Q. Can I split Cubase tracks into different frequency bands?

 

By Matt Houghton

Blue Cat's MB7 Mixer plug-in.

In Ableton Live, I used to use a plug-in to split a channel so that I could do multiband processing. I’m now using Cubase Pro 8.5 and it doesn’t seem to work — I can only have a mono or stereo channel. So my question is, what’s the best way to do multiband processing in Cubase?

Jamie Gibbons via email

SOS Reviews Editor Matt Houghton replies: It’s worth mentioning that Cubase has a number of multiband plug-ins: a compressor, an expander and an envelope shaper, as well as the Quadrafuzz v2 multiband distortion/stereo widener. But if you want to split the channel into different bands so that you can insert your choice of plug-ins on each Cubase has some limitations, and so you’ll either have to invest in a third-party multiband-capable plug-in host, or route the track in question to different channels and apply bracket filtering to each (effectively creating your crossover), and routing them in turn to a Group channel so you can process the whole signal afterwards.

In terms of multiband plug-in hosts, DDMF Metaplugin, which is supplied with multiband splitter and mixer plug-ins and offers intuitive drag-and-drop routing, is worth a look. Another excellent option is Blue Cat’s MB7 Mixer (shown above), which has a more familiar-looking approach to routing, but includes some useful additional features.

Published January 2017

Introducing the new KORG CA-2; The compact handheld chromatic tuner

Cubase's MIDI Drum Editor

By John Walden

Cubase’s Drum Editor, with a simple drum pattern that’s been ‘humanised’ via a little velocity editing and some subtle timing tweaks via the Quantize panel.

Don’t take Cubase’s dedicated MIDI Drum Editor for granted — it’s a gem!

Longstanding Cubase users might take it for granted, but the humble MIDI Drum Editor has long been the subject of envious looks from users of other DAWs, and if you’re new to the wonderful world of drum programming, or perhaps feel you don’t have the drumming chops to build your own patterns from scratch, the Drum Editor can help you in lots of ways — it’s well worth learning your way around it. This month, then, I’ll help you get the drums rolling with a couple of examples.

Starting Grid

Let’s start with a few basics. Once you’ve configured a suitable drum-based virtual instrument track (for example, one loaded with Groove Agent SE, which comes bundled with Cubase — and which I’ll come back to below) and created a short, initially empty, MIDI clip on the track (use the Draw pencil tool to do this), you’re ready to get started. Double-click on the clip and it will, by default, open in the Key Editor, so instead you must choose ‘Open Drum Editor’ from the MIDI menu. If you use the Drum Editor to create new parts often, you’ll want to assign this a shortcut key.

The Drum Editor is similar to the Key Editor in many ways, but the differences make it much more drum-friendly. The most obviously useful feature is the list of drum names that replaces the piano keyboard as the vertical axis of the editor grid. The kit-piece names are based on a ‘map’ of the drum sounds to specific MIDI notes. If you find the default doesn’t match your chosen virtual instrument, you can create custom Drum Maps (as described in SOS February 2009: http://sosm.ag/cubase-0209). The default GM layout will suffice in many situations, but it’s worth noting that once you’ve assigned a drum map to your track, the Drum Editor will become the default editor for that track — just double-click the part in the Project page and the drum editor will open automatically. Unlike the piano keyboard the ‘notes’ don’t have to appear in chromatic order and can be clicked and dragged to reorder them; I’ll often bring the kick, snare and hi-hat to the top, to make it easier to program basic beats.

In the Drum Editor’s toolbar, the Pencil tool is replaced by the Drumstick, which you use to ‘draw’ drum hits into your MIDI clip and remove them with a single click. Alternatively, double-clicking with the normal Object Selection tool achieves the same thing, and holding Alt (PC) or Option (Mac) while using the Object Selection tool temporarily switches you to the Drumstick. By default, all notes added in these ways are given the MIDI velocity that’s defined in the Drum Editor’s toolbar. As you add notes, another difference between the Key Editor and the Drum Editor becomes apparent: drum hits are presented as ‘diamonds’, with their colour indicating note velocity. This is generally a much cleaner way of viewing a drum pattern than the elongated note format used in the Key Editor. Be aware that, despite the default one-shot appearance of these notes, these diamond-shaped drum notes can have a note length, as I’ll explain later.

