Cubase 11: SuperVision Explained

By John Walden

SuperVision’s Loudness and Wavescope modules, with instances placed before and after the master bus processing chain (top‑right). The visual feedback about the changes in the loudness and waveform can help to inform your processing decisions.

Cubase 11’s new SuperVision plug‑in makes it easier for Pro and Artist users to trust their ears.

Gavin Herlihy’s ‘Why Your Ears Are Lying To You’ article in SOS May 2021 (http://sosm.ag/why_ears_lie) was a sobering reminder that you can’t always trust what your ears are telling you. This is why it’s helpful when recording, mixing and mastering audio to have good metering options to support your listening‑based decision making, and the Pro and Artist editions of Cubase 11 added a powerful new audio analysis and metering plug‑in: SuperVision. I can’t hope to cover its 18 different analysis modules in detail here, but by way of an introduction, I’ll consider how it might help with two common practical mixing tasks: setting your master bus processing and checking for lead vocal masking.

First, though, I need to go over some basics. SuperVision is an insert plug‑in, so you can use it to visualise your audio at any point in a signal chain. In addition, you can also use multiple instances in a project. By default, a new instance opens with a single Level module. However, the tool‑strip at the top includes a drop‑down menu to select from any of the 18 module types. The two top‑right buttons allow you to split the display of the selected module vertically or horizontally, to add a further module, and you can repeat this process to display up to nine modules in a single instance. You can resize the overall plug‑in window and customised layouts of modules can be saved as presets for instant recall.

The ‘cog’ button opens a further options page for the currently selected module (I’ll discuss some examples below), and other useful buttons in this tool strip allow you to pause, hold and reset the values in the current module. Holding Alt/Option while clicking on the Pause or Reset buttons applies the action to all modules in the plug‑in. Usefully, you also have the option of resetting a module’s display each time playback commences.

Master Bus Processing

While not everybody is a fan of mix‑bus processing, it’s common practice either to mix into a processing signal chain on your master bus or to add some master‑bus processing in the final stages of a mix; EQ, dynamics processing and saturation are all commonly applied. Precisely how much of this processing (all, some or none) you actually ‘print’ to your final mix is a broader question, but if you’re going to export your mix with the processing in place, it’s helpful to have as much information as possible about the changes that result from this processing. A number of SuperVision’s modules can help here, but I’ll focus on a combination of two: Loudness and Wavescope (shown above).

The Loudness module provides a pretty comprehensive numerical and visual summary of the loudness of an audio signal. The exact display can be customised in the Settings window and in the screenshot I’ve selected LUFS and the EBU +18dB display scale (I’ve left all other settings at their defaults). As well as a True Peak value, you get the three different standard time‑based averages of loudness: Momentary Max, Short‑Term and Integrated, measured over 100ms, three seconds, and the whole playback period, respectively. Typical targets for streaming services are ‑1.0dB for True Peak and ‑14 LUFS for Integrated loudness but, whatever loudness targets you’re aiming for, SuperVision lets you see if you are hitting them. The Range values and visual display show the dynamic range, with higher values indicating greater differences between the loudest and quietest sections of your audio. This can be a useful additional indicator of the impact of your dynamics processing.

The Wavescope module provides a real‑time waveform display for the audio signal. In the Settings, you can adjust the meter’s integration time (how long, in seconds, the ‘window’ is that you are seeing at any one time) and scale the display in various ways. This module does a pretty simple job but when combined with the Loudness module, and with identical instances of SuperVision placed both directly before your master bus processing and directly after, it can be really helpful in informing your processing decisions.

The first screenshot (above) shows an example. Top‑right in the MixConsole, you can see instances of SuperVision placed before and after my master bus processing chain. Comparing the two SuperVision instances, the numerical loudness data and visual waveform changes introduced by the processing are obvious. Such visual feedback is undoubtedly useful in terms of identifying any over‑ambitious loudness gains or potential destruction of transients. Of course, this approach isn’t just useful on your master bus; the feedback can be just as helpful on a drum or lead vocal bus.

Spectrum Curve and Multipanorama can provide visual assistance if you suspect other instruments are conflicting with the all‑important lead vocal.

