Tips Tricks And Workflow Goodness

First- Thanks to Rhino for the links. Very helpful info.

Second- could Bane’s ‘The Steinberg Forum Knowledgebase for Users by Users’ be used for this?
There is already a ‘Tips and Tricks’ section.

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Hiya Curteye,

Thanks for the info, I hadn’t found that excellent thread in the lounge, but I was looking for that type of info on Cubase 7 in the Cubase 7 forum, crazy I know.
As you may have noticed, I’m trying to keep all the info in the first post here accessible, C7 specific and ego-less.
I’m happy for this thread to be moved over to the lounge I suppose, but having been lurking this forum in various guises since last century I’d never found that thread and not for a lack of looking.
This one seems to be humming along nicely now and I can’t really see why a C7 specific thread should be moved away from the C7 specific forum.
That said, I will link the knowledgebase thread to the tips post, it looks truly excellent and once again, thanks for pointing it out.
Ohh and I just noticed the tips n tricks section there, is a link to this thread :wink:

Cheers,

Good move Paul. And as you said let’s keep this one going as well.

IMHO it is one of the most useful threads on the site.

A major ‘Mahalo’ for its creation.
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Just noticed this:

BEWARE, don’t choose erase unless you don’t need the files, choose the‘remove from pool’ option. Erase option will send your files to digital heaven. Then choose Save as Template option from the file menu.

I’ve started a thread in the Features and Suggestions list to get this fixed called “Save Template without Media”. If you guys could +1 that thread it would help get this very flawed template problem fixed

thanks

Martin

Shameless bump!
Oh, but I did add some more joy in the first post though…

@ Rhino, ‘backup project’ very frequently used here too, sometimes even for arrangement edits that are undoable… once bitten.
And HDD’s are cheap.

If you require more than 8 Inserts on a track, just route into a clean group channel and add another 8 Inserts…

Macro
I’ve created a macro to see the entire project at once.

Whole Project:
Zoom - Zoom Full
Zoom - Zoom Track Full

It’s my most used macro. Better yet if you assign two KC for Undo Zoom and Redo Zoom. (this way you can use the macro to see your entire project at once and one KC to go back to the previous position.

regards

For me, some of the best tips are keyboard shortcut or modifier keys and are not really hidden but I’ll post them anyways:

-Hold shift + Ctrl, left click and drag up or down on midi event(s) to change their velocities
-Hold Ctrl while resising an event (when snap to grid is enabled) to bypass the snap to grid and resise freely (same thing for moving an event)
-This is simple but a lot of people don’t know about this, use Grid Relative in the snap to grid panel if you want to move events but keep their starting position.
-when using the Range selection tool, hold Ctrl + Shift to select all tracks
-there’s a command called select cursor to end, so if you assign this to a keyboard shortcut and also assign one to split at cursor, you can easily split all files and the select all on the right side of the split to move them
-if you want to delete a section but you want all event after to move where the deleted section is while keeping everything on the grid use the range selection tool while snap to grid is enabled, use the ctrl + shift modifier I talked about to select the part you want to delete (let’s say you delete 2 bars), then go to the snap type in the snap to grid panel and change it to shuffle, then press delete. the 2 bars are gone and all event after moved to the left automatically. Don’t forget to change the snap type again after tho :wink:
-Variaudio shortcuts: press tab to switch between segment and pitch modes, hold ctrl while moving a note to put it perfectly on the pitch, hold shift while moving a note to move it freely
-In mixconsole, alt double click on sends to make the send plugin show up
-Add a Key command to Find track/Channel (in my case it’s F) so when I press F I can start typing the name of a track and it will select it … this is really usefull to find tracks easily in big sessions

I could go on like this but I don’t want to clutter the forum :wink: I hope this will help some of you

i will add to these all these are re-configurable via preferences>editing>tool modifiers, so if any of these don’t work at a studio, they may have been configured differently. also, there are some modifier-controlled functions that are not by default assigned to any keyboard keys, so it’s worth getting to know what can be done.

Tip for Drum Templates

We all create one track for each mic on a drum set. I put all these tracks in a folder. Fine. But what happens when you want to punch in a drums set? Well the drums themselves are simple but the overheads, hi hat, and any other cymbal tracks sustain much more than a drum hit does. And you don’t want to cut off the staining sounds when you overdub.