Human Touch

Even using just this basic subset of the Drum Editor’s tool kit it’s easy to add (or delete) drum hits, but if your track genre requires something other than a metronomic (machine-like) drum pattern, how do you make things a little more ‘human’? Well, a useful starting point is to add some MIDI velocity variation. This velocity editing is made easier in the Drum Editor because clicking on an individual drum sound in the drum list selects that lane in the editor. As a result, only the note velocities for notes within that lane appear in the controller lane at the base of the editor. Even when editing manually, then, turning a drum robot into something closer to a drum human becomes trivially easy.

The main screenshot (above) shows a simple kick/snare/hi-hat pattern with some additional kick/snare hits added in bar four and a 16th-note hi-hat pattern. Most drummers would emphasise the hits on the whole bar and beat divisions so, as shown in the screenshot, I’ve tweaked the velocities of the hi-hat accordingly. Also, aiming to create a sort of ‘ghost note’ effect (as opposed to a drum roll) with my extra kick and snare hits, I’ve significantly lowered the off-beat note velocities for these kit pieces.

The other main ‘human’ element to drumming is timing, and the Drum Editor’s Quantize panel can help here. A full discussion of swing and groove is a topic for another day, but if you apply both a very small amount of swing and set the Randomise value to something other than zero ticks (but do start low unless you want to it to sound like a bad drummer!), then pressing the Quantize button will create just enough timing variation to take you from robot to something vaguely human. If you don’t like the effect, simply undo it and repeat it but with different settings. Oh, and if you really want to get into some subtle MIDI randomisation of note positions and velocities, the Logical Editor is a better place to go — if you are feeling brave enough!

EDM snare roll anyone? This is easy to create with the Drum Editor toolset.

That’s all useful for a basic groove, but what if you want to create rolls for a little extra flourish? Adding a set of notes as a starting point for a drum roll is easy. When adding notes, simply hold the mouse button down and drag horizontally along a lane — this automatically adds hits at regular intervals, which are determined by the current quantise setting. Pick a suitable quantise value and you can easily generate EDM-friendly snare rolls. All that’s then required is a ramp in velocity values and the job’s done.

Special Agent

As you might expect, the Drum Editor includes features designed to make it easy to work with Groove Agent SE. This includes the option (added in v.8.5) to toggle the display between the standard Drum Editor diamond symbols and a Key Editor-style note-length display (via the ‘Show Note Length’ button) which allows you to edit note lengths.

The Show Note Length button allows you to toggle between a Key Editor-style display (shown here) and the standard ‘diamond’ note display, shown in the other screenshots.

As mentioned earlier, the ‘diamond’ drum notes do have a note length and it’s value can be set within the Note Length section of the Drum Editor’s toolbar. On most occasions, the note length information might not be important, as the virtual instrument just needs the ‘Note On’ message — the length of the drum sound is governed by the virtual instrument itself, often simply by the length of the original sample being triggered.

The ‘Create Drum Map from Instrument’ option will interrogate your VSTi and attempt to populate your Drum Map with a full list of the drum sounds in the current preset.However, Groove Agent (including GA SE) now includes lots of presets that don’t just contain conventional drum sounds — there are also loops, such as synths, guitars and bass samples that are part of the ‘kit’ and can be triggered via a MIDI note. These loops might be many beats or bars in length, so the Drum Editor’s default of short note lengths, and no ability to see the note length, can be a problem when programming by hand. Switching to the new Note Display option solves that.

Another Drum Editor feature that works well with Groove Agent SE is the Drum Map. Having loaded your GA SE preset, if you open the Drum Map pop-up menu at the bottom of the drum list, you can choose the ‘Create Drum Map from Instrument’ option. While this can, of course, be used with any third-party virtual drum instrument, it works particularly well with GA, and the result is a drum list that matches all the samples in the currently loaded GA kit, including any loops or sound-effects samples.

