Well, they could also be ill with Covid if it’s passing through the staff and giving them shortages.
But agree, that’s a poor reply to receive, not to mention the spelling and grammar is seriously under par for someone who’s customer facing. The Covid thing at the end does sound like a very poor excuse when presented in such a way.
I have seen on here before that asknet can be frustrating if you have a query, but i’ve never had to contact them - everything just went through without bother.
Are you able to share the screenshot without exposing any codes? Presuming it’s just a mistake in the text where it says “Artist” - but of course, I don’t blame you for not clicking the buy button unless it’s clearly listing the product you’re expecting.
One good thing about this experience is that it sets my expectations about the company. Is this what I have to look forward to with Steinberg’s customer service when problems and glitches develop?
BTW, I’ve received a response from them from, apparently in Germany? They’re having someone get back to me and try to restart the whole thing from scratch, which means making sure my “crossgrade” discount isn’t already “used”.
Your asknet Solutions AG Customer Service Team — — asknet Solutions AG Vincenz-Priessnitz-Str. 3 76131 Karlsruhe Germany www.asknet-solutions.com
Looking at the headers on the email it looks like it’s originating in the EU - …eu-central-1.compute.internal … but the whole thing is wrapped up in Amazon Web Service packets so who knows? It could be literally anywhere in the world. Does anyone know whether Steinberg actually has a US-based support or customer-service operation at all? …Mainly so I know what hours and whose holidays I’m working around.
I’ve bought products before with either competitive discounts or student discounts - mostly in the video/image/animation space and I’ve NEVER had such a difficult experience as this!
Cubase is a great DAW for contemporary music & scoring, but is sadly lacking in some key areas for sound design and electronic music production compared to just about all of it’s competitors.
Steinberg seem to be taking it on a path to becoming Nuendo lite. Where in the past Cubase was the flagship software for anything audio & Nuendo was the flagship suite for working in post, film & game audio.
Almost all feature requests that they implement in upgrades are aimed at the composer crowd & most request made from the electronic producers in this community have been ignored for a decade. Aside from adding features to sampler tracks & updating automation & MIDI CC automation to utilise bezier curves, there has been very little added since Cubase 7 that caters to those of us making electronic music or hip hop.
Steinberg seem to think they can just throw us a few new libraries of garbage loops & omit any feature requests made. Some of which have been available in other DAWs for years, such as native global modulation sources & multi assignable macros.
No option whatsoever for FM synthesis, anywhere within the Steinberg family of products. Not even in their flagshhip sound design suite, Halion 6. Very little in the way of decent native synths. Retrologue is just a reskin of Halion’s VA synth engine & Padshop is just a better skin for Halion’s granular engine. the other included synths have been there for over a decade & are complete trash.
Could you please elaborate on this? I’m a composer but I compose with a mix of traditional (piano, bass, drum-kit, etc) and electronic synthesized sounds, so I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making between composers and electronic music producers. The sound I’m aiming for is a bit like Robert Miles whose main instrument is piano but there’s lots of electronic stuff going on. Also, Hans Zimmer’s music (not my style!) is very synth-y and allegedly he’s a big Cubase uer.
Also, are you referring just to the stock synthesizers? I’m new to Cubase but I thought that with the VST standard you can get a huge choice of plugins.
Cubase is a Download. It doesn’t matter if the shop stocks it. What matters is the eLicenser - if you don’t have one. That’s what you need to be in stock. It’s cheaper to buy from Best Service, anyways. Cheaper price, and no sales tax.
Buying the Cubase license from Guitar Center would literally waste money.
He means that the feature requests that tend to be prioritized are those working in a Composition market segment. This includes Film Composers, who routinely use Synths in their productions.
However, things like the Clip Launcher that Logic Pro and Digital Performer added aren’t things that are prioritized for Cubase, because Steinberg deprioritizes those market segments.
He didn’t mean “composer” in a “strictly orchestral/classical music” sense. He meant that specific market niche. Hans Zimmer is in that market niche.
