Tips Tricks And Workflow Goodness

Very nice tread!

Here is what helps my work flow and maybe will yours as well:

  1. If working with plug ins mainly, I like to insert them on the input channel while tracking, this way the effect is being printed while recording and it will force me to COMMIT. There is beauty in it and when people reminisce about the “good old days” and how tape made everything sound magical, it is often an over looked factor. Committing and making final decisions right from the start, forces you to up your game. When the pressure is on, the performance tends to be better. If you know you can go back a million times and edit to death, that will not help the performance imho.

  2. I try to leave as little as possible to the mix down stage to give the sound “muscle’” or to make it fit in right. By the time the song is arranged and tracked/edited. The very thought of having it to mix can be nauseating.

  3. I try to avoid presets as much as possible. Generally I find them to be a huge waste of time.

  4. I like to print reverbs to audio and mess with them for creative results. Mix and match, loop, reverse or having them in places where they did not originate can give a lot of character and create cool defects.

  5. When writing, I like to put all my tracks into a folder track, so let’s say I have 3 versions for the chorus, I can quickly move them around, AB, recycle parts, etc, by dragging just those few bars in place to hear it in the context. The arranger track can be used for that too, but I find it faster this way.

  6. When editing vocals or instruments I like my final takes comped on a new track ( Id like to see something like beam part to master take in Cubase eventually. I think Pro Tools has it. Here is a simple macro that helps:

Edit - Copy
Edit -Paste at origin

Your selected take in the chosen lane will be copied to a new track as long it is highlighted in its place.

I apologize if any of this or all of it is too obvious.

Best,
F-

this one isn’t too known i guess: to replace all instances of an audio event in a project (akin to exchanging a sample in a sampler), put your replacement sample in the pool, the drag it from the pool whist holding shift, and drop it onto the event to be replaced.

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M/S-recording + edits:

If recording i.e. a vocalist with M/S technique (to get that little air around) which I often do, record it to a stereo track (M = left/S = right) instead of two individual tracks. Mix6To2 or Voxengo MSED get you decoded in a second.

That way you can apply i.e. VariAudio + Warp to both channels while avoiding phase issues.

Works exactly the same if you track a DI guitar + an amp, up to 6 channels, see Rhino’s tip on multitrack wave editing somewhere above in this thread.

Does ReadyBoost improve Cubase 7 VST performance?
My Win7 32b mobo is maxed out with 4GB of RAM.
Will adding a 32 or 64GB USB ReacyBoost do anything to help with VST performace?
Thanks for the help.

Thanks for the great thread!

well not workflow but a useful KC (for me at least :slight_smile: )
open all insert GUI on channel… shift+alt+left click on E button of a channel. to close all of them shift+left click on E again

Great stuff here guys…

For me, I have almost all my key commands set to my left hand so my right leaves the mouse as little as possible.

A=Add audio track
F=Snap on/off
Alt+S=Detect Silence
Ctrl+B=Bounce Audio
Ctrl+X=Export Audio
Shift+S=Silence
Ctrl+Alt+D=Detele Overlap

Just a few i customized that I use VERY often.

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Wonderful idea. Keeping this hard wired live REC buss so to speak.

There’s a cool thing I discovered. there are some tool modifiers that are not assigned to any Key and one of them is really useful (for me). In preference, under tool modifiers, range tool, you’ll find “Select Full Vertical” … what that does is that if you resise multiple midi notes or audio events with that comand, (let say you’re resising the end of multiple files) it won’t keep their end positions but all the event ends will align. So let say you recorded a vocal part multiple times and they are all stack but some are longer, select them all, resise the begining and the end with that command and they’ll all be the same lenght. Same for midi :smiley:

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Wow, how long has this one been hidden from the general public?
Haven’t been able to do this since Nu2 and I’ve missed it badly.
Has this been there all along?
Let’s hear it for Steinberg’s documentation!

Thank you so much for this one!
I have brought this up before but no one ever had an answer.
I thought they did away with it.

it’s been this way as far as i can remember. i habitually try all different modifiers on various controls, it’s usually faster then reading the manual which is lacking sometimes.

the issue is, there’s no KC assignable to opening the GUIs of all the inserts on a channel. (there are, however, individual generic remote commands to open insert #1, insert #2, and so forth.)

there is, however, a KC to ‘close all’ plugin GUIs that are currently opened on the screen, at once. pretty handy. (ie. the same as going shift+left mouse click on any ‘e’ button in the arrange. found under “mixer > windows: close all plugins”.)

what you’re in fact describing is the “size objects>common position” modifier. (“select full vertical” is handy for moving around chunks of the whole arrange.)

Attach one of those alarms for keys that beeps when you whistle. But turn it off while mixing, else it might be triggered by something in the mix.

i think a new section on the manual or a separate PDF of all Tips and Tricks could be very refreshing way on how to work more efficiently.


Well… i was more thinking of steinberg to put all Tip and Tricks known by them… its their software i guess they know all of the tricks… :exclamation:

That assumes they defined ALL the possible usage scenarios, and PREVENTED ANY others, otherwise just providing a whole bunch of facilities will guarantee that there will be a myriad of things users will be able to do that were never thought of in the design.

im just saying there are good tricks not documented or documented here and there , its good to know them… the user can use them(or not) and also use their own methods and have suggestions too… there is no conflict here.

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