If you prefer doing things one note and event at a time, you can certainly ‘mouse your way’ through it.
If you want to batch process a lot of things that would take HOURS to do by hand with a mouse, by using a couple of Cubase features instead, you can. Six or eight clicks in a logic editor to process an entire track takes seconds…going through and clicking on every single note and manipulating them all individually…hours.
If you don’t want to have to put a hand on the computer keyboard, but only a mouse and one or two clicks per entry, you CAN (and if you have a programmable button or two on the mouse, even achieve quantized note lengths of your choice before clicking to enter the note…the more buttons the better).
It’s flexible enough to get there.
I’ve even known composers who use pedals for most of the things we’re talking about. Stand there with a guitar or bowed instrument in hand, try out their ideas in the acoustic realm, and punch it all into Cubase using ‘no hands at all’. (Point here…it’s flexible, and open to many forms of data entry…from mouse clicks to special controllers…you can even use your iPad or Android to enter stuff!).
No problem here. For me however, a mouse is the ‘least musical space’ way of inputting triggering events for a MIDI or instrument track. I’m also more inclined to go by my ears as opposed to what the GUI says. Not to say the GUI isn’t extremely helpful for data entry and edits, but for me, the piano roll is the ‘least musical frame of mind’ aspect of my workflow.
When it comes to ‘composing’ original melodies/themes…introspective recording is amazing, and very inspiring to me. I can ‘diddle’ on the keyboard or wind jammer (ignoring things like tempo, a metronome, etc.), and paste that diddling where I want at will and shape it up with my mouse.
Using my MIDI Controller, I can enter all four parts of an entire verse of say, a choral hymn (step entry if I don’t feel like trying to play it in real time) in the time it’d take to get a few bars in with a mouse. I don’t even have to touch the computer or a mouse to do it.
Once I have the notes in at ‘roughly’ the lengths I want, I can run a few batch processes to make it a bit more ‘human and musical’. Again, things that’d take a good hour or more by hand with a mouse, done in a few minutes.
Once I have the phrasing style for note lengths (legato/staccato/etc.) somewhat in place, I can run a few batch processes to rough in, them smooth off dynamics and expression data.
Now it’s getting pretty darn close, but some fine details are still wrong or missing. So I’ll fiddle with things like tempo, groove (if not swing effects, definitely changing beat emphasis, as musicians tend to do depending on the meter, instrument or voice characteristics, type of piece, etc.), and perhaps add a bit automatic humanization from the track inserts.
Last composition/entry phase, I’ll go in with the mouse and ‘fine tune’ the existing data where required. This is also the phase where I’ll pay close attention to the instruments themselves, and how they react to expressive data.
Now it’s time to MIX, apply effects, etc. That’s a whole different ball of wax…with yet another ‘personal workflow’ that might or might not be like what ‘others’ are doing with Cubase to get their mixes and masters done.
Now this is just ‘me’…it’s how I like to do things, BUT, there are countless ways to get at it. Including mouse clicks and drags, one note at the time.
This animated gif shows one way to do this there are 4 or 5 other ways to get there too. This also shows how you can color code the notes to indicate if they are in a scale and/or chord.
You can also create your own custom scales, new in C11.
What I’m doing is drawing in 1 long note. Then use the Scissors Tool to Alt+Split the Note at the first quarter note. The ‘Alt’ causes the split to be repeated. Then select all the Notes to shorten them, remember I still have Snap on so turn it off so I can freely resize the length. Then I’m using the computer keyboard arrow keys to select different Notes & change their pitch.
EDIT:
I just realized these GIFs do not enlarge like a jpg does when you click on it - instead it just starts/stops the animation, which at this size is too small to tell what’s going on. But if you open the image in a new tab or window you’ll get a large version.
Did I call it the wrong thing? Go figure. Whatever the buffer thinggy is called that keeps up with whatever we diddle through a controller with time stamps.
It’s pretty cool for quickly getting licks, phrases, and melodies into a track…whatever it’s called.
It looked like one of those auto-correct errors that turns out more poetically correct than the original.
Agree. I’ve had times where I’m just randomly hitting keys to audition presets & then realize the last little bit was interesting - and now I can magically keep it.
If you like the sound of Yamaha MOTIF keyboards and their stock pianos/winds, you’ll like what comes with Cubase.
In my opinion these instruments (pianos, woodwinds) can sound really nice in ensemble, but you WILL have to stage and mix them. Out of the box they’re panned center, not adjusted to have the ‘presence’ staged out, and you’ll want to make plenty of adjustments to place them properly in your mixes. Proper implementation of EQ, compression, and reverbs can really make them sing.
