AudioMedia - March 2009 - (Page 30) STEINBERG CUBASE 5 Advanced Music Production System Is the new Cubase a major step ahead for this popular sequencer? RICHARD WENTK investigates. ubase . arrived just over six months ago, so it was a surprise to see Cubase being announced at this year’s NAMM show. It was even more of a surprise to find it shipping just a couple of weeks later – unusually speedy compared to the typical announce-release cycle. Previous updates have concentrated on new technology, but this release adds a box full of new features. If there’s a theme, it’s a move beyond the strict tape-based metaphor to a looser approach to music and audio. Considering that multi-tracking is almost half a century old now, and that computers are good at processing information in creative ways, it’s been disappointing to some to see that most DAWs still follow the old familiar tape-based model. Even though the linearity may be familiar, both music production and post could benefit from smarter computer assistance. Automated robo-post seems unlikely, but a hint of digital jamming is starting to creep in, promising interesting things for the future. C Control O rientated THE REVIEWER RICHARD WENTK is the owner of Skydancer Media, a digital production company providing sound, image, design, and consultancy services to various clients in London and the West Country. With pad controllers becoming so popular, it’s no surprise to find that Steinberg has added a virtual MPC sample player, with sixteen virtual pads, called Groove Agent. There’s no equivalent hardware controller from Steinberg – at least not yet – but you can use any of the rash of pad players that have appeared over the last few years to trigger samples. Clicking with a mouse works too, but it’s not quite as hands-on. There’s quick access to volume, pitch, filtering, and other essentials, for the sixteen pads that are arranged in groups of eight for a total of samples per patch. Pads don’t have to be mapped to key pitches in sequential order – any pad can play any pitch. Although this seems like a small addition, it’s very much easier to set up a collection of samples in Groove Agent than it is in a standard keymapped sampler, making live triggering of sound effects much more productive. You can also use it in the obvious way for drum loop “If there’s a theme, it’s a move beyond the strict tape-based metaphor to a looser approach to music and audio.“ programming – a new MIDI plug-in called Beat Designer is a very rhythm friendly way to program drum loops using the pad layouts, and includes very accessible swing and accent features that make it easy to create lively loops. For more creative loop processing, a new instrument called LoopMash adds programmed and random loop cutups. Although this was designed for rhythm processing, you can coax it into working with other kinds of samples for creative sound design – speech and vocals can be particularly interesting, and creative abuse of any prerecorded material is fair game. Vocals can also be processed with VariAudio. This doesn’t mean varispeed – that’s been available in Cubase for a while now with ‘musical mode’ for loops and tracks. VariAudio is more of an autotune feature. It’s limited to vocals really, and adds hands-on re-tuning of vocal parts. A single click analyses your vocal line. Pitched note blocks appear, and you can drag these up and down for quantisation and correction. Some basic reworking of vibrato and expression curves is also possible, but it wasn't quite as fluent as it can be in, say, AutoTune or Melodyne. But audio quality is good –you can move the audio up or down a fifth or so without it sounding too chipmunk’ish or robotic. There’s also a MIDI extraction feature, but trying to copy the pitch of some vocal lines to a VST monosynth created more misses than hits. You could, with time on your side, convert the output to something closer to the original. It’s certainly in the proverbial ball park, but it’s also not a one-click process. Pitch-M eister Pitch correction is also available in the new PitchCorrect plug-in. This is a real time effect with programmable speed and tolerance, and also includes pitch shifting, scale fitting, and formant alteration. The best of these is the formant shift, which can transform 30 AUDIO MEDIA MARCH 2009
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