Inspiration is fickle. There’s no telling when a new melody or beat or sound will abruptly pop into existence for your brain. When it does, it may be about as slippery as a greased eel, with even the slightest distraction vulnerable to go back the idea, ghostlike, to the ether from whence it got here. In the absence of a manner to run a line-out out of your noggin’s sound machine, then the satisfactory component to do is to get your concept sketched out on your studio as soon as feasible.
Once upon a time, while that mystical fizzle of concept struck, you could switch on a synth, deliver its sign up on a desk, and then begin to the training session the idea nearly straight away. However, with a current DAW, you have to boot your laptop, load the software, create an assignment, create a track, select an instrument, find a suitable patch or sample bank for that instrument, installation consequences, and so forth and so forth. The spontaneity is lost, and the possibilities for distraction boost with each step.
Thankfully, the clever oldsters over at Steinberg acknowledged this shortcoming with DAWs and feature-packed Cubase with a practical set of gear with which to mitigate the problem.
Project templates
As an ordinary Cubase user, you’ll be adequately conscious that you are shown the Project Assistant window while creating a new Cubase assignment. You could select a template to act on because of the start line for the venture. While the standard built-in models may be useful, what we’re truly interested in right here is the capacity to make custom templates tailor-made to suit your rig and requirements. This is straightforward to do, as I’ll display you in the walkthrough.
Project templates can include the whole thing that an ordinary task report shops: audio engine settings, I/O, internal routing, tracks, results, units, drum maps, and so on. Templates also can include actual tune content, but for this to paintings reliably with audio and video content, it’s essential that the related media files are saved in a not unusual library vicinity that’s always to be had to Cubase. You also need to be conscious that any adjustments to such supply-media documents will impact any tasks – past and destiny – based on that template.
While task templates are a brief and handy manner to configure Cubase for a specific type of consultation, their usefulness most advantageous is going to date. It might be impractical to create templates that cover each viable eventuality and that they offer no way of dashing things up after you’ve established a new undertaking and started running inside it. This is in which presets are available to play.
Presets aplenty
The handiest manner to get the right of entry to Cubase’s presets is through the Media tab of the proper-hand region of the challenge window. The User Presets folder suggests those you’ve created, and Presets indicates you all predefined and consumer-created presets. Each folder incorporates some of the subfolders, one for each of the specific sorts of preset that Cubase manages.
Track Presets outline most of the settings for a track – like a name, channel configuration, inserts, pan position, and so forth – and maybe dragged from the Media Browser for your project or implemented to an existing tune. Cubase comes with presets for audio, instrument, sampler, and MIDI tracks. You can also create multi-track presets containing definitions for 2 or greater person tracks right now, best for growing drum recording or vocal double-monitoring set-ups.
There are sorts of preset for handling effects plug-ins. VST FX Presets outline an impact plug-in and its parameters, at the same time as FX Chain Presets shop the plug-ins and settings used by a sequence of processors. You can drag those presets to a track’s Insert stack within the mission window, load a preset right into a song inside the MixConsole, or drag a preset to the Track List to create a new ship effect out of the plug-in or chain.
Similarly, you can configure every song’s channel strip the usage of Strip Presets. You could use VST Instrument Presets to manipulate your definitions of an instrument and accompanying instrument parameters.
Taking the time to create templates and presets that fit the responsibilities and jobs you perform regularly, which can be tailor-made to your hardware setup and favored workflow, is a very worthwhile use of your studio downtime. Let’s have observe the diverse methods you could do this…