Detecting Vocal Masking

Another two‑module combination, Spectrum Curve and Multipanorama, can provide visual assistance if you suspect other instruments are conflicting with the all‑important lead vocal. To make the visualisation easier, I’ve set up a stereo bus for my lead vocal that receives the vocal plus any of its send effects (reverb, delay, etc). In this mix, the main instruments ‘competing’ for frequency space with my vocal are some guitar and piano parts, and I have routed these to a further bus.

SuperVision’s side‑chain input option allows you to compare two audio sources in a number of the plug‑in’s modules.

The second screenshot shows how you might configure an instance of SuperVision on the vocal bus described above. In this case, I’ve activated the external side‑chain input, and specified the guitar/piano bus as its source. The upper panel shows the Spectrum Curve module, and in the right drop‑down menu you can choose what frequency curves are displayed. In this example, I’ve selected both the main channel (in this case, the vocal, shown in blue) and the side‑chain input (the guitar/piano bus, in white). Within the Settings panel for the Spectrum Curve module, I’ve activated the Masking option. With this engaged, SuperVision highlights (using blue vertical bars) the frequencies in the main signal that are most likely to be masked by the side‑chain signal — for my example, this is the 300‑600 Hz range, making this an obvious target for some modest EQ cuts on the guitar/piano bus, if I find that I need to give my vocal a little extra space in the mix.

The Spectrum Curve and Multipanorama modules can provide a useful indication of potential masking of your lead vocal by other elements in your mix. If you take advantage of the ability to resize the SuperVision plug‑in, the Multipanorama display can reveal a lot of detail.The lower panel shows the Multipanorama module. This X‑Y display maps the audio intensity of a signal across the stereo image (horizontal axis) and frequency range (vertical axis). You can flip the axis and change the colour of the display in the module’s Settings panel. At present, for this module, you can only visualise one audio signal at a time in the display. Still with the module selected, you can use the top‑right drop‑down menu to decide whether the display shows the main audio channel or the side‑chain input, so you can easily flip between the two signals. Not only can you see the frequency ranges where they might clash, but you can also see whether those potential clashes apply to their stereo placement. This might inform your panning decisions for the instruments or, if you are feeling particularly brave, help with any Mid‑Sides EQ you might like to apply to the instrument bus, perhaps making frequency space for your vocal just in the centre of the stereo image, while being able to leave the instrument’s EQ intact towards the sides.

Of course, it would be great if the Multipanorama module could display both the main and side‑chain signals at the same time and better still if they could be colour coded. Perhaps that’s something the boffins at Steinberg can add at some point. It’s also worth noting that this module is very useful for judging the impact of any multiband stereo image processing you might apply using Cubase 11’s new (for Pro and Artist) Imager plug‑in... but that’s a topic for another day. 

Published July 2021

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Cubase 11: Vocal Rebalancing With SpectraLayers One

 By John Walden

SpectraLayers One is a powerful vocal unmixing tool for Cubase 11 Pro and Artist users.

SpectraLayers One allows you to tweak vocals that are ‘baked into’ a stereo mix!

Have you ever wished, when you don’t have access to the original multitracks, that you could have the ability to ‘unmix’ the different elements within a stereo file to gain access to individual parts — particularly the lead vocals?

Until recently this was rather like attempting to unbake a cake to access the eggs and flour, but the latest generation of spectral‑editing software makes it more viable and one such app, SpectraLayers One (from here SL One), is bundled with Cubase 11 Pro and Artist. SL One may be a cut‑down version of the separately available SpectraLayers Pro 7, but it does boast one of its bigger sibling’s eye‑catching features: stem unmixing. It can only create two stems (vocals and ‘everything else’), but that’s just what you need if you want to do some post‑mix vocal tweaking! In this workshop, I’ll explain what you can do with it, and you’ll find some accompanying audio examples on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/cubase-0821). Alternatively, download the ZIP file of audio examples here:

 cubase-workshop-0821.zip

You’re The One

SL One can run as a standalone app or as an Audio Extension on a Cubase audio clip within. The first screen shows the letter, which allows you to combine SL One processing with further processing and effects in Cubase. Once the Extension is applied, SP One and its various tools appear in Cubase’s Lower Zone.

