Hi Mashedmitten, thanks for your reply. At the moment all is fine as I have created a midi template with instrument tracks routed to the USM vst you told me about. I’ve also got a drum VST plugin which allows me to use midi to tigger drum samples in *.wav format of my choosing, e.g. snare drum, Hi Hat Toms etc. So I get really good drum sounds now .
My hope for Cubase was that I could record a mixture of live vocals, bass, Keyboards and guitars and use midi to generate say string sounds etc and have everything within a project. I didn’t want to have to send midi out to some external midi unit only to have to route it back into a project track for audio mixdown. I think I have the means to do this now.