Brass…meh, but then again, it’s hard to find a good brass instrument in the digital medium. I’d say those sounds are comparable to what comes with other DAWs. I’ve supplemented brass heavily with third party plugins, and still have a hard time getting realistic sounding brass. Oh, I can make it sound ‘good’…but…not like ‘real brass’…if that makes sense.
For solo work, it can be hit and miss. Kind of depends on the solo itself. I.E. Maybe you don’t want vibrato at all, but all the solo violins that come with Cubase have it at the sample level.
If you’re wanting instruments with a lot of pre-staged/panned instruments, 3rd party libraries will be the way to go, and even so, they’ll take some learning and work to master getting nice mixes.
All in all, it’s not bad for the money, or compared to what comes with other DAWs, and you get a massive pallet of bread and butter sounds to work with (including a decent base General MIDI set).
As for synths…Cubase comes with quite a few of those…Hybrid, Flux, Padshop, etc…some that work through HALion SE, and some that run as their own stylized plugin. You can hear demos of alot of this stuff on the Cubase website, or in browsing Youtube.
For jazz percussion…I find the stuff that came with Cubase lacking. There’s a brush kit gem that was for Acoustic Agent 1 that’ll still work in Cubase that you’d be entitled to, but it’s kind of tucked away and takes some work to find and get working.
There’s enough included with HALion SE and Groove Agent SE to rough in a project and get the idea across, but good jazz drumming with brushes, felt mutes, coated/textured heads, etc, is very intricate…so if that’s part of your demands, invest in a good jazz drum kit plugin.
Which one? Subjective call there! I got the Paul Simon Jazz kit on sale that’ll run in Groove Agent SE (player that comes with Cubase, plus I have the full version of Grove Agent allowing me to tweak it even further)…it does get used, alot
Orchestral percussion that comes with Cubase…pretty much the General MIDI set of staples…not great, not terrible.
When it comes to sounds, a lot of it is subjective, loads of it has to do with everything else you’ve chosen for the ensemble, and how well you can stage and mix things.
Since the dongle is a physical item it makes more sense to me to buy it locally - most larger music stores will stock them. Buying from the online shop, I’d expect delivery time to vary based on your location. If you’re in the US there’s likely a Guitar Center nearby (although now-a-days who knows…).
Cubase itself doesn’t come with the dongle (although a music store might have a boxed version that comes with one - make sure to ask). Also if you see an older version of Cubase 10 or whatever it will still activate as C11. Boxed would save a lot of download time (Cubase comes with a bunch of content) if you can find one.
I’ve used lots of products with dongle keys before - these were usually professional software development products like source-control systems or automated testing software that cost like $40K, but the dongle was just a key. When you bought the product you got a dongle, or maybe several, depending on how many “seats” you bought. But since you were a registered user if you lost or broke a dongle you could get a replacement for a modest fee.
But it sounds like you’re saying with Cubase the dongle is the product. Is that true? You’re buying the dongle, not Cubase? So if you lose or break the dongle you’re out the whole cost of the product? I’ve been in the software industry for 45 years and I’ve never heard of anything that worked that way.
How did you get an “older” dongle and what can you do with it?
Thanks, but at this point the new system is hypothetical; we can talk about it when it goes into effect. Right now I need to understand the existing scheme.
If you’re a registered user what are the practical implications of the “zero-downtime” scheme? It says you can have 25 “operating hours” while you “apply for” a replacement. I compose music maybe 8-10 hours a day, so that’s 2-3 days. Is that enough time for a new dongle? Also where do you get a spare USB e-licenser? The whole scheme sounds arcane.
Which is why the licensing system has been under reconstruction.
Although there are many complaints about the dongle, it has been one of the most robust anti-piracy systems in existence for the past few years. It is my understanding that there has not been a legitimate crack of Cubase since version 5. That gives me confidence in the fact that the license I have purchased is not being used by someone else. I just hope after all the time they have invested in this project that it is a successful transition.
The replacement is a key they send you to register to a new dongle. You could order a dongle from Stienberg (and it’d likely ship from a center closest to your location), order it from a big box outfit like Sweetwater, or you could go pick one up in person from a dealer.
So, with zero down time policy, they essentially send you a key that eventually ‘expires’ until everything is sorted. If there were legit issues in getting your situation sorted in a more permanent manner, they would most likely issue you more time on that key, or just send you another one that eventually expires to serve until your permanent one arrives.
I’ve been using Steinberg dongleware since the 1980s on Atari (I have about 8 of them, from Cubase 1 ST, to CAF Falcon, early PC dongles, etc…and they ALL still work). It’s never been an issue for me. Maybe I’m lucky.
