As I currently rebuild my template from ground up, I sometimes find unfortunate design choices of certain aspects of Cubase and want to share my (mainly sample based) view on those in several threads over the coming time. I would be both interested, how other (film music) composers or other musicians using Cubase see those.
So, first up is Quick Controls. I was quite excited, when I first heard about them, but in order to use them for my sample library parameters, there are many things missing:
- View in Matrix Editor: It is not practical to edit instruments parameters in the track view, only. You have to be able to Edit both notes and CC-Data in one window, like ist works now with midi. Further, I would miss the midi CC editing capabilities of the matrix editor.
- Touch: When using a motorfader controller or something like Lemur, you can send a message, if the fader is touched or not. That works well in automation of volume, where the value gets overwritten, as long as you touch the fader, even if you don’t move it. Unfortunately, that is not the case with quick controls, but it would be great to have that!
- Number of available controls: 8 seems enough for many, but I disagree. If you want to control the sample library parameters (or synth parameters) via quick controls, I want to be able to specify the number of QCs myself. On a motor fader device, you could then easily switch though those with the bank keys, on touch devices like Lemur, you can build as many individual controls as you like.
Since there are way to many reasons for me to use quick controls for usual VSTi/synth parameters, I thought, I’d use them for some parameters, I really don’t need in the matrix editor. Microphone positions came to mind! However, it turned out quick controls have a very bad design mistake for that kind of purpose: Usually, I set up the mic mix of each track for the whole piece and very rarely do I change it. But Quick controls never remembers its value, when there was no automation recorded. That is very bad, as you need to set a value at the beginning in you template, then, however, you may not simply change that any more for the whole piece. You would have to go to the beginning of the piece and move it manually, which destroys the “quick” in QCs! That is a rather unfortunate design IMO … would the value of each QC remember its last value with saving, the QCs would find at least a very good use for this purpose. But in its current state, I don’t have any use for QCs at all, which I find regrettable, as they could be really great! I am thrilled to hear, what you guys think about that. Or maybe I have missed something, that could make them useful to me?!