The unmixing process requires almost no user intervention and is very fast!For our purposes, we require the Layer/Unmix Vocals option and, despite the under‑the‑hood complexity, it couldn’t be simpler to use: the only user‑defined control is the Sensitivity slider setting. The default ‘zero’ setting has generally provided the best results for me, but I’ve included an audio example (link above) to demonstrate the differences. Essentially, positive Sensitivity values put more audio into the vocal stem but may include more fragments of other mix elements too, while negative Sensitivity settings are less likely to place other instruments in the vocal stem but can leave more vocal trace elements in the ‘everything else’ stem. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, either could be useful.

Once the processing is complete, it can take a minute depending on the length of the audio clip. The two stems appear in SL One’s right‑hand panel, with mute and solo buttons that allow easy auditioning of the results. This unmixing process is non‑destructive: if you play back both stems together without further processing, they’ll sum to deliver the original mix. Auditioned in isolation, the vocal stem will inevitably show some artefacts (unless you started with a particularly sparse mix, with few other sounds overlapping the vocal). These artefacts may be non‑vocal elements (eg. traces of drums) or ‘missing’ vocal information that remains in the ‘everything else’ stem. You can hear elements of both types of artefact in the accompanying audio examples.

Whether you consider the vocal separation successful will depend on just what you hope to achieve. But given that vocal extraction/isolation is often a last resort, because the original mix project is unavailable, ‘usable’ can almost always be considered a positive outcome — so, are these sorts of results usable?

Balancing Act

Using these two unmixed stems to modify the level of the vocal relative to the instrumental backing is likely to be the easiest trick to pull off. For example, if we wished to raise the vocal level by a dB or three, we can do this by adjusting the gain of the vocal stem. While that will also adjust the level of any artefacts in the vocal stem, they are often difficult to detect in the context of the ‘reassembled’ mix.

Once separated, the stems created can be dragged and dropped to the Cubase project window for further processing or editing.

When used in stand‑alone mode, SL One includes gain sliders for the two stems and these are not available when using the ARA2 plug‑in in Cubase. Instead, you can drag/drop each stem to a new Audio Track in your Cubase project. Not only does this allow you to rebalance them, but you can then apply further editing, audio processing, or automation to the individual stems, to improve the blend of your ‘rebalance’.

In my second audio example, gain changes ranging from ‑3 to +6 dB are applied to the vocal stem. Your mileage may vary, but to my ears all these rebalanced versions seem pretty effective and transparent. Rebalancing isn’t all that can be done though; as a final stage in this audio example, I’ve added a fresh dollop of both reverb and delay, just to show that more creative changes are also possible (so feel free to experiment!).

A second potential application of SL One’s unmixing facility is to silence the vocalist, to create a backing track. Such a vocal‑free backing track might be used, for example, for personal practice for a vocalist, as a karaoke track, or to generate an underscore music cue for film/TV use where the vocals might impinge upon dialogue. I’ll leave you to navigate any copyright implications, but as the third audio example demonstrates, SL One can take a good stab at this with minimum effort on the part of the user.

As the isolated vocal stem has revealed, the separation process is not perfect but, as a means of recusing an instrumental version from a full mix, the default results may well be acceptable in some contexts and a little additional editing can easily improve things further.

Ready (Re)Mix?

The Holy Grail of this unmixing process would be a perfectly isolated vocal track but unless your starting point is a very sparse mix, that’s an incredibly ‘big ask’. Yet, if your isolated vocal stem is intended for use in a remix or mashup project, in which it will be layered with a suitably busy backing track, then might SL One be up to the task?

The fourth example explores just how realistic this proposition might be...

SpectraLayers Pro can generate up to five stems from a stereo mix and, when used in standalone mode, both One and Pro offer gain controls for easy rebalancing of your stems.

I’ve taken the default unmixed vocal stem from our earlier short ‘verse’ audio mix (artefacts included) and built a new backing track for this extracted vocal. In the audio example, I’ve gradually added layers of instrumentation with each pass through the performance. Layered with a single instrument such as a strummed guitar or solo piano, the artefacts are audible — this might still be useful as a scratch vocal to build a ‘vocal + guitar’ or ‘vocal + piano’ remix project, but it’s unlikely to cut the mustard in a release context without considerably more detailed editing work or a new vocal recording. Note, though, that many of the artefacts in the vocal stem appear to be drum related and once new drums and bass are added to a remix, the majority of them are masked.