The areas of the market where the most “growth” is to be had is not in that market niche. It’s a nice niche, absolutely, but I think other DAWs are dipping their toes into other waters specifically because they want growth. Not simply to sit in the same market segment yelling the same names that many of the people entering the market really don’t care much about.
That being said, there is nothing about Cubase that stops anyone from making Hip Hop. There isn’t really much that is needed, except a long overdue update to Beat Designer, which feels like it hasn’t been touched since the mid-90s, frankly. But one could easily just make beats in something like MPC or Maschine (or FL Studio) and just bring the drum stems or whatever into to Cubase - or even use either as a plug-in - if you really want that kind of pattern-based/sampling workflow.
If you want something closer to Ableton or Bitwig, but still want good composition/video features, etc. then you’re going to have to look at something like Digital Performer or Logic Pro, frankly. Maybe Studio One, but that depends on if you work with video a lot (or if they add a video track and improve that before you decide). If DP wasn’t so expensive on crossgrade, I would get it just to see if I could get used to the workflow. Maybe over the holidays they will have a discount.
Honestly I don’t think that Studio One is good for the film scoring. Logic - yes, but it’s just for Mac. I was purchased Cubase in this summer just because it’s great for film scoring. But I don’t like Steinberg support system at all. And don’t like that they don’t work with their HDPi bugs in Windows for the years… Need to check Digital Performer btw
Cubase Pro is Tonality-aware, in two major (pun intended) ways.
In the Score Editor you can set a key signature, notes are displayed in the customary way you see in sheet music
In the Key Editor (the Piano Roll) you can set a key and ‘quantize’ pitches to the key.
I was absolutely FLOORED today to discover that Cubase Pro is not Tonality-aware. Some of its components are, but Cubase as a whole isn’t. And that’s something you could say about FL Studio, which is the kiddie-league product I was leaving to go to Cubase.
Some of the tools are tonality-aware, but they don’t talk to each other, e.g., if you use a Chord Track to create a key signature for an instrument track, the Key Editor knows about it but the Score Editor doesn’t! Am I the only one who thinks that’s poorly-designed? Because now I don’t know what else is unaware of the key. For example, if I export a MIDI file to another DAW or a score-editing program, will Cubase embed the right meta-message for the key in the MIDI file?
I’ve been using Cubase for a month now, mainly based on advice in this thread, and it’s been a series of letdowns.
Sad to hear Cubase is not meeting your expectations art1. I can understand that Cubase might have mysterious ways of workflow sometimes, but rest assured that it can do probably everything you want when you apply a little effort. (needed or uneeded, that’s a big discussion)
For example:
The chord track does not create key signatures. It creates chords, during whose duration the Key Editor tries to spell notes correctly enharmonically (if the option is selected.)
Now, a score on the other hand cannot rely on chords alone. A series of C F C F chords does not allow us to tell if a song is in C major or F major without other context. That’s why all scores default to an open key signature on a single treble staff with no display transposition, and it falls upon us, the users, to set up the staff correctly to our needs, either by writing down the key signature, or changing the staff settings in the way that befits the instrument. Maybe that Halion track has a Tenor Sax VX sound loaded? Then it should have a display transposition of one octave up (as tenor), and a whole tone more (as Bb). There are presets in Staff settings so that you don’t have to do this manually each time, but you still have to do it. Or not. If you need to have a proper score to hand out, you have to do it. You can also set up a template once, and then import tracks from there when you need them. A big time saver, not having to do the same housekeeping busywork time and time again.
Being able to enter Key Signatures in the Signature Track though is something that has been requested before by users but is yet to be implemented.
I agree that’s not what the Chord Track is for, but it’s the only hack or work-around to prevent the the Key Editor from displaying sharps for the black keys when you’re composing something in a key where you’re thinking of them as flats. It’s very distracting to be thinking A-flat and have Cubase insist it’s G-sharp. I would prefer to just turn off note labels altogether but not having that feature is another Cubase disappointment. Why do you need to label notes at all? It’s on a piano keyboard layout and we all know what those notes are, and real pianos don’t have note labels.
