Workflow help

Cubase
1

Hi all,

I’ve been using Cubase a for a few years now, and I have yet to develop a really solid workflow. Would some of you be willing to take a moment and help me out? There are a few things that I’ve always been frustrated with that I either haven’t figured out yet or don’t exist in Cubase. If you could help me sort out the items below, it would work wonders for my workflow:

  1. I want to be able to create a new group track and have it insert into the track list directly below my selected track. Presently whenever I create a new group track, it always gets inserted in the group tracks folder at the bottom, which means I have to click and drag it all the way up if I want to put it next to the instrument(s) it will be associated with. I like to keep my send effects close to the instruments that I’m sending to them.

  2. I want to record automation in the MIDI track in the same way I record it in the automation lane. Presently I prefer the lane, because it represents my recorded automation by a few handles joined by straight lines. These are easier for me to edit than the zillions of MIDI CC data points that are recorded when I record automation in the MIDI track itself. One of the downsides is that I can’t record multiple takes of the automation.

  3. When I add a new track, I want its default output to be a group track that I specify and not to an output bus. There have been many occasions where I create a mixdown of my “sub mix” bus–the bus where I think I’ve routed all my instruments to–only to realize afterwards that one of my instruments was routed directly to the Main Mix output and was not included in the mixdown.

  4. Colors! Ugh! Whenever I create multiple new MIDI or audio tracks, I get a fricken rainbow. Can’t they all default to one color?

  5. I want to keep my stem group channels–named STRINGS, BRASS, WINDS, etc.–visible at all times in their own mixer window. Presently I can only filter the contents of a mixer window by channel type, but I want to filter by specific channels.

  6. Is there a way to edit one channel’s EQ while a different channel is selected? Or to have multiple channel EQs visible at a time?

  7. I want Cubase to remember where I began playback from last time. Very frequently I will tap the 0 key to stop playback and accidentally bump the 1 or 2 key, moving my cursor to wherever my markers happen to be. Then I have to manually reposition the cursor to continue where I left off.

  8. I have the “Write Enable” function in my template mapped to the 8 key. For some reason whenever I press the key, in addition to enabling automation writing on the track I have selected, it also enables it on a handful of other tracks. It’s always the same tracks every time. Is this a glitch?

  9. I was using Groove Agent One for the first time not too long ago, and I wanted to automate the pitch shift knob for one of the pads. The automation I recorded showed up in both the automation track of the MIDI track I was using and in Groove Agent’s instrument track. However, if I moved my MIDI data around, the instrument data wouldn’t follow, and I had to manually move it and resynch it with my MIDI. I have this problem with any instruments I load into the instrument rack, since their MIDI track data is separate from their instrument track data. Is there a way to link the two together?

  10. Fast transients recorded in the instrument track (and maybe automation lane, too) do not respond quickly. Again, when I was working with Groove Agent, I wanted to pan one of the pads quickly back and forth, so I drew a vertical line in the instrument automation from hard left to hard right. When I played it back, panning lagged by several hundred milliseconds. I had to move my panning automation to accommodate this.

  11. I frequently get get stuck notes when using the sustain pedal on my MIDI controller. It is SUPER annoying. I’ve only ever noticed it when using EastWest’s PLAY instruments. Has this ever been fixed, or is there a workaround?

  12. When I plan instruments that have a slow attack, I naturally compensate by playing the note before the beat. When I go to quantize my performances, I always have to move the notes over a bit if I want them to quantize correctly. Is there a way the Cubase can accommodate this, so I can save a step in my quantization process?

  13. When I quantize a performance, can Cubase move the automation data to follow the changes it makes to the MIDI note data?

  14. Is there a way Cubase can begin recording from the middle of a bar? Maybe it’s only when I have precount bars enabled (which is ALL the time), but Cubase repositions the cursor to the beginning of the bar whenever I press record, meaning I overwrite any automation lane data I had in the first few beats of the bar.

  15. Is there a way for me to select a range, tell Cubase that I want there to be x number of bars or beats in this range, and have Cubase automatically adjust tempo and positioning, leaving all other data before and after the section unmoved? This would be invaluable for film scoring.

That’s all I can think of right now; sorry about the long list. I’ve been getting gradually more and more frustrated with some of these to the point where I’ve thought about looking into other DAWs. But my hope is that these things are all possible in Cubase, so I don’t have to do that. Now that I’ve written this, I’m starting to think that maybe I should stop using automation lanes and start recording my automation in the MIDI track itself.