CUBASE SX tutorial BEGINNERS 2

Thyas - Cj Daft

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English

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CUBASE SX tutorial Series One – Volume Two danDont.com The Mixer in Cubase SX. A Short introduction The mixer in Cubase SX is a very big and powerful part of the program that is heavily used in every day work: this is where you colour your sound, set up levels, pan, add effects, manipulate the original sound source and do countless other things – and it’s also a very large one to get into so in this a short introduction we will go through the basic functions in the mixer, a walk-through to the channel strip, setting up simple fx channels and using sends. A brief look under the hood. If you would be looking at the face of a regular analogue hardware mixer, you’d find there’s a lot in common comparing to Cubase. However when mixing is done in a software you will find there’s a lot more options on offer and some things are not always visible on-screen like they would normally show in a hardware mixer. This is simply a question of space and usability: you can’t possibly cram a 48 track mixer to a small screen and expect it to be usable! But the modularity will show its true powerful nature once you learn how to get around the software… What’s on the mix then? Looking at the main screen in Cubase, you can access the main mixer in the Devices->Mixer menu or simply by pressing F3. You should have some tracks created in the main project view before you can get into mixing – logically you should have something to mix! The Mixer window ...

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Publié par	Thyas
Nombre de lectures	46
Langue	English

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(Picture 1) The main mixer default view. From the left: mixer view controls, stereo input channel, midi channel, a stereo audio channel, a mono audio channel and on the right – the master fader. At the leftmost part of the mixer there are controls over the mixer view. This strip of functions offers you full control of what’s on-screen and what’s not. If you click on the “+-“ buttons you can always bring up basic mixer functions visible, select different views or hide them. By default your Mixer is showing routing options on top of each channel and no equalizer. You can always store your favourite preset view on the mixer and – in fact – load it up to any of the three mixers available on the devices menu! Next to the “+-“ buttons you can also select narrow/wide view for all of the mixer channels to keep the mixer tidy. The basic “M, S, R, W” buttons are there for clearing mute, solo, automation reading and writing on the selected channels. Underneath you can find access to the VST Connections panel, mixer reset button and a quick access to alter your current mixer view. On the right side of the view control strip there are multiple buttons which give you show/hide options on channels that fall under different categories. For example you can set all MIDI channels invisible after setting them up. More space for mixing but always accessible through this panel! You can also choose which channels can be hidden or not. The small copy/paste button at the lowest part of the strip is an easy access for duplicating channel strip settings on any selected channel (Picture 2).

(Picture 2) On the left: The Mixer View control strip. There are plenty of options to choose from. Use this panel to setup your views, save them as presets or copy different channel settings. Powerful!

(Picture 3) Above: Set up VST Connections and you can connect to all ofyour hardware I/O. Hardware inputs and outputs in Cubase SX You can choose multiple inputs and outputs in Cubase. This is where you connect to your external gear and route the signals in and out the software mixer. If you have a sound card which has plenty of connectors it might show many inputs in the mixer view by default already. However in some cases you have to set up your input channels manually and you can do that by accessing the VST Connections panel (Devices->VST Connections menu or F4) and selecting the proper connections on the input/output leaf. Remember when someone used to buy an 8-bus mixer and how flexible that was back in the days? This is where your 8 bus could be hiding… (Picture 3). Channel strip mayhem Let’s get this straightened up. Atrackbe anything from audio to MIDI to controller lane. A can term usually found in multitracking devices and DAW’s. Achannelhowever is a mixer term. One track can be (for example) a mono audio track or a stereo audio track – they will show as mono input channel or stereo input/paired mono channels in the mixer. A channel is whatever you decide to route into one input on a mixer. This is why you have all these specialized categories on the mixer: You can make a group channel to control the levels of multiple inputs on one channel or you can create an fx channel where selected channels can send dry signal to a reverb. But now we should look into a single channel input on a mixer and what’s under the channel strip. If you look at the mixer you will find that audio tracks on your sequencer have input and output channel routing, phase shifting button, gain, narrow/wide view selectors on top of each mixer channel and pan. When adjusting gain, you can find a safe level of working when recording from external source and then fine adjust the level with the big fader on the channel. Underneath there are multiple buttons which are: mute, solo, read, write, edit, inserts state, EQ state, sends state, monitor and record enable (Picture 4). With the state buttons you can enable/disable all the stuff available under the edit button. Choosing monitor enables you to listen the input source on the channel.

