In my mind, I view the cubase crossfades as more of a micro tool to help make for seamless edits. For the more macro type of crossfade you’re doing I’ve always used separate tracks, routed them both to a group channel, and used the group channel for overall volume, eq, effects, etc. An extra benefit is you can use the individual tracks to do individual adjustment if needed… for instance if the room acoustics evolved over the course of recording and you’re now trying to join parts together that have notably different tone colors. You could do that with automation as well, but I find it cleaner to have a separate track.
Not sure I could do it as fast as JMCecil, but still at a few orders of magnitude slower it’s pretty quick.
Man, I appreciate you attempting to explain this for me but I just cannot figure out what you mean and if I am understanding you somewhat this just seems unwieldy as all hell.
I’d prefer not to in-place bounce since my compositional choices sometimes change at a later date through the course of giving these improv sessions the Macero treatment.
I’m thinking that if I have to use a second track to do what I need I might as well use a folder track, that way if I move a chunk of the mix around later, which I sometimes do when building these experimental mixes, then I can just grab the folder track chunk. So thanks for the idea that led to this idea.
Plus, and this may be because I’m such a neophyte, but I don’t see much advantage to using a group channel over using folder tracks for this purpose. Plus I only have one screen(dang audio monitors hogging my desktop riser!) so I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the mixer. Call me crazy but between the inspector and the track controls the mixer ends up seeming kind of redundant. But maybe there is a reason I’m not aware of that using a group channel would be a better practice?
It would be nice if there was a way to defeat the Front/Back playback behavior. Sure this would affect overdub playback but if you could toggle the Front/Back playback behavior on a per-track basis, so that it would either play only what’s on top or all overlapping audio, that would make Cubase more adaptable/capable/powerful.
As it stands now I have to duplicate every single track in a lot of my projects just to be able to do dynamic fades on overlapping parts. Honestly it’s a real ball breaker.
The point of the group track was for you to be able to apply global adjustment (eq, efx, volume) to all related stuff. If I have multiple drum tracks, I send them to a group track so I can then adjust the volume etc of “drums” relative to the other instruments. In your case, maybe you don’t have anything else. In that case you can use the master channel for the global stuff and you’re right, the group track is sort of redundant.
Regarding the toggle-able front/back… early on I thought I wanted that too. But I now think the point is that a “track” is really analogous to a tape track or mixer channel in an old-school studio. Plays one audio stream and is best thought of as a holder for one “horizontal” element. The lanes are not meant for multiple overlapping simultaneously-sounding audio, but rather are a sophisticated and flexible editing system for cobbling up that single audio stream from a bunch of pieces.
That’s not to say that the toggle-able front/back wouldn’t be useful. Or some sort of break from the strict tape/mixer track model.
Aww gee whiz. So I realized if I want the duplicated tracks in the track folder to share sends I need to use a group channel. So now I have the duplicated tracks, a group channel for the pair of duplicates and all of that inside of a folder track…for every audio part in the mix that needs to have dynamic fades on overlapping material. Starting to feel like a real sword of damocles over here!
If you macro the bounce process and get used to the mod+drag for the clips to new lanes. It is actually extremely fast. You can modify on the fly, multiple times. Silencing/deleteing a previous bounce is one click easy. Seriously, for what you are describing, multi-lane editing will be the fastest.
The folder track’s going to be helpful so I can have the duplicated tracks sharing sends.
Yeah, I see the appeal from one perspective of having a DAW emulate old-school work desk methodology but when there’s no way around certain things it can become prohibitive. Flexibility is a higher ideal if you ask me.
Ok, so I explored the lanes methodology. (I couldn’t figure out how to make the ‘Show Lanes’ button appear right on the audio track like on page 76 in the Manual, I used the button on the Inspector instead.) I realized that duplicating the tracks and putting them in a track folder is probably the better way for me since that way I can use automation on both parts. It seems like lanes are really intended to be used temporarily while you are comping your “perfect take” whereas I may never actually want to consolidate the duplicated tracks. Not doing so leaves me with the option to change the part more readily(with lanes I couldn’t do automation plus I’d have to “un-bounce” to make any changes). I thank you for your input and if something I just said is off please let me know. (Also, maybe when you said “multi-lane editing” above you didn’t necessarily mean using actual lanes?)
Although I probably won’t use lanes to accomplish the part fades, I did discover that when you show lanes Cubase seems to detect any part overlap and dump any underlying segments to a second lane, which I thought was pretty nifty. Though I tried to reproduce this on a new track by duplicating a track with splits, bouncing it to a single event then making some splits and overlapping some parts but when I showed lanes after doing this it didn’t send any parts to secondary lanes so I’m not sure when Cubase actually does this or how it knows to. But since I probably won’t be using lanes much for this purpose I probably won’t pursue the understanding further. Though it is good to sort of know how lanes work now.
Yeah, I’ve tried to get by the past few yeaers using as little of the feature set of my DAW software as possible but I suppose it couldn’t hurt too much to dig a little deeper, lol. And I do like some of the aspects of duplicating the track to do fades more so than the single track method I was using in Sonar. For starters, it’s a lot easier to see what’s going on when parts of the track aren’t visually obscuring others…
I too came from Sonar and I know exactly what you’re going through. I also find the way Sonar handles overlaps better than Cubase, at least for audio editing. Simply grab the fade handles and put them wherever you want, done! However, for overdubs, the Cubase method is better (especially with the new comp tool). You can audition takes much faster and create the perfect take in no time. So both ways have their pros and cons.
Having said that, Cubase should allow more flexibility when using cross-fades. A way to allow us to keep it all in one track and use the cross-fade function (X) in order to make overlapping material audible (as you can now), but without the current limitations. That would be great!
BTW, the show lanes button can be enabled by right-click on any track and selecting the track settings option. You’ll see there where you can show/hide different track buttons for different track types (Audio, MIDI, Instrument, etc).
