I’m working on a video game score right now and I’ve run into a workflow bottleneck that I think many of us in the game audio world face.
I have three related tracks within a single Cubase session. It’s the most efficient way to share VSTi instances and keep a consistent mix across the whole soundtrack. However, this means my first track starts at bar 1, my second at bar 340, and my third at bar 700.
The issue is that once I’m deep into the Action cue, the bar numbers are in the hundreds. This makes it really counter-intuitive to think in 8 or 16 bar phrases, and it’s a headache when communicating with developers who expect me to talk about Bar 1 of that specific loop.
I will also be sharing my session with my copyist using Dorico. He may ask me about measure 16 of the second track, while on my session it would mean measure 356…
I’d love to see a feature that allows us to restart the measure count at specific points in the timeline. Imagine being able to tell a Marker or an Arranger section to Reset to Bar 1. That way, the ruler would reflect the musical structure of the specific cue I’m working on, rather than the absolute project time.
Is there any hidden way to achieve this currently, or is this something we could see in a future update? It would be a huge quality of life boost for anyone doing long form media or non linear game music.
Ah yes indeed, it is a workaround. Though the ruler track is not very ergonomic imo.
This means i would need at least 2 rulers, all of them diplaying the negative measures before the point i need and an infinite number of measures after that.
It would be nice to be able to hide the measures before number 1 and be able to hide the ones after the last measure needed. Just like markers.
You can do this now using the Project Setup dialog. If the Project has a 0 offset and you have a song that starts at bar 100 setting the offset to 100 will slide the Timeline 0 up to that song. You can change this on the fly as you work on the Project.
Yes i get it. But i am working with a copyist, and we’ll need to get back and forth on the different tracks. A little annoying for him and me to change the measures everytime we need to address a particular track.
But the rulers do the job for now. Not as clean, but still helps.
Well you could set the Ruler Tracks’ visibility so you only see the ones you want to see at any time. You could also use the PLE to set the visibility of the Tracks so you only see the Tracks & Ruler used for song A, or B, etc. Assign these to Key Commands and you could switch songs with keystrokes.
Yeah that complicates things but not a huge amount. You’d need to come up with a suitable naming scheme. For example Track names that end in SNG-1 are only on the first song while Tracks with SNG-23 are in both songs 2 & 3.
Using Track Names is the easiest way to ‘tag’ Tracks in the PLE. But because this also involves Rulers, which don’t seem to have names, it might be better to use the Track Color Names instead of Track Names since Rulers can be colored just like Tracks.