You absolutely DO need it if you’re exporting to an external music score package like MuseScore. But your answer illustrates a major tension in the DAW community. Some people who use DAWs are geeks who think nothing of editing MIDI files. But many of us are musicians - we think in terms of notes and melodies and harmonies and scales and keys and chords, etc, etc. We expect the tool to handle the geeky stuff, and there’s no technical reason why a “professional” tool like Cubase Pro can’t automatically export that in the MIDI.
I do lots of work in Adobe Premiere Pro. As a retired software engineer I’m familiar with the header format of an H.264 file and if I really had to I could brush up on NAL units and RBSP’s and hand-edit them, but I expect Adobe to do that for me. It’s the same with Cubase - MIDI is something the tool should handle so we can focus on the music.
The idea of a music-creation tool like a DAW with no concept of a key signature is bizarre and I thought I was escaping that when I left FL Studio. The creator of FL Studio, Gol (Didier Dambrin), had no musical training so I thought it was down to that. So I still can’t get over how Cubase is so limited here. Are there any DAWs on Windows that have a concept of a key signature across the whole product?
I am under the impression that your life has basically been one disappointment after another. I seriously regretted ever suggesting Cubase to you shortly after my first post in this topic.
I get your point, but this is not how most of DAWs are designed to work. At least for now.
Why? Wouldn’t it be more logical and sensible? A good tool (in any field - video-editing, software design, web-design, photography, etc) should be one that allows you to focus your attention on your creative work and not on the tool. I’m a retired software engineer and a good IDE (Integrated Development Environment is like a DAW for programming) lets you focus on your program and your objects, classes, resources, etc, and not on the limitations of the IDE.
I find when working in Cubase I always have to think about Cubase and its limitations and how to work-around them, and that takes my mind off the music. How do you get around that?
I am under the impression that your life has basically been one disappointment after another.
Not life, just DAWs. I’ve used lots of tools of similar complexity in other fields - Adobe Premiere Pro, Microsoft Visual Studio, Android Studio, Photoshop, Microsoft Word, etc, and in all of them I can stay focused on my creative work because I’m not always bumping up against limitations of the tool. So far I’ve used Cakewalk, FL Studio, and now Cubase DAWs and they all have this random thrown-together quality like they were written by-and-for geeks rather than designed from the ground-up by-and-for musicians. So it seems to be a DAW thing.
But I have a backlog of music to write, so what do you suggest for a good start-to-finish detailed composing workflow tutorial for Cubase for composing? I want to see how another composer gets around these things in a practical job.
YouTube is full to the brim with this kind of content. Steinberg themselves have ton of Studio Session videos documenting this. This question is rhetorical. Just go to YouTube and look at their channel, and others.
Overall workflow is similar, regardless of DAW (barring some major feature disparities). The “macro” workflows are what differ, due to differences in feature implementation - and this becomes a non-factor as you acclimate to the DAW you’re using. If you know how to do this in FL Studio, then the main issue is not “how to I do it in Cubase,” but learning how to use Cubase enough to be efficient doing ANYTHING.
You cannot acclimate how the different components work together until you understand how the components themselves function. That’s the big hurdle most people face when switching DAWs.
You have to be aware of what features exist, how to get to them, and how to use them in order for this to work.
Trying to review a DAW based on first impressions - especially coming from something like FL Studio, which is quite esoteric in comparison to Cubase or Cakewalk (themselves relatively similar)… really just results in a [totally predictable] series of ignorable anecdotes.
No offense intended.
I’m not a fanboy, by any means, but your posts come across as “digging for issues” and the responses display an attitude that is off putting to anyone who would otherwise by willing to help. It feels like a complete waste of time when someone tries to explain something to you, and your response is yet another list of disappointments… Like you’re moving the goal post and really don’t want a solution, but just to highlight more problems and having people discuss them.