The downside is that the drum list can become quite long, which can be annoying given that in any particular pattern you’ll probably only use a few of these drum sounds. Thankfully, another Drum Editor feature introduced in Cubase 8.5 can help: the Toolbar now includes a Drum Visibility Agent (the orange button on the first screen’s toolbar), which allows you to select different levels of detail in the drum list display. For example, the ‘Show Drum Sounds With Events’ option limits the display to just those lanes where you currently have note data present. This really helps to simplify the Drum Editor display, allowing you to focus on just those sounds that are integral to the current pattern.

If your drum pattern only uses a few sounds, the ‘Show Drum Sounds with Events’ option can tidy up the Drum Editor display considerably!

Diamonds Are Forever

Of course, the above examples only scratch the surface of the Drum Editor’s feature set and the integration possible with Groove Agent (SE or the full version). For the less confident drum programmer, one further GA SE feature worth exploring is the Style Player with its Performance Section. This allows you to take the predefined patterns and generate new patterns in the same style but with different levels of complexity. These patterns can then be further edited via the Drum Editor. This can be a great source of fresh ideas... and it would make a wonderful topic for a future Cubase workshop! 

Published January 2017

Introducing the new KORG GA-2; The compact handheld tuner for guitar & bass

Cubase: Humanise Your Programmed Drums

 By John Walden

My initial programmed drum pattern — not exactly full of ‘feel’!

Cubase has all the tools required to add a human feel to your programmed acoustic drum parts.

Last month (http://sosm.ag/cubase-0117), I took you through the MIDI Drum Editor’s core features, its enhancements since Cubase 8 and its links to Groove Agent SE, and touched on how the Drum Editor can help ‘humanise’ programmed parts. As this last point is really significant for non-drummers, this month I’ll discuss various other ways to make your programmed performances more realistic.

Adjust In Time

I’ll use a pattern I programmed using the MIDI Drum Editor, as described last month. If you decide instead to ‘play’ the initial pattern in via a MIDI keyboard or drum pads, then (aside, perhaps, from some initial quantising) the subsequent steps could be very similar. My preference is to start with patterns that are at least eight bars long, as this helps to reduce obvious repetition. In the example, I’ve opted for a simple eighth-note hi-hat pattern, with a classic rock-style kick and snare. It’s a solid enough groove, but it doesn’t sound very ‘human’.

To transition our pattern from ‘robot’ to ‘human’, we need timing and velocity variations. For timing, we can manipulate two elements: first, we can emulate the swing or groove that a human drummer supplies, where notes are deliberately pulled/pushed against the ‘grid’; and second, we can add random timing variations to mimic human ‘imperfections’.

The Drum Editor’s Quantise Panel can be used to add a subtle groove to the programmed pattern.

To explore swing/groove, start in the MIDI Drum Editor’s Quantise Panel. Once you’ve selected the drum hits to which you want to apply some swing, there are several interacting settings to be aware of. I set Grid to 1/8, as most of the hits in my pattern were placed on eighth-note intervals; the chosen setting is reflected in the Drum Editor’s grid display. Adjust the Swing setting, and you’ll see the grid display start to change, with alternative off-beat grid lines moving. Hit the Quantise button and the notes will align to this new grid. The strength with which they’re ‘magnetised’ to the new grid can be moderated by engaging the Iterative Quantise option and adjusting the Iterative Strength value. A more powerful option is the Groove Quantise feature — see the article in SOS July 2012 if you wish to explore that further: http://sosm.ag/cubase-groove-pt1. As mentioned last month, you can also add random timing variations using the Quantise Panel, but I’ll discuss a more sophisticated approach later.

Varied Velocity

As with timing variations, there are a number of potential levels (no pun intended) at which velocity variation can be created. You can select a drum lane in the Drum Editor and adjust the individual velocity of each hit by hand — this doesn’t take long if you’re working with only a few patterns, and allows you to accent specific beats to change the rhythmic feel. I’ve done this in the screenshot example, and my manual velocity editing also included the few ‘decorative’ snare hits in bars four and eight. In bar four, low velocities were applied to the ‘ghost’ notes while the very simple snare roll was given higher velocities, with a ‘ramp’ towards the end of bar eight. Try to avoid simply duplicating these ‘human’ touches; copy your finished pattern and then apply further tweaks to the copies.

Some basic manual editing, as shown here for the hi-hat lane, can be used to further emphasise the accented hits within a pattern. Note the colour (velocity) variations also added for the snare and kick hits.

Logical Editor

For subtle random variation to timing and velocity, Cubase has just the tool: the Logical Editor. As Mark Wherry described in SOS January 2006 (http://sosm.ag/cubase-0306), this is essentially a MIDI equivalent of your word processor’s ‘search and replace’ tool. You configure filter ‘conditions’ to select certain MIDI notes/events (including by position, pitch and velocity) and transform the selection by applying actions (including changing the velocity or note position settings). Some Logical Editor presets are provided (they’re in the MIDI menu), but none is ideal for our purposes, so we need to open the Logical Editor itself.

There are many options, but the screenshot illustrates what’s possible. In the upper-most panel, I’ve defined the filter conditions to select exactly what I want from my MIDI part. I’ve used two conditions. The first indicates that I’m looking only for notes (Type is, Equal, Note). The second selects notes based on a specific position — I’ve used the ‘Outside Bar Range’ condition and set parameter 1 and 2 to 0 and 22 (shown in MIDI ticks; you can set them manually or by dragging in the Bar Range/Time Base column). This second filter selects all notes except those on beat one. Notes on beat one are therefore excluded from any changes I ask the Logical Editor to apply.

For illustration, I added two ‘actions’ in the next panel. For any selected note, the first applies a random position adjustment of between -5 and +5 MIDI ticks. The second applies a further random adjustment of -5 to -10 to the ‘Value 2’ parameter — for note objects, ‘Value 2’ is MIDI velocity. (This is explained on page 899 of the Cubase Operation Manual, along with some other useful details.)

The Logical Editor can be a bit intimidating but it is a powerful MIDI editing tool and great for adding subtle random timing and velocity variations to programmed drum parts.

The final action required is setting the Function value to Transform. Then, when I click the Apply button, the Filters tell the Logical Editor which notes to select, and the Operations apply the specified changes to the selected notes; hey presto, your robot drummer should now sound a little bit more human. The Undo button will rescue you if you don’t like the results, and you can save your Logical Editor settings as a preset for use the next time you need to add a bit of ‘random’ to a drum pattern.

In practice, I tend to use separate Logical Editor presets to randomise note position and note velocity, as this gives you a little more control over proceedings. Given the principles outlined in this example, though, there are all sorts of other ways to humanise your drum pattern, including systematically increasing notes that fall on (or close to) the beat and changing velocities for one specific drum. Given that a Logical Editor configuration can be applied to multiple patterns in an instant, this is potentially a massive time saver.

Down The Lane

You can apply some further, very easy, tweaks in the Drum Editor’s velocity lane. As in the Piano-roll Editor, once you select some notes (in the example screenshot I’ve selected just the hi-hats) and hover your mouse in the note velocity lane, four tiny control nodes appear, and each of these offers another MIDI data-editing option.

Here, just to illustrate the principle of the available tools, I’ve tilted the hi-hat velocities from left to right, but these ‘node’ tools can be very useful for quickly adjusting the velocity dynamics of your drum parts.

For example, the top-centre node adjusts the relative values of MIDI velocity for all selected notes. This is useful for song-level adjustments. For example, patterns used in a louder chorus section can have their note velocities increased easily, while those in the more laid-back verse sections can be made more restrained. The nodes top-left and top-right allow you to ‘tilt’ the velocity data, which can be great if you want to simulate a drummer gradually playing harder or softer. The mid-right node allows you to scale the velocity data around the centre value, which is useful for fine-tuning a previously created velocity ramp.