At this point, it’s not such a stretch to think that even some modest spectral editing on the vocal stem might generate a very usable vocal part, and as more layers are added to the instrumental bed (the final few passes in the audio example include multiple guitars and a synth) the artefacts become even less obvious. So if your remix has a prominent drum beat and doesn’t leave the extracted vocal too exposed, SL One’s vocal unmixing may well prove very usable.

Cubase 11’s SL One can make something that used to be difficult into something remarkably easy.

Density Matters

As noted earlier, the success of this vocal unmixing process is very much dependent on the original mix. The one I’ve used for the audio examples is what I’d call moderately dense, and SL One has done a commendable job. But what if your source mix is busier?

As a final audio example, I’ve used an alternative version of my short ‘verse’ clip that contained additional instruments (an extra guitar, a keyboard part and some harmony vocals). It’s no surprise that the resulting vocal stem has more artefacts. But, even if it would be more difficult to use the isolated vocal stem in a remix context, the vocal rebalancing and backing track creation discussed above remain distinctly possible.

SL One doesn’t handle the obvious legal obligations of publishing works using stems extracted from commercial recordings, but it does make the technical side of the ‘unmixing’ process remarkably easy and efficient. And, of course, it’s a freebie for Cubase 11 Pro and Artist users. Whether it’s vocal rebalancing, backing track creation or, with a bit of luck, vocal isolation, Cubase 11’s SL One can make something that used to be difficult into something remarkably easy.

Published August 2021

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Cubase Pro: Take Control Of Your Stereo Image

By John Walden

Imager: up to four bands of stereo width control for Pro and Artist users.

We show you how to take full control of your stereo image with Cubase’s powerful bundled plug‑in suite..

Cubase has long included stock plug‑ins for manipulating the stereo image and they all have a role to play, as I’ll explain, but the recently added Imager is particularly interesting. It allows you to process up to four different frequency bands and, as is so often the case with multiband processors, it’s a powerful tool that’s capable of great results in the right context — but it’s also fairly easy to screw things up if you don’t know what you’re doing! In this article, I’ll work through a few examples that show you what Imager has to offer, while noting some of the potential pitfalls. You’ll find some audio files to accompany each example on the SOS website at https://sosm.ag/cubase-1021.

Perhaps Imager’s most obvious application is as a mastering‑style processor, whether used on the stereo mix bus as you put the final touches to a mix, or to tweak a bounced stereo file. The first screenshot shows Imager as inserted in my main stereo bus processing chain, with a typical configuration for this kind of application that serves as a good starting point for exploring Imager’s control set.

I’ve used all four of the available bands here, but three could easily be enough in this context; you can specify the number of bands at the top‑left of the GUI. You can adjust the frequency of the filter crossovers between bands and in this case I’ve gone for 200Hz, 1kHz and 5kHz, to create low, low‑mids, high‑mids and high bands. Each active band has three controls. Leaving the Output and Pan controls untouched for now, I’ve adjusted only the Width in each band. As the control’s name suggests, it manipulates the stereo width of its band, with a value of 100 percent leaving the stereo image unchanged and higher/lower values making the image wider or narrower, respectively.

Moving from low to high, I’ve chosen values of 20, 125, 150 and 170 percent. This keeps kick and bass instruments firmly focused in the centre (generally a good thing) and gradually adds greater Width through the low‑mids, high‑mids and highs. There are no hard and fast rules here; you should judge things by ear. But I’m generally cautious about going beyond 150 percent in any band, as stereo enhancement can potentially produce unwanted side‑effects when the mix is heard on a mono playback system. Having checked the mono playback compatibility (as I describe below), I felt able to push the width a little harder than usual in this case, for a little extra high‑end ‘pop’.

SuperVision’s Multipanorama module before (left) and after (right) Imager’s processing of my worked example.

The screenshot above shows two instances of SuperVision’s Multipanorama module, one before and one after Imager, and these make the narrower lows and wider upper‑mids and highs easily visible. Check out the accompanying audio example — to my ears, the result is a subtle but rather pleasing widening of the stereo image, while the low end is kept nicely focused.

 cubase-pro-stereo-image-audio-1021.zip

On The Buses

Imager doesn’t have to be used on a full mix; it can be just as useful on individual instruments or subgroups. There are plenty of possibilities, but a few simple suggestions should illustrate the potential.

If you need to give your lead vocal a little more space in the centre of the stereo image, try inserting Imager on your backing vocal group channel (bus) and using it to push the backing vocals a little further towards the sides of the stereo image. Unlike with simple panning or single‑band wideners, Imager’s multiband options give you control over how you spread the main frequencies of the backing vocals.