No one is here for that.
Even if someone came here and gave you a 1,000 step workflow for composing in Cubase, you’d probably still pick out 5 steps and talk about how it’s annoying and getting in the way of you “focusing on the creative work.”
There is a reason Film and Game scoring people are into Cubase…it’s called the Score Editor, which keeps up with the kind of info you’re speaking of. Natively, well, it keeps up with anything and everything you key into it!
Exporting for other apps:
SMF (Standard MIDI) Files can have meta tags, however, very few apps that can import SMF files pay any attention to such meta-data (if they don’t simply strip it out on import, it’s just random sysex looking stuff and the app typically ignores it)…so you’ll ‘export as XML’ rather than SMF.
SMF files are intended to store ‘performances’ but aren’t really prime for keeping up with ‘visual’ information. Think back to nine-teen eighty weird when MIDI became a thing…we were using slower RS232 flavored serial interfaces, so it was essential to keep the lines free of anything not critical to the ‘performance’. Memory back in those days cost a fortune as well, and the typical PC could only see like 512kb at a time, and had to ‘page’ the memory around to use more (4 cycles a pop. Motorola computers like Atari ST/TT/Falcon, Macintosh, and Amiga could see up to 4 megabyte at at time only requiring a single cycle to get any memory cell, but upgrading to 4meg cost as much or more than the base machine with 512k - 1024k!)
Most musical apps keeps theoretical/analytical information in their own native formats (these days it’s usually some form of XML or another under the hood of the engine), not general MIDI (which is meant to be optimal to stream over serial connects and control instruments/lights…so the less ‘data’ in that stream that has nothing to do with actual ‘necessary’ performance information the better.). Hence, if you really want this sort of stuff in an SMF file, pretty much every app I’ve ever seen, you need to input it MANUALLY if for some reason you want/need it there.
There is a better way these days. XML!
Here’s the first page of a sample project where I threw in a score for a small group of kids on random instruments to have some fun with a score based on the Game Of Thrones theme. It took 30 to 45 minutes or so to do this entire project using the score editor. Yes, I know the flutes are written an octave too high (intentionally as a kind of joke and challenge to some of the kids, but that’s another story). It uses several transposing instruments, and I’ve toggled all the apps demonstrated below to show the native instrument keys rather than concert keys.
This is How it looked when I left Cubase and exported it as XML.
And imported straight into Sibelius it looked like this right away (before touching it at all to clean it up). Obviously it needs some tweaking in Sibelius to get it spaced out properly, not sure why, but the Bass line is up an octave too high (easy to fix with a couple of clicks in Sibelius), the bells are in the wrong octave, the chord symbols for guitar are missing (not sure if that’s supported by Music XML, if it is, Cubase isn’t saving that info?), and the percussion stave doesn’t play back from the import (I’d have to tweak Sibelius to get this percussion stave to play, or read on for a trick that I use…where I handle the ‘sounds’ by importing MIDI files on hidden staves.)
Still, this is about as good as it gets when exporting anything from a tracking DAW to be ‘imported’ into scoring software!
Sorry, I don’t have Musescore installed on anything right now, but that app DOES import music XML files.
Note that all of the apps that can import XML have various flags and options one can set to help improve importing XML. Sibelius and Finale both can also use Dolet I think. Musescore does a really good job at importing XML.
Here’s what the GOT project sounds like in Cubase, and this is off the base score interpretation of Cubase using some expression maps for the sound library at hand (Garritan Concert and Marching Band Instruments): https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuRCV8VVt8Zphx8o2juY7OdaAPkk
Oh, I’ve check projects with key signature changes in Cubase, and it shows up properly in all the scoring apps. Accidentals might be handled differently depending settings in your target scoring app, as well as how you’ve got it configured to import XML.
