Hello my Steinberg team!
As a composer and songwriter, many times I write songs in parts. Back in the day when I was writing charts, many times I would have a part of a song but not an entire song. These parts would lay around after the band played through them and I would just number them. Then, at some point part number 5 might sound good with part 12 then we go into part 2 come back out in part 7 then repeat. Now I had an “A” section then could mix and match, create transitions and key changes, tempo shifts etc… all on the way to building a song. Kind of like building a song like dealing cards from a deck.
Today, I often find myself not having time to write an entire track but do have time to capture a part. In order to merge tracks with another song I have to import tracks and get involved in the technology rather than just be able to “deal from the deck” real time and see what I can pull from the library of parts.
Would it be possible to have a merge parts/songs feature that just asked combine parts 1 and 2 for an instance and just roll. No other DAW has a feature this simple and quickly functional to create with.
It could be a prompt in the hub making things even easier.
Thanks for all you guys do to make Cubase the best!
Sincerely,
Jerry
Hello and welcome to the forums!
Have you looked into the feature that lets you import tracks from other projects? It allows you to grab any type of track(s) from any saved project with the option to include its parts/events.
If you render your song-sections (“Parts” having a specific technical meaning in Cubase) to Audio and put them in a location which the Media Bay indexes, then you could use them the same way EDM folks work with loops.
The problem is that “parts” as a concept like you mean (musical sections) don’t exists Cubase, so how should it know what to merge and how?
Exactly fese. Based on the response from help, I don’t think they understand the concept of what I am presenting. I am certain if they did merging would already be a feature.
That was my initial thought too. But isn’t that what an Arranger Event actually represents.
When using Import Tracks From Project… we are basically importing horizontal sections of a Project. A similar Import Arranger Events From Project… would allow us to import vertical sections.
Isn’t flattening the arranger chain (and then importing it) doing exactly that (importing vertical sections)?
I was thinking about arranger parts, too, or maybe cycle markers, but the problem with that is: how would you merge the tracks from two projects vertically that have maybe different track names, different routings, different instruments and plugins and such? You cannot just put “part B” vertically behind “part A” unless the projects have the same track count, type, order, routing and VSTis. I mean, you could of course append all audio events and MIDI parts from project B to projectA, but the result won’t probably be useful…
Yeah that’s the core issue. A Track is a complete thing that can operate fine all by itself.
But a slice of time from a Project is always incomplete, it needs stuff (VSTi’s, Inserts, etc.) that are outside of the slice of time.
It could be simplified exponentially. Like in MS Word. Copying and pasting a section or parts of written compositions together. Even that is overly complex for this arena to me.
For example:
Prompts:
Merge song(part)
Merge (title) with (title)= (new title)
Hit enter and boom there it is. No muss, no fuss,
just simple.