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Cubase Tips - Arrange To Perfection
Get the most out of Cubase with this tutorial...
Hands up all of you who used to own an Atari ST. Now keep your
hand up if the only reason you bought the thingwas to run Cubase.
Yep, thought so. Let's face it, Cubase really was the only reason
to chose an Atari ST over itscontemporary, the Amiga.
Now let's be a bit more controversial. Many people would never
have started using Cubase if it wasn't for the freeand easy
availability of pirate copies, and although Steinberg probably see
it differently, I would argue that theirplace in the market today
was secured by the piracy that troubled them in the past. Once the
Atari becameobsolete and we had all gone out and bought PCs and
Macs (oh dear) we needed to get a new sequencingpackage, and what
better than the one with which we are as familiar as we are our own
mums - namely, Cubase.
Now another question. Hands up all of you who have read the
Cubase manual? Yep, thought so. You didn't needto, did you? You
taught yourself how to use it when you had that naughty pirate on
your Atari. Sure, you've neverquite sussed out the Interactive
Phrase Synth, the Logical Editor seems to be about as logical as
the Teletubbies,and God only knows what some of those bloody
editing icons do. But that doesn't matter, you can find your
wayaround the program well enough to come up with masterpiece after
masterpiece, right? But wouldn't it be nice toknow just what all of
those extra bells and whistles really do? Well, we thought we'd
dispel the mysteries once andfor all.
We will be running a series of tutorials, each focusing on a
particular feature, to make sure you really are gettingthe most
from Cubase. The examples and walkthroughs are specific to Cubase
VST for PC, but if you are a Macowner don't despair, everything is
just as relevant, it may just be done slightly differently, and
you'll have to makedo with only one mouse button. Oh, you'd already
realised that.
To get this series underway - and to make sure we are all
starting from the same point of knowledge - we are
going to begin by looking at Cubase's Arrange window. Don't
worry all you power users out there, this isn't goingto be a lesson
on recording parts or creating tracks, there is a certain level of
basic knowledge used for creatingsongs which we shall take as
read.
Group TracksAs the name suggests, the arrange window is where
you can easily alter your song's... err... arrangement. Asmany of
us know, shuffling around all of those individual parts can often
become quite a chore, so wouldn't it benice to have some sort of
MIDI pool in the same way as there is an audio pool?To facilitate
working in this pattern-orientated way we'll look at one of
Cubase's most frequently overlookedfeatures: Group Tracks.
Let's say that you had a song that consisted of four main
sections: intro, verse, chorus and middle 8. Let's assume
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you wanted to try various different arrangements of these main
sections. Obviously it's going to become quitetedious moving those
individual parts after a while - step in Group Tracks...Select all
the parts that are associated with the intro and then select 'Build
Group' from the Structure menu(Cntrl+U). Enter the desired name in
the window that opens and click 'New'. You'll see a new column
appear tothe right of the screen, with the newly-created group
listed.
Be sure to select only the parts that correspond to the desired
section, but also bear in mind that the parts don'thave to be
adjacent and that their relative positions are maintained within
the group. Now from the File menu
create a new arrangement.Next, you need to create a group track
to place the groups into. There are various different track
'classes' inCubase, which are set using the 'C' column of the
tracklist. Create a new track and set its class to 'Group
Track'.You can now drag and drop the groups out of the group list
and onto the group track.
If you subsequently want to edit one or more parts that are
contained within a group, simply select the group thatcontains the
part to be edited, then from the structure menu, select 'Unpack
Group'. The group's constituent partswill be restored to normal
MIDI tracks.
You don't have to use groups purely for sections of songs,
either. Another good use for them is to group togetherrelated
instruments, like brass or drum parts. One shortfall of using
groups, though, is that you cannot group audiotracks or mixtures of
MIDI and audio tracks.
Global funct ion sCubase provides another set of functions for
quickly manipulating large numbers of parts efficiently. These
are
called Global functions, and are accessed from the Structure
menu. All of these functions work in the same way.The area being
worked on is defined by the locators and any muted tracks remain
unaffected. 'Global Cut'removes the area between the locators and
moves all the following parts back to create a seamless join.
'GlobalInsert' moves all the parts that appear after the left
locator to the right locator, thus creating a break in your
song.
'Global Split' works in the same way as the scissors tool,
except across all tracks. When selected parts are split atthe
locator points, and if you only want to create one split, then
either set both locators to the same position ormove the right one
to an empty area of the Arrange window.
Finally, 'Copy Range' copies all events that fall in between the
locators and inserts them at the current songposition.As this
series continues, we'll be looking at progressively more advanced
functions and features of Cubase. Untilthen...
Adam CruteThe Mix 04/00
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