(Picture 4) Above left: The Channel Strip on a main mixer. Basic controls over a channel. (Picture 5) Above: The VST Channel Settings. When selecting the italic “e” on the mixer you can access multiple functions on the selected channel strip. This panel has all the insert effects, on-channel EQ’s and signal routing (send) stuff ready and waiting to get tweaked! Channel parameters – loads to tweak! If you access the “e” button on a mixer a panel labelled “VST Audio Channel Settings” will show up. This offers access to all the rest of the channel strip functions on a regular hardware mixer. On the left you can see clear solo, clear mute and initialize channel buttons with the channel settings’ copy/paste function underneath. Same basic view of the channel is offered on the left next to this but the real fun part of mixing starts with the “i” slots which stand for Inserts. There are 8 inserts available for each channel on Cubase SX (5 if using Cubase SL). These are for setting up effects on each channel individually. By clicking your mouse over any of these black slots you can bring up a menu which will show you every effect plug-in you have installed to your Cubase SX. Once you’ve selected a plug-in, the main panel of selected plug-in application will popup to set up desired plug-in setting. Also when you have a plug-in selected in a slot, 3 buttons over each slot will become active. These buttons stand for on/off, bypass and edit. By pressing edit you can always access (show/hide) the selected plug-in and have a look at the parameters. On top of this panel there is a selector for viewing routing options and presets options on the inserts row, plus three buttons for inserts row reset, bypass and edit (Picture 6).

(Picture 6) A nice insert plug-in selected to the first inserts slot. You can alter the settings on each selected plug-in, then close the window and later return to adjust some more simply by clicking on the “e” over the insert plug-in slot.

In the middle of the panel you will find a simple four-band equalizer. This is for rough equalizing each channel. An equalizer is for cutting off undesired frequencies in your mix; if you, for example have a singing artist on the selected channel, you might want to get rid of the lowest frequencies and by selecting the lo frequency button on (the on/off button on each of the band rows), you can see a green line with a dot labelled “1” showing up. You can adjust the settings by typing in values inside the black slots, dialing the two-way knob or simply by clicking and dragging mouse on the graphic display. Notice that you can select low cut on the first band and hi cut on the last band only. Otherwise the knobs underneath the labels “lo”, “lo mid”, “hi mid” and “hi” act as “Q” value dials. This value is for selecting desired band width on the equalizer. However this equalizer is really intended for rough equalizing. If you need more sophisticated equalizing, I’d recommend selecting an equalizer plug-in as an insert effect. On top of this row you can store or remove equalizer presets and reset or bypass the channels’ equalizer. The last row on the VST Audio Channel is for signal routing via sends. This row looks quite similar to the inserts row but offers flexible routing from the channel to a group channel, effect channel or bus. If you think of a regular hardware mixer design, this row could be also called as “aux”, standing for auxiliary output selector.

Before using this row, you should notice creating an output path before any selection can show up in the popup menu of each slot. This could be internal software path (group channel or VST effect channel) or external path to external gear. For example if you wanted to send a selected channels signal to an effects channel, you’d need to create an effects channel on the main project window view first. Doing this is simple: just access the main project view, right-click on the track indicator row and select “add FX channel track” from the menu. After selecting the desired effects plug-in on the FX channel, you can return to the channels VST Audio Channel editor view and select the desired send on the slot (Picture 7 and 8). On the top of the row there are also view selector options with routing or normal modes and the regular reset, bypass and edit all sends buttons. (Picture 7) Creating an FX Channel Track on the main project view. An FX track is a processor-easy way to add send effects to your project and use the effect on multiple channels just by selecting the correct send routing on the VST Audio Channel panel.

(Picture 8) The created FX channel with “Liquid Delay” plug-in has been set up as a send routing and the dry mixer channel signal on the “Audio 02” channelis getting reverberated. You can select routing, level and panning options on each of the send slots.

If you’re not familiar with differences between an insert effect or a send effect or you have any questions or feedback regarding this tutorial, feel free to visitwww.dandont.com/invision forum and leave any comment on the matter. As a short beginners tutorial this should be considered a first view on the mixer functions and there will be following tutorials on specific details of the subject. The danDon’t Team http://www.dandont.com/invision