Recording - March 2012 - 56

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Steinberg Cubase 6
Best. Cubase. Ever.
by Paul Vnuk Jr.

...where we bring you follow-up articles with application hints and upgrade news about gear already reviewed in Recording

threshold bars to determine which beats are selected, and “hit pointed” rather than the older practice of placing a hit point at every transient spike and then making manual substitutions and corrections. Once the hit points are detected, we can proceed to two of C6’s most exciting new features: drum replacement and track quantization. Replace it, time it, make it groove Drum replacement is nothing new; it is the practice of augmenting or replacing recorded drum hits with sampled hits. Usually this requires third-party software, but C6 adds it as a stock feature. Once you determine your hit points for, say, kick or snare, you simply convert them to a MIDI note of your choosing, which can then be used to trigger your favorite drum sampler—or, easier still, Cubase’s own built in Groove Agent One VSTi drum machine. It’s worth noting here that since C6’s hit point detection is an audio process, it detects not only each beat but its velocity as well, which is crucial for realistic sounding hits. Overall this process is akin to the Auto-Tune style pitch correction added in Cubase 5; it may not be as tweaky as a third-party plug-in, but in my environment, workflow and integration beat tweaky every time. It’s no secret that Cubase has lacked a groove editor/Pro Tools-style Beat Detective feature for years now. Well, thanks again to the improved detection, hit points can become split points, which can then be easily quantized to the grid. What’s more, thanks to a new Group Edit feature, once you find the hit points for the snare, kick, hi-hats, toms and so on, you can split, quantize and then crossfade out the gaps all in one easy window. You can even specify track dominance like Kick > Snare > Hats > Toms and it will keep the phase and timing issues the same across all of the specified tracks. I am simply blown away by how well this works—I contrast this with the (in-)famous, largely manual and time consuming “Cryptaglobe Method” we used back in the day. I was expecting numerous clicks, double hits, and gaps. Clicks? None. Double hits? Nope. Gaps? Well, sometimes, and I will fix them out of principle... even though 90% of the time I can’t even hear them in the mix due to Cubase’s auto-fade settings! Another new gem in the land of groove is the new feature of advance tempo detection, which works on a single track or even on an entire mixed-down song file. This is handy for songs not played to a click, when a tempo map is required for syncing BPM-based effects, further overdubs, etc. Recently I recorded a non-synced line from an analog synthesizer sequencer and could not find the exact tempo, which was like 59.21 BPM and took almost 3 hours to truly nail manually without drift. C6 took less than 8 seconds! Better lanes, better folders, better group workflow Cubase has always worked with lanes (essentially a track that houses or nests multiple tracks of successive takes), but it was a klutzy process of moving lanes up and down as only the top lane played in the track, having to make cuts and watching out for clicks and fades, etc. While tracks are still nested and stacked on top of each other when you’re editing in lanes, now any cut made to one take applies to them all and you don’t need to drag your favorite bits manually to the top for your comped take. Simply click on the one you want in any lane and highlight it and it is magically placed visually and sonically into your master

DAW

updates can be a tricky emotional ride. Along with the excitement of new features, bug fixes and program tweaks, there is also the anxiety of “Will this work, did they break anything, what did they change?” All that comes into play as we’re faced with Steinberg’s Cubase 6.

There are a handful of visual and performance tweaks to the mixer and main workspace, and functional updates like 64-bit OS X Lion support, tweaks to existing plug-ins and such. Aside from those, the bulk of the new features of Cubase 6 are these three: Improved editing/workflow, MIDI expressiveness, and new toys for guitar recording. Drum editing workflow Fast intuitive editing is the name of the game in C6, with significant changes to drum editing, and to the way in which multiple performances are comped and edited. Cubase’s new and improved hit point detection is similar in the way it functions to the program’s detect silence feature, with visual
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RECORDING MARCH 2012

Recording - March 2012

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