When you want to help a specific instrument peep out of the mix a little more clearly, Imager can also be a good alternative to a level change. By applying some subtle widening to a specific frequency band or two, you can place the sound more obviously at the edges of the stereo field, which will make it more noticeable to the listener.

For those who are very particular about their reverb treatments, another option is to insert Imager on your reverb’s FX Track. A three‑band approach that narrows the lows (so you don’t get low‑end reverb clogging your stereo image), gently widens the mids, and spreads the highs out wide can be fun to experiment with.

Finally, whether used on an instrument bus or your master bus, automating Imager can be useful in an ‘arrangement/production’ context. Whether by toggling Imager on/off or using automation to adjust key parameters, you can use it to apply a touch of widening to chorus sections, to give them an extra sonic lift. You could even try applying gradually more widening (while ensuring to check for mono compatibility) as the song progresses, to make each chorus feel slightly ‘bigger’ than the last.

Stereo Fakery

While Imager provides plenty of options to adjust the stereo image of a stereo source, it’s not designed to fake a stereo sound from a mono source. Thankfully, the MonoToStereo plug‑in (in Cubase Pro, Artist and Elements) has this task covered, and the audio files include an example based on a mono electric piano recording. As shown in the third screenshot’s second MultiPanorama, GUI MonoToStereo appears to achieve this fakery by applying the well‑established EQ‑based trick of panning narrow EQ ranges of the mono recording to opposite sides to the stereo image.

Faking stereo from a mono piano recording. Moving from left to right, the three Multipanorama displays show (a) the original mono signal, (b) the result of the MonoToStereo plug‑in and (c) combining both MonoToStereo and Imager.

You can use Imager for a particular type of mono‑to‑stereo fakery, though, and mono piano recordings are an obvious candidate. Stereo piano recordings usually convey the natural left/right balance of low to high notes. In a mono recording, you could simulate this effect to some extent by using the Pan controls for each Imager frequency band, panning lower frequencies (notes) to one side of the stereo image and higher frequencies to the opposite side, and use the Output controls to adjust the tonal balance. It’s difficult to get a truly convincing result on an exposed part, but combining MonoToStereo and Imager does have potential if you want to fake both stereo and the left/right note pattern from a mono piano recording that will be used in a busier mix.

Control Room allows you to send the mono output to just one of your monitors...

Mono Matters

Checking the mono compatibility of a stereo mix is always informative, but it becomes absolutely essential if you’re using stereo image processing, and widening in particular. Cubase’s Control Room allows you to switch between stereo and mono playback at the click of a button, but this feature is only available to Pro users. Artist and Elements users, then, need an alternative approach, and Stereo Enhancer allows just that.

With StereoEnhancer inserted on your master bus and the Mono Compatibility Check button engaged, the plug‑in’s bypass button lets you quickly switch between stereo and mono playback.This plug‑in includes a Mono Compatibility Check button (in the centre of the UI). If you insert an instance of this on your master bus, making sure it’s placed post any stereo image processing, and leave this button switched on (it lights up blue when engaged) you can use Stereo Enhancer’s main bypass button to switch between normal stereo monitoring (plug‑in bypassed) or mono compatibility monitoring (plug‑in engaged). Just remember to have it bypassed when bouncing your mix down to a stereo file!

It’s also worth pointing out that this simple workaround generates a phantom mono signal; you hear the same audio from both speakers, resulting in a ‘phantom’ signal that appears to sit in the centre of the stereo field. This is not quite the same as listening on a single mono speaker, where all sound emanates from the same place — and Control Room allows you to send the mono output to just one of your monitors. Workarounds are possible without Control Room, but I’ll leave that discusion for another time; until then, feel good that phantom mono is better than no mono compatibility check at all!

Finally, a potential drawback of Imager is that it can add some latency. This is not usually such an issue while mixing, but it can easily be distracting in a real‑time recording context if monitoring through Cubase. Thankfully, then, Steinberg have included a LIVE button (top‑centre of Imager’s UI), which engages a zero‑latency mode. It’s at the cost of some processing quality, but the results are certainly good enough if you suddenly find yourself needing to lay down a further live track or two in the middle of your mixing process. 

Published October 2021

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