If you also hold down the Opt/Alt key while grabbing the top-left/top-right nodes, you have the option to either compress (by dragging down) or expand (by dragging up) the range of the velocity data. The effect is not quite the same as applying an audio compressor to the drum sound but it does provide a very neat way to reduce or augment the performance ‘dynamic’ within the pattern.

Like it or not, virtual drummers are a fact of life for many recording musicians, and while efforts to make that virtual drummer sound ‘human’ are only one small step towards giving your tracks that elusive ‘all natural’ vibe, hopefully this workshop shows that this is at least one small step that’s very easily taken in Cubase!

Published February 2017

KORG Gadget for Mac | MUSIC PRODUCTION SOFTWARE

Cubase 9's Sampler Track

 By John Walden

The new Sampler Track and Sampler Control panel. (The reason for the two identical MIDI clips is explained in the main text.)

Amongst Cubase 9’s new features is a whole new track type dedicated to quick and easy sampling.

One of Cubase 9’s big headline new features is the Sampler Track, and it’s available in all three versions of Cubase (Pro, Artist and Elements). Compared with Steinberg’s HALion, or any ‘full-fat’ third-party sampler plug-in, the new Sampler Track is a little modest in terms of its actual sampling functionality, but it scores highly in terms of speed and ease of use, and its deep integration into your Cubase projects.

To explore some of the pros and cons in this first iteration of the Sampler Track, I’ll focus on one example: extracting hits from an audio drum loop. Cubase already offers plenty of scope for experimenting with pre-recorded drum loops — the Sample Editor, AudioWarp, HitPoints and Groove Agent SE features combine to form a powerful toolkit. So, in terms of creative workflow, let’s also consider what the Sampler Track brings to the party.

When A Drag Isn’t A Drag

In the new multi-pane, single-window layout of Cubase 9, one of the four tabs in the Lower Zone is Sampler Control. The easiest way to create a new Sampler Track is to drag and drop an audio sample into the (initially empty) Sampler Control zone from an existing audio track, the MediaBay or even from the Finder/File Explorer of your host OS. This process will automatically create a Sampler Track and map your sample across a default C3 to C6 key range ready to be played via MIDI — it’s super-easy!

The Sampler Control zone is split into four key sections. The waveform display allows you to define the loop and sustain regions for your source sample, while the keyboard display allows you to constrain the MIDI note-mapping range. The key control in the top-most toolbar strip is the Loop Mode. There are various options here, but for our drum-hits example selecting ‘No Loop’ and enabling the One Shot button (the icon looks like a circular target) is a good start.

Creating A Hit

In No Loop mode, all you need do in the waveform display is set the start and end points of the drum hit by dragging the two white ‘S’ markers to the desired locations. Zoom controls (located bottom right of the waveform display) allow more precise control. The markers also include fade options and setting a short fade out can be useful to avoid glitches on playback. That said, you get more control over the amplitude of the sample’s playback by visiting the Amp envelope...

The tiny envelope icon (top-right of the Amp section) replaces the waveform display with a flexible envelope editor, where you can add multiple nodes to create precisely the shape you require. For the example, I’ve chosen the ‘One Shot’ envelope mode and emphasised the attack portion of the drum hit for a bit more impact.

For our drum-hit example, the Amp envelope is set to One Shot mode and I’ve emphasised the attack portion of the sound. The Pitch and Filter panels offer similar envelope editing.

Similar envelope editors are available for the Pitch and Filter sections, and you can get creative by adding just a little bit of pitch variation and tonal changes via the filter. The different filter types allow gentle overdrive through to more extreme bit crushing. Again, for use with isolated drum hits, setting the pitch and filter envelopes to One Shot mode is best and you can control the degree of envelope modulation via the AMT slider located far-left in each envelope editor panel.

In terms of crafting your drum hit, some other interesting options in the Sampler Control panel are worth exploring — the reverse (backwards ‘R’ icon) button, for example. However, for isolating an individual drum sound from your loop and then tweaking its character, this really is a super-simple process.

