I’ve got an audio track with a pad sample on. The track has an EQ on it, which is taking a side-chain input from the another track.
The track the EQ is taking its side-chain input from is an instrument track (a kontakt piano library).
The issue is, I want to be able to solo the pad audio track and still have the side-chained EQ responding to the piano.
The send from the piano is on a pre-fade, and I have 'Mute Pre-Send When Mute" unchecked in preferences.
The issue seems to be that, when I hit solo on the pad’s audio track, it mutes the piano track as expected. But when the piano track mutes, it doesn’t just mute the audio - it stops the MIDI data being sent to Kontakt. As no notes are triggered, no audio leaves Kontakt, and no side-chaining occurs.
Having migrated from Logic, this is unusual behaviour for me. I’m used to mute and solo buttons muting the audio output from a mixer channel, not muting the MIDI data coming from a MIDI event.
Is there any way around this so that I can monitor my side-chained channels in solo?
There’s a couple of things going on as I see it. The first thing is that Solo in Cubase actually Mutes all other tracks. The difference may seem like semantics at first, but there is a subtle difference and pre fader sends puts a spotlight on that difference.
The second thing, as you found out, is that Muting an Instrument channel in the mixer also mutes the MIDI. I find this behavior very counterintuitive. If you use Rack Instruments, you can actually mute the MIDI Track and Audio Channel individually but Solo always engages on both(!).
Luckily there is—the Listen bus. It does require you to setup and use Control Room but IMHO, you should do that anyway. Once Control Room is activated, click this “L” button to listen to a channel with sidechain routing in place:
