Recording audio and MIDI simultaneously (on multiple tracks)

Cubase
1

Hi guys

I’m a Logic user who used Cubase several years ago for more than a decade (up to Cubase 5) and am looking at moving back from Logic Pro for a number of reasons, not least being Logic’s poor handling of external MIDI across multiple ports.

At the moment we are doing a lot of our writing from jam sessions (with perhaps a couple of synths, vocals, guitar, etc). We usually record everything in realtime and have started recording all jams to a click so that we can potentially use bits of the jam to build final tracks (keeping the original magic and spontaneity of the jam intact).

This works well, but as everything is recorded as audio, there’s no real way to edit notes later if we want to make changes or correct errors.

I’ve had an idea for future jam recording that would allow us to capture the audio alongside the MIDI. If we are recording four synths in the jam, I would record each to its own audio track, and hopefully also take a MIDI feed from each synth and record that as MIDI. This would allow us to then make edits and changes to the MIDI if we needed to, and then just dump the corrected MIDI track down as audio from the synth after making those edits.

So my question is this - is there any reason why Cubase 8 won’t let me record several synths at the same time as audio, while also recording their MIDI outputs simultaneously? I’m assuming there’s no problem with this, but wanted to check in to be sure.

Thanks in advance guys!
Mike

2

Hi,
here si no problem with it at all, in Cubase.

As an Input of every single track, you will select the dedicated input device. Don’t use “All MIDI Inputs”, which is default. This would mix MIDI signal from all of yours devices to the one track. You want keep them separated, as I understand.

And that’s it. No magic. :wink:

3

There is no problem, THEORETICALLY.
In practice, there is a strange problem, that you will see widely discussed in many posts here (I am not at my desk to provide you links), of timing recording MIDI. I think when you try it you may discover that the MIDI data and the audio wave files are not in sync. Just try it out first, or look for the posts.
Let us know how it goes!