I will admit that Cubase 12 Pro offers many more features than I will ever use. So far one of them is the Control Room. I know that the “Pro” version is way overkill for what I do. My compositions are small, done by myself and contain very little use of VSTs, tracks and effects. Without getting into that conversation i.e. buy a lesser version, is it possible that the Control Room can be beneficial for such a small setup and limited use?
Yes.
The main thing for me in the Control Room is being able to monitor without affecting the mix. When you change the CR volume, it has no effect on the mix.
Plus, you get the Listen Bus, which provides a kind of partial solo function- you activate Listen on a track, and you can configure how loud it is in relation to other tracks – this is good for “proofreading” the individual tracks.
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Yes, definitely Control room can be beneficial at any level. To get a bit more specific that what has already been mentioned on effects that don’t affect the mix, if you are ever mixing on headphones, plugins like the Waves Nx series (and I know there are other brands, as well) can be useful to hear your mix in different ways – nominally in the control rooms, and various speaker setups, of some name brand studios, but, more usefully, to get a better idea of how the mix may translate on more than one type of speaker before taking the trouble to do a car listening test. I always have those sorts of plugins in my Control Room inserts, albeit disabled when I’m mixing on my monitors or not needing the references. Without Control Room, you’d have to put these sorts of plugins on your stereo output, and then you’d need to remember to bypass them or remove them when you go to export a mix.
Other plugins can be good to keep there, too, if you are mastering your own projects or just want to get other visual clues on what is going on in your mix.
Still another use that wasn’t already mentioned is having cue mixes. The way I use these is to load any reference tracks for a given project on audio tracks, but send them to cue mixes, rather than the stereo out. Then I can just switch between the main mix and a cue mix in the Control Room to listen back and forth between projects quickly, even with playback already in progress. (If I have multiple reference mixes, I tend to disable all but one of those mixes, but you could also use multiple cue mixes to switch back and forth.)
The separate volume control already mentioned is especially useful when switching gears, such as at tracking time, at mix time, and at mastering time since the volume levels will be very different at each stage, but it can be helpful to hear them at similar levels. Of course, you could change the levels at your audio interface, but I find that more of a pain to do.
As mentioned above, the Listen feature is also very useful, especially when wanting to do tasks like tune or tighten vocals but in the context of a mix, but with that mix at a significantly lower level than the vocals you are focusing on. And, of course, a similar thing could be said for any detailed track editing.
There are lots of reasons I need the Pro version compared to lesser versions, but the Control Room is probably the one I would find hard to live without after having been “spoiled” by it. (I originally used Cakewalk/SONAR for at least a decade and a half before coming to Cubase.)
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Thank you for the input. I guess I’ll be giving it a try.
Yes , you need it , everyone needs the control room , even if it’s only for using the volume control instead of the master fader , the master fader adjusts the final mix loudness but the control room doesn’t
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Here is a great vid on Control Room
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There are 2 issues with this feature that you ought to know:
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The Play tool in the Sample Editor becomes unreliable and therefore useless. The start positions of the playback do not necessarily match the position that you click at.
The Play tool in the project is not affected by this bug. -
If you use the Headphone bus and a Monitor bus any pre-listen (import samples from Media Bay e.g.) will EITHER go to Headphones OR to speakers but never to both. The switch for this is in the Preferences.
You’re issue #1 is interesting to me. I haven’t run into that and I use Control Room all the time as well as the sample editor. I do wish the space bar would allow for playback and stop commands when the Sample edit window was open rather than always starting the main time line. But that’s just the way Cubase works. I’m on Nuendo 12 but I doubt that would make a big difference.
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Don’t know why my message way erased but I said that for an amator musician I didn’t see the interest of the control room.