To solve this I do the following:

  1. Create a folder called “drums”
  2. Create a two sub folders under drums called “main” and “aux” respectively
  3. Create tracks for your drum mics under the “drums” folder
  4. Create a set of tracks for your cymbal mics under the “main” subfolder
  5. Create a second set of tracks for your cymbal mics under the “aux” sub folder
  6. Route all drum tracks to group tracks. (snare top and bottom to snares, 4 overheads(remember, there are two sets of overhead tracks in this scenario) to an overhead group etc)
  7. Add FX to group tracks instead of the main tracks. Mix primarily with the groups.

Main advantage:
When I need to punch in I hit the record enable on the “drums” folder and then disarm record on one of the cymbal sub folders (main or aux) that was recorded just prior to the punch in point. This way, the cymbal sustain from the performance just before the punch in point decays naturally and is mixed in with the new punched in drums and cymbals. Sounds seamless as if it were played in one take.

note: I use two bass drum mics, top and bottom snare mics, 5 tom mics, two hats each with their own mic, a ride mic, two overheads and two room mics. As a result, my groups are bass drums, snares, overheads, hats, rides, all routed to another group called drum sub. Finally there is another group for parallel compression and one for the room mics. I do most of my mixing in the groups rather than the individual tracks.

This has worked well for me. Hope it helps someone else.

Locators and markers

1- My goto next/previous marker is {Alt}+{+} and {Alt}+{-} very handy as {+} and {-} are already used for scroll

2- to set LR locator to the next 2 markers locate to marker 1 then apply the following macro ({Alt}+{/}
transport- set Left locator
transport- next marker
transport- set Right locator

SeeWhat

some people have been wanting a ‘lock locators’ feature. it would be handy, but you can sort of overcome that by creating a set of proprietary macros+PLE scripts. you need a marker track, and have a script create a cycle marker around the current locators position. then have a PLE script rename that cycle marker a dummy string. then you are free to move your locators wherever you wanted. when you want to revert your locators to the saved position, you have a PLE macro select the marker object in your arrange whose name is precisely that dummy string you had created in the first step, set locators around it, and delete the dummy marker. don’t have time to write out the scripts+macros atm but this is the principle.

Great topic! Thx!!

To avoid getting duplicates of a sample that is dragged from Mediabay into your Cubase project appearing in Mediabay (clogging up your Mediabay with many multiples of the same sample), uncheck your Cubase projects folder in the “Define Locations” section of Mediabay.

Need more overview in your PlugIns? Here is what I found out about:

Cubase PlugIn sorting

I don’t know why Steinberg makes such a magic about PlugIn-sorting (Maybe they want to create reasons to sell it in Cubase 8?). It is easy to manage yet in Cubase 7 /7.5! So this one goes for VST2 Plugins…

  1. Create in your VstPlugins Directory Subdirectories like:
    \Reverb
    \Distortion
    \Filter

  2. Any VST2 PlugIn you install directly in those subdirectories will be sorted correctly!

That means:

Install for example “Audio Damage Kombinat” into the directory C:\Program Files\Vstplugins\Distortion
and it will be correctly sortet near by the Steinberg Distortion Plugins!

If you create a further subdirectory like …\Vstplugins\Distortion\AudioDamage you have all Distortion Plugins from Audio Damage in one folder, right under the Distortion Group

Nice? :wink:

Not nice enough, this needs to be enabled for vst3 as well (withou the need to hex-edit the file itself). Also most welcome would be creating custom arbitrary groups of favourite plugins etc.

Here’s my take on bouncing as a lazy guy.

Macro for bouncing without any processing from the main-outs (and also auto muting what’s bounced)

usage: select the track and part you want to bounce. fire the macro.

The cool thing here is, you set the export window once, and bounce whatever you can, no need to select output when exporting, no need to assign your vsti or audio output to a specific group etc. Your bounce will be unaffected by your main output eq / insert chain.

“floating” inspector bar, PT style :wink:

make it allways on top and will automaticaly scroll during selecting track

http://www.gifti.me/i/b9qAm.jpg

simple mixer configuration