I doubt Steinberg would ‘leave you hanging’ without at least giving you time on a temp key that you can place on a fresh dongle (ordered or picked up at a local music store) until they take care of verifying and replacing your damaged dongle or in the case of lost/stolen dongle…resetting your account in a way that erases your old registration from the system (or marks it as lost/stolen, whatever they do for that).
The point in the ‘application’ is so they know how to treat your case. Not to hose you and leave you with no way to use DAW you’ve paid for the rights to use.
If you’re doing mission critical work 8-10 hours a day and really fear missing a second of work, you have a few options.
Do business with a local retailer who won’t mind loaning you a dealer dongle (perhaps with a cash deposit, or leaving a credit card no and a due date) if you get in a bind. That tends to be one of the advantages to working with local dealers, and getting to know a rep there on a first name basis. Taking care of their pro audio customers over the long haul tends to be important to these sorts of businesses.
Just get a spare dongle, and jump through the Zero Down Time hoops in the link Scab has shared above. While it’d be unlikely that Steinberg would leave you out on a limb once they could verify you ARE the account/license holder in a given case…if for some reason you were up against a deadline with no head-room, you could always go buy a new dongle and key (order it on line, or go pick it up from a local dealer), and sell one of them once it’s all sorted.
Purchase duplicate licenses on more than one dongle…overkill for most single users, but a few do it, and actually keep a ‘complete backup system’ on the ready.
Stick with FL, wait for the new ‘no-dongle’ option that’s supposedly on the table, or get a different DAW.
Truth: I’ve suffered all sorts of down time from things like bad hard drives, burnt out power supplies, viruses, idiot mistakes on my part messing with a system build or OS configuration, etc. In contrast, I haven’t had a dongle (Steinberg, iLok, etc.) go bad yet (knock on wood…I know it ‘can happen’…but of all the weak points in a system to flake out…eLicenser is truly the ‘least fragile’ of the lot). Personally, I’m one of the few who actually LIKES the dongle…as I can have a near portable installation on a hard drive I can just plug up to any system with a lot fewer issues from the ‘local sysop’, need for a network connection with all the right ports and web/ip addresses whitelisted in the enterprise firewalls, and a 32 page implementation plan that has to be approved by 18 executives up the ladder to get it up and running, etc. OK, I worked a lot of years for bureaucratic institutions, and found I could buy ‘dongles’ with a lot more different budgets and purchase order types than I could ‘software’ with ‘subscriptions requiring a credit or debt account and regular internet access’, and fewer people had to ‘approve’ it all…didn’t need 6 engineers to install it, etc. I put the drive with OS (sysprepped with scads of drivers already on it) and Cubase already set up in a sled, shoved it into the machine, plugged in the dongle, rebooted, and poof…off I go.
So…‘arcane’ is having to give someone bank account access, and keeping a system more or less perpetually online. Arcane is needing to have every bureaucrat, accountant, and lawyer in the building involved in making ‘contracts’, setting up eExchange accounts that get pinged on a regular basis to keep using the software, and many others involved in implementing the product.
Remember, we’re not talking about a DAW that just popped up yesterday, only has a few hundred customers who are essentially beta testers, has zero industry patents, and limited financial services to raise capital and get things done. Stienberg has been around 30+ years, on the international scene, dealing with PROs, as individuals, and as large scale enterprises for a long time. One of the reasons they’ve managed to stand the test of time in a niche software market is because they’ve protected it all from rampant piracy. Enough people want or need the software to pony up for it, and put up with the pain of a software protection scheme.
All protection schemes are a pain in some way. Online/cloud reliant/ondisk protection/payment systems have problems too…servers suffer down time, servers get hacked, bugs pop up in the client software, hard drives crash, hardware gets changed out that borks it ways that require releasing and redoing everything. Other issues arise…especially in bureaucratic institutions, or when dealing with grant work (buying a ‘dongle’ that happens to have some useful some keys on it is a lot less complicated and easier to get approved in a grant application than setting up debt/credit accounts with bank numbers and such attached).
The whole idea that the need to install an ‘always running process’ that needs ‘full admin privs + network access’, a valid/current debt/credit card keyed in, snoops a bunch of info about your hardware, other software, usage habits, and even your physical location, stores all that info on the cloud somewhere, and has to go through worldwide infrastructure (maybe even thousands of different systems…all ‘hackable’) is ‘more reliable’ and ‘easier to use/maintain’ than a simple stick one plugs in locally…now that’s ‘arcane’.
For what it’s worth…if my system with Sibelius crashes…I still have to call Avid and get the old key released. ONLY thing I like about it is they allow simultaneous installation on two machines instead of one (technically you’re still only supposed to use one at a time), and for portables…don’t have to consider dongle management. Other than that…it’s every bit the pain in the rear as dongles when something goes wrong.
