Hey all!
I’ve been on Cubase for just over two years. I transitioned from Logic but there are a few functions I’m having problems finding. The main one I wanted to try to find is to extend or “trim” the end of one region to the beginning of the next. Basically filling the gap between events. The only thing I have found is crossfading, but it does the exact opposite of what I’m looking to do, as it trims to region back until it hits the end of the previous region. This was especially useful for me when I had both overlapped events and spaces between events as it allowed me to fill in the empty space by trimming the end of one event to the beginning of the next. Does anyone have a solution to this?
Hello and welcome to the forum.
Cubase follows a different philosophy when it comes to Audio Events (regions in Logic). An Audio Event is an excerpt of an underlying audio clip. Therefore one cannot extend an Audio Event with silence in one go.
There is a method to add silence to an Audio Event but I don’t think this is what you’d want in the end.
Actually, my question would be: Why do you want to fill the gaps between events?
Maybe the concept of an Audio Part could be helpful for you. An Audio Part in Cubase is a container that you can put around Audio Events on the same track. Thus the single events will become one unit. The events can be accessed by double-clicking the part or by dissolving it.
The command to wrap events to an Audio Part is available in the Audio menu.
Hello and thanks for replying so quickly!
My reasoning behind wanting to use this function is specifically for editing fast passages on guitar. It’s a fairly common technique in metal music to record guitars at a slightly lower tempo, slice at the pick attack and quantize and it’s something I’m fairly used to doing in Logic.
In my specific case I wanted to:
record a certain guitar part at a slower tempo
slice the audio at the hit points
quantize the regions
Use this specific function to fill the gaps between the audio by trimming the end of the region to the beginning of the next to fill the gap
cross fade them
The problem I’m facing right now is I want each audio event to start on the grid, I don’t want them to be trimmed backwards to crossfade at the previous events, which is what a regular crossfade would do. It’s not so much two audio events that are recorded separately, and more-so one audio event that has been sliced like a drum track and quantized to the grid. I hope this helps clarify what I’m talking about!
See, this is the part I don’t understand what you want to achieve. You want to fill the gaps… but in order to achieve what? “To crossfade them” means that you crossfade silence with non-silence. That’s effectively a fade in.
I have a little macro set up that applies the standard fade and fade out to a selected audio event:
Standard fades are setup in menu Project → Auto Fades Settings…
Maybe it is easier to use that than to use the function “Close Gaps (crossfade)”?
For events that already overlap you can just use the ‘normal’ crossfade, of course.
I think the point is that before slicing up the Audio there were no silent gaps between notes. It is only after the tempo increases that the silence appears.
@keegan.okazaki you can use this method in Cubase, but there are other approaches that are easier & produce superior results.
The Select/Arrow Tool has a mode “Sizing Applies Timestretch” where you can manually stretch the Audio Events. You could use this on your sliced Audio. But it would also work on the unsliced Audio.
But Cubase can also be set to automatically adjust Audio for the Tempo. It’s quite powerful but can initially be confusing because 2 of the main concepts have similar names but do very different things.
Finally here’s a video showing how to deal with fluctuating (and fixed) Tempos.
You should be able to slow down the Tempo, record the guitars, make sure the resulting Audio has the proper settings. Then the Audio will just follow along for any Tempo.
Yeah of course. In my defense I hadn’t had any coffee yet.
In any case the OP can probably do what they need without having to cut everything up.
Rereading the description of what they are doing, it is confusing about how the gaps come into existence. I don’t really understand what this might mean.
Oh I get it now - they’re quantizing the Note starts. So if Note-1 gets moved earlier and Note-2 later that will leave a gap between them.
So @keegan.okazaki the video from Dom is exactly the way to deal with the situation. But read the stuff about Timebase & Modes before hand, the video assumes you understand how they work.