Time To Play?

So, we’ve our isolated hit, but what next? For this example application at least, this is perhaps where the ‘first iteration’ of the Sampler Track feature becomes a little more obvious. I’ll focus on what’s possible within Cubase itself (HALion owners may have more options) and, in particular, how you might approach the most common situation, where you wish to extract several different individual drum sounds (eg. kick, snare, hi-hat, tom and crash) from a loop in order to build a basic ‘kit’ that can then be triggered via MIDI. Let’s look at the two most obvious possibilities, both of which work but have an element of clunkiness.

Method 1: Going Groovy

The Sampler Control Toolbar features a very interesting button called ‘Transfer to New Instrument’. Having defined your drum hit, click this to see options to export your selected sample (with all its settings) to a different virtual instrument plug-in. If you select Groove Agent (full version or SE) then, hey presto, a new instrument track is created for you, and your carefully crafted drum hit is inserted on an empty drum pad ready to play.

The Transfer to Groove Agent option creates a new instrument track and exports your sample configuration to a new instance of Groove Agent.

Great as this is for your first drum hit, though, if you go back to the Sampler Control section to define a second drum hit, when you repeat the Transfer to New Instrument process it’s placed in a second instance of Groove Agent. Currently, there’s no option to ‘add to existing instrument’ — one for the future, perhaps. That’s a bit of a shame from a workflow perspective, but a simple workaround is to drag and drop this second sample from the pad in your second Groove Agent instance onto an empty pad in your first, and then delete the superfluous Groove Agent Instrument Track. Yes, this a bit clunky, but it works and, importantly, it takes only a few seconds. Repeat as many times as required and you’ll soon have a Groove Agent ‘kit’ ready to play. While Groove Agent already includes similar sample editing features for creating individual hits from within a drum loop, I find the Sampler Control environment a much more inviting place to do this sort of quick-and-simple sample editing.

Method 2: Multi-track Drums

Another option is to create multiple Sampler Tracks (one for each drum hit/sound that’s required) based on different edits from the same original drum loop. This is easy to do but, again, a little clunky. First, note that you have to select all of the Sampler Tracks, and record-enable them, when you want to ‘play’ this kit from a single MIDI keyboard. Second, you’ll need to constrain the MIDI note mapping for each of your Sample Tracks so that each sound only responds to a unique range of MIDI pitches. This is easy to do via the keyboard display in the Sampler Control section for each track, though, and it does mean you can actually define each drum sound to be triggered by two or three keys. (An upside is that using multiple keys per sound can make playing rolls or fast hi-hat patterns much easier!)

Groove Agent offers similar options to Sampler Control but, to me at least, the latter offers an easier working environment for basic sample editing.

Depending on how you set up the pitch behaviour (for example, if you don’t engage the Fix option, which causes all keys to trigger the sample at the same pitch), the fairly subtle shifts in pitch between adjacent notes can also be used to add useful variation to your performance. You end up with multiple Sampler Tracks to manage, of course, and, when you record your MIDI performances, you’ll create multiple (identical) MIDI parts. But if that bothers you, just hide all these tracks within a Folder Track.

Could Do Better?

There are a couple more general Sample Track ‘gotchas’ it’s worth being aware of. First, if you drag a new sample to an existing Sampler Control zone, the default behaviour is for it simply to replace the existing sample, so any existing (careful) editing will be lost — and there doesn’t appear to be an ‘are you sure?’ warning.

Second, note that any samples you drag and drop from outside the current project are not automatically added to your Project folder. Played on the same host system, these samples will be recalled when you reload your project but, if you want to move the project to another system, you will need to ensure you take these samples with you. The easiest way to do this is to execute the Media/Prepare Archive function as this will gather all the files referenced by the project and ensure they are placed in the project folder.

So, while there’s clearly scope for further development, the Sampler Track is already a very promising new feature and Steinberg deserve a big pat on the back for it — it’s a hugely creative feature that’s easy to get your head around, and allows you to work fast.

Published April 2017