Recording External Effects on new audio track

Cubase
1

Hey guys -
I’m slowly moving over from Pro Tools. I use outboard compression while mixing, so I’m trying to figure out an easy way to send say - a vocal - out to the compressor and then record the affected vocal back onto another track. In Pro Tools, all you have to do is route the vocal out to the compressor, then create another audio track and record it back into the new audio track. Seems much more convoluted with Cubase. The only way I’ve found to do it is to set up the compressor as an external effect, and then export audio. Then import the results on another track. Is this the only way?

2

Yes it is possible to do this, but it may take some patience and practice. Not as convoluted as it may first appear and it is just some simple routing. I’d just quickly make up an empty project and keep it simple to start.

You will need three tracks:

1 Audio track with the audio you want to “Print” and your insert External effect (or any normal insert effect)
1 Group Track
1 Audio Track ( Your Print track )

Route your Audio track OUTPUT to Group 1.
Set the INPUT of your Print track to Group 1.
Record/Monitor arm your Print track, hit record and that is it.
This process can only be done in real time - I think that goes without saying…

There are details to make this work smoothly like turning off the OUTPUT of the Print track while recording so not to overload the Stereo bus, this isn’t critical as it won’t effect the actual recording. If you do this step you will have to remember to turn the OUTPUT of the Print track back on again to actually hear it once you are done recording.

OK that is probably too much information…

3

Thanks, man! Someone tried to explain that to me, but I was a little confused. I’ll give it a shot.

4

Nine years on…! I have taken the almost unprecedented step of actually logging in to thank you for this. It was doing my head in how to get the latency compensation of the ext effects plug onto a track that I could record on. I’m sending from the cubase ext effect channel to a group and then routing that into a track as you suggest.