audio file boundaries. This sort of thing has helped me a number of times in bringing components from older SONAR projects into Cubase for remixes.)

9

I can add that I came from Pro Tools (jumped to Steinberg in 2015), and this is one of the VERY FEW things I still feel Pro Tools may have solved in a bit more tidy way. There the different lanes (called playlists) actually don’t overlap (at least that’s how it used to be). So you could set one of the “playlists” as the “master playlist” and just copy stuff onto there, and none of the “dead” audio would follow through since there really is nothing left in the background, so there’s no need for that duplicated “clean” version. Having said that, it was still cumbersome to use in its own way - you had to manually select a new playlist to set it up for a new take. In Cubendo all that happens automatically, with no danger of “replacing” a previous take. Apples and oranges, I guess.

10

I pretty much do the same as most of you. But I do make frequent use of Track Versions to act as an edit history that I can revert back to if needed.

One other thing I started doing a few years ago and highly recommend is to use Save As… to create a variant of Project and use that for Tracking and Comping. Once the Comp is finished & Rendered I pull that back into the main version of the Project. The advantage is the main version stays tidy while you can leave everything open & messy in the Tracking version to facilitate any later editing.

11

Thanks all for sharing your workflows!

Seems like we all do something similar, and there isn’t “one weird trick” to make vocal comping less tedious in Cubase.

It is what it is, as they say :slight_smile:

12

I’ve been using Nuendo and Cubase since version one and have developed a super fast and efficient comping method that will outdo anything on any of the DAWs . I do it using single or grouped stacked tracks with front to back key commands and control click to cut the top layers and move things around at lightning speed. The newer Cubase and Nuendo don’t do this anymore and split at cursor or ctrl click cuts through ALL of the overlapping tracks, creating an exponential jigsaw puzzle and logistical nightmare. I’ve been trying to get them to change it back because there’s no logical reason why anyone would want to cut through all the tracks. I have Cubase 14 Pro and literally still use an old Nuendo program in the studio for this reason alone, in that comping and editing great is one of my main strengths as a producer.
PLEASE FIX THIS. One other request is to change the event fader back to the center box at the top. The new location is a hassle and easily gets selected when stretching the left side of an event. The older versions graphics were also nice in that they were well defined and bold with room to click and move sliders. It had a look more like a vintage Neve console instead of a watered down rainbow unicorn candy store feel.
However, I do love all the new features and options to get lost in if you aren’t careful. Just don’t change the good, solid stuff to lesser effective things and fluff.

1 Like