Hi,
Could someone point me to a tutorial or give advice on how I can record a sample (just a single word or quick noise), via microphone, and then play this back at various pitches via my midi keyboard? I thought it would be a common enough thing to do but I can’t find a tutorial 
I’m using Cubase Artist 6.5 - new to all this!
Thanks!
NQM
You’ll need a sample player, trying looking at something like Native Instruments - Battery 3. It allows you to load all your own custom samples and play them back on your midi keyboard. Also lets you key bind so you can choose which note each sound is played on.
That was quick! 
Looks good - do you know if there are any free alternatives?
SampleTank Free:
Once you get past the slightly convoluted file management it’s an EXTEMELY powerful and useful tool.
I’m not a big fan of NI (battery)
save your pennies and get Halion.
good luck
s
Battery as the name implies is for drums and actually very good at bending percussive noises out of shape and back again with a good set of tool. For “real” drums I prefer Toontrack SD2 though.
For what the TO asked for I agree with SampleTank Free. If you get bitten by the sampling bug you can download the trial for Steinberg HALion 4 which is totally integrated with Cubase for 60 days I think. Totally awesome.
Just downloaded sampletank free but Google Chrome threw up a “potential malware” message…I know these things are sometimes false alarms but you’d think the company would have corrected this by now if it was legit?
IK Multimedia is OK! 
Just got “shortcircuit” working! Lovely!
Thanks for all the input! May update my antivirus and give sampletank a go too
Actually Battery is perfect and above all very fast, when you are looking for a simple sampleplaying device.
Every cell in Battery can be set to an individual MIDI input, audio output and channel and keyrange from G-2 to G8 with tracking.
It isn’t free though.
Gotta try that! 
Battery 3 is a BEAST, in terms of editing, workflow, routing and samples. Havent used others, to be fair.