Might I suggest you read everything about the Score Editor in the manual, several times. It can keep up with all this information. You can export XML scores with Cubase.
If you know all along a project will be imported into Scoring software, I suggest doing your base composition here as well, rather than the Key Editor (or split the screen and use both, or if you have multiple screens, even better, you can work in Score and Key editors at the same time). It’ll save you a good bit of time in the long run. You can teach the score editor to get some ‘basic interpretive’ work done for you as well. I.E. Accents should increase velocity x%, and so forth. That’ll give you some base tracks you can later clone, then ‘freeze’, as a starting point for more ‘expressive playback’ work on the tracks.
Set your key signatures in the score editor. Use XML Score export if your target is scoring software. Something not many (if any) other tracking DAWs offer.
Musescore would ignore the meta data in an SMF anyway, so don’t waste your time inputting it if you’re hoping the Musescore (or any other scoring app I know of) can make use of the meta tags.
So…if the goal is to pull work done in Cubase into a scoring app, consider this possible workflow.
Clone your tracks if they’re not perfectly quantized, and put them in a folder of their own called ‘score’. Quantize everything as it should be to get a good visual for traditional notation.
If you like, use the score editor’s tool boxes, add tempo marks, articulation marks, hair-pins, text instructions, terraced dynamics, etc. Sometimes I personally skip this in Cubase, and just do it in the target score app, but if you get in a habit of doing this as you go, it’ll make for some pretty quick and nice imports into your scoring apps. Be prepared to tweak things in your scoring app after importing. Sorry, it’s the nature of the beast…they all have some different ideas on how XML should be handled. In time you’ll learn their quirks though, and can fix them in an XML editor, or set up quick macros/scripts in your apps to make the corrected in batch form.
If you’ve already got playback tracks elsewhere in the project (say you’ve recording live playing, and it’s not perfectly quantized, and you’d like to keep this interpretation for playback purposes)…you don’t really need instrument end points for these ‘score tracks’ since you won’t be using them to ‘play back’ anything.
It’s not ‘required’, but personally, I like to keep a set of Score tracks separate from ‘performance’ or ‘playback tracks’. Why? Scores a blocky, and when doing swing and stuff like that, well…lets just say that can look a lot different on paper from is actually sounding.
Optionally, you can compose in the score editor from the beginning. It can be taught to ‘interpret scores’ pretty well, but don’t expect it to be as musical as what you can do on tracks where you ‘ignore’ the scoring stuff. When it comes time to get ‘really expressive’ with the project, clone the ‘score tracks’ to fresh tracks, and go to work enhancing its ‘basic interpretations’ by hand/logic editors/etc.
Whatever info you want to carry into your scoring app…add it to these ‘Score Tracks’.
Export the Score tracks as XML.
Export the ‘performance’ tracks as MIDI. (I like type I for this sort of thing, but you can try both Type I and Type 0). Sometimes it’s better to do it one instrument/stave at a time, and import them into the score isolated in this fashion, one by one.
Import the XML file into your scoring app. Once it’s looking good in your target scoring app, mute all those stave so they don’t play back anything…(don’t even worry about playback there either at this point). Percussion tracks are always a PITA to get playing back properly when imported into a scoring app, so I rarely even try anymore, and just use invisible/hidden staves with MIDI files imported to them to play back percussion stuff in the scoring software.
Pull in your ‘performance tracks’, as in the one’s you’ve sounding more ‘human’ (not perfectly quantized, the actual performance desired). Set these staves to do the ‘playback’ in the Scoring app. They’ll LOOK ‘ugly’ and ‘messy’ for sure…but that’s OK. HIDE THEM in the scoring software. Direct them to instruments to make the ‘sounds’ for your project.
This is just one of many ways to sort things out. In short, you can keep ‘performance tracks’ and ‘visual staves’ in two little worlds of their own. Two sets of data. One handles what things should ‘sound like’, while the other focuses on what it should ‘look like’ on printed scores/paper.
