I have been using a Yamaha keyboard connected to Cubase for playing back different instruments. I am now taking my laptop on the road and would like to have my midi tracks play sounds from the VST instruments. I have never done this. Can someone explain in detail the steps I do to connect each track to a VST instrument so that I will hear sound from my laptop when I play a track. Thank you.
First of all you need to have VST instruments installed on your laptop. I assume you haven’t installed any since you say this is your first time. Therefor, you can only use the default VSTi’s installed during your Cubase installation.
Under the Devices menu, open the VST Instruments panel (F11), then load whatever VSTi available, load the closest sound to what your MIDI track is to play (e.g. piano if you have a piano track), and assign the MIDI out of your MIDI track to the VSTi you just loaded. Do the same for the rest of your MIDI tracks. Note that you may have Multitimbral VSTi’s in which you can load more than one patch each under a different MIDI channels. In such case you also need to assign the appropriate MIDI channel of your track in addition to its MIDI out to that VSTi.
That is how you do it, but don’t expect to hear exactly the same sounds you used to hear from your Yamaha keyboard. you may need to do a lot of tweaking in your MIDI tracks and/or most of the VSTi’s you load to get the sound you want.
Good luck.