Here lately keeping AVID stuff ‘up to date’ has been expensive, and mostly pointless. The Steinberg Dorico Team built an entirely new DAW on top the Steinberg/HALion engine to what it is today in 4 or 5 years…all AVID has done in that time is tinker, tease, and take our money. I only keep it because a few clients insist on using it. Progress for Finale is slow and pretty trivial too, but at least they aren’t keying in our credit cards and demanding monthly or yearly payments…much cheaper to keep up to date.
If AVID were to pull the plug on their servers tomorrow, I’d be hosed if the system drive it was last registered for ever crashed.
If Stienberg went away tomorrow and pulled the plug on their severs, I could still install and run everything from Cubase SX to Cubase 11 with my dongle and a supported OS…for as long the dongle itself still works (still have clones of the sys-prepped system/cubase drives, and occasionally need them when going back to old projects). If the dongle died, I could probably scrounge around and find a working dongle with keys someone would sell/trade (or maybe even outright gift me) and have it up and running inside a week. So there are some clear ‘advantages’ to ‘arcane’ technologies. End users get a little more control over it, for a quite a bit longer.
If you followed the link above you’d find Guitar Center has them for about $27.
It was the dongle I was using until I replaced it with a newer one, so I kept the old one as a spare - in case I smash my current dongle or accidentally ate it. Why replace it? Because as USB got faster newer dongles could take advantage of that.
I’m at the backend of a PC failure and migrating to a new machine. Gotta say the products on my eLicense & iLok dongles were the easiest to get up and running again. Very pro dongle myself & hope that continues to be an option moving forward. On the other hand totally understand not wanting to take dongles to a gig.
How would I find a dealer? I just got off the phone with my local Guitar Center (Nashua, NH, USA) and not only do they not have Cubase Pro in a box, but they don’t even show it as an item they can get. I went to the Steinberg website and I couldn’t find a phone number for Sales, just support, which I can’t call because it’s only for registered users and Steinberg “USA” is only open until 1PM EST (what’s up with that?) More critically I didn’t see anything on the Steinberg home page with any phrase like “Dealer Locator” or “Find a Dealer Near Me”.
Many products I use for production, e.g., RØDE microphones, have a system of authorized dealers, and woe betide anyone who buys or sells RØDE gear outside their authorized dealer network. Does Steinberg have anything like that?
I’m also confused about this, from your earlier post… Cubase itself doesn’t come with the dongle (although a music store might have a boxed version that comes with one - make sure to ask). Also if you see an older version of Cubase 10 or whatever it will still activate as C11. Boxed would save a lot of download time (Cubase comes with a bunch of content) if you can find one.
So maybe it comes with a dongle and maybe it doesn’t, or maybe I can buy a boxed version or maybe I can’t. How do I settle that? How do I talk to someone at Steinberg to get some solid info on this? If it needs a dongle to run then why on earth wouldn’t they ship one when you buy the product? Most companies go to a lot of trouble to make it EASY to buy and install their products - Steinberg seems to deliberately make it hard and complicated.
FWIW Guitar Center can sell the downloadable version of Pro 11 for $552 and they can sell a key for $28. No information on how these two items get matched up.
Steinberg likely has offices and maybe even media production (packaging/installation media/etc) centers in multiple countries. I don’t know details, but it’d make sense that they either have some of their own scattered around the world, or they contract reps to maintain a presence in various countries (some countries require it to do business there). I think ‘distribution’ in the US is handled through a Yamaha office.
If you can’t find a music or pro audio store by calling and asking around, I’m sure they’d be happy to tell you the closest authorized dealer if you were to contact US Support.
There should be several in the New England area!
Also, if you know places that sell Yamaha electric pianos (or other Yamaha pro audio gear), there’s a very good chance they might carry Cubase as well (if they don’t stock it, they can almost certainly order it and have it there quickly). Might give those a call first.
You CAN buy boxed versions, that include a dongle. Last one I purchased came from local music store, which deals in a lot of Yamaha gear. They also stock and demo Cubase and Dorico in their pro audio show room.
You can get a dongle through the Steinberg Website, or a number of resellers. You can also just buy download versions from online stores (including but not limited to the official route through the main Steinberg website), in which case you’d need to have a dongle already, or source one however you see fit.
It says on their support website that “Support can only be provided to registered users!”
So where can I find comprehensive instructions on how to install Cubase Pro 11 from scratch, including the dongle? When I did a Google search on this “How to install Cubase” most of the hits were on earlier versions (installation changed with 11) or they were questions about installing OVER a previous version and retaining preferences and settings.
