Play and/or Record loop.wav as I'm recording guitar

I hope this makes since. (Cubase Elements 12)

I have a loop I made for just free playing guitar. It’s on 2 tracks (Drums/Guitar), or a .wav file.
I want to play the loop and record the loop while recording my guitar. Without having to stop and paste or duplicate the audio.

I hope this makes since.

Thanks for any help

Hi,

What doesn’t work to you, please?

Actually this doesn’t make sense. Why do you want to record the loop when it is already recorded ? I just don’t understand this.

Anyways, in Audio Connections, you can add a new input bus and name it whatever you want, but leave the physical inputs blank. Create a new track and set the input as the input bus you previously created. On your other tracks, set the output to the same input bus. This will record everything on a single track.

But I still can’t understand why you want to do such a thing. Isn’t it easier to render the project once everything has been recorded ?

I knew it would not make sense.

So I can keep recording guitar while the loop is playing and/or recording with the guitar.
otherwise I would have to make a 3-5 hour track to record my ideas.
Like can the loop auto paste as needed until my session is done.
I just don’t know how to explain it.

I don’t want to create 28 bar loops, and paste it for 3-5 hours onto a track, that would be insane.

Anyway I know this can be done in reaper, but I wanted to try it in Cubase before buying Reaper.
These are the directions I got from someone in Disord…

If you record it all in a loop in Reaper, it will make another “take” on the audio item for each pass, but it will all be saved in one long .wav anyway. You can do Right click → Take → Explode all takes (in order) and it will put the takes right after each other. Or you could just do “crop to active take” on the first take, and pull the item longer - since it’s one long wav, the other loops will appear after it in one continous item. Not sure if I described that right since it feels harder to explain, but it is really quite simple once you figure it out.

I guess in reality I’m trying to play/record a .wav file into a track simultaneously while recording guitar.

It works the same in Cubase if you Cycle the selection and choose Keep History. The audio is recorded into one single file and the Takes are actually just trims of this big file.

If you want to record your loop at the same time you have no choice but to follow the instructions given in my previous post, but then both your loop and your guitar will be recorded into the same file, they won’t be separate.

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Thanks I appreciate it very much.
I’m checking all this out, I’ll report back when I figure it out…

Still don’t fully understand what you’re trying to achieve, but it sounds to me like some kind of looper could be the thing you want. There must be some kind of looper VST out there…

I don’t really understand why you want to record 3-5 hours at a time. Is that really a thing you do?
And if so, it isn’t a big problem just duplicating your backing loop a thousand times with the “Repeat”-function. Matter of seconds.

If I’m trying to write a song or songs, I build off of certain loops I create, then just jamming out to it & coming up with riffs and such, then later forget what I came up with, If I have it recorded, I can go back to it and build on that. But yeah I could duplicate it a million times, but would be nice if there was a function to play the loop, and record continuous guitar.

But yes a looper plugin would be great, before I started using plugins on my old equipment I use a JamMan Stereo to do this. But I’m using Amp Sims now. I will check out the looper plugin thing and see if I can find something. this might actually be what I need.

@Louis_R I see why you think it’s not a good idea. Yeah I have the mix rendered to a .wav file.
I would like to play this .wav while recording guitar, would be nice if it records to own track. I mean I’ve been just playing it in Windows Media Player, but would be nice if it would write to a track or something. and not have to switch out of Cubase to stop it. I’m going to see if there is a looper plugin like @fese recommended.

As Luis said above, you can cycle record in Cubase which ends up as a single audio file. You have to grab the full file from the Audio Pool.
There is also nothing wrong with repeating the loop one million times. It can be done quickly using the Repeat Events function.

Some amp simulators have loopers built into them.
If your does not, maybe you can find one you like from this list of free VST loopers?

All the looper plugins I’ve found so far are very sketchy at best for malware, the same one InstaLooper I have found on about 20 sites. So that’s out, unless I find one that’s reputable.

It would be nice if I could have 2 project windows open and active simultaneously, play the loop from one, and record on the other.

If you want a looper why don’t you use Sonobus ? You’ll be surprised about what this software can achieve :wink:

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That’s a pretty kool application.

Hello Mr_Scary

I’m not sure if I got you right but I think you are talking about setting independent track loop
Please see Cubase manual how to do it , with this function you can play one track ,part of it , over and over while recording other track
See the link Setting up the Independent Track Loop

Thanks-misiek55

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@misiek55 You are a genius, thank you so much, yes this is what I wanted to do.
it took me a while to figure it out, but YAY! the loop is looping over and over, and my guitar is recording in the main track. The instructions I believe are for MAC, I’m using PC so creating the start and stop was tricky for me, I think Control+CLICK for start point, ALT+CLICK for stop point EDIT: Actually I was misunderstanding the “Ctrl/Cmd-click” “Alt/Opt-click” is PC/MAC

Thanks again for your solution.

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Bruh I didn’t know about this since the button is hidden by default :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
This is a real game changer !

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Earlier I was in the “Sample Control” pane trying to do this, there was just no where to loop it. I spent several hours looking for a way to make play on it’s own.

Now I can just create a loop of drums, bass, keys or whatever, and sample guitar and figure out parts, and riffs.

Thanks again misiek55, and everyone else for the replies as well.

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And now to find a way to record that loop onto a new track along with the guitar track.
But I’m not going to push it.

And… that part was easy, I just setup an input using the Scarlett Loop Back input and chose that for another track, so both guitar and loop will be on 1 track, and guitar alone another track.

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Cheers ,Happy recording :smiley:

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