Keystage: Video Manual - Chapter 1 - Setup

Cubase 15: Hyping Your Drum Bus With UltraShaper

 By John Walden

Bring the hype: UltraShaper is a one‑stop option to take your drums from polite to powerful.

Looking to hype up your drum sound? Cubase’s new UltraShaper plug‑in might be just what you need!

In SOS January 2026, I explored dynamics processing for acoustic drums at a number of different points in the signal chain (read it here). My aim then was to retain a natural sound while controlling the drum dynamics. But what if you want a more aggressive or ‘hyped’ sound coming from your drum bus? Well, Cubase’s stock plug‑in collection has long had plenty of options for more assertive processing, including some you can use in combination. Cubase Pro 15, though, introduced a new option that’s well worth exploring: UltraShaper. Let’s find out just how much drum hype can you extract from this powerful new plug‑in.

Sum Of The Parts

UltraShaper is not just about hyping drums: the supplied presets provide plenty of starting points for both corrective and creative use with a wide range of sound sources.

Before we unleash UltraShaper on our drum bus, I’ll share two quick observations. First, don’t assume that UltraShaper is simply a reworking of some of Cubase’s existing stock plug‑ins. I don’t think that’s the case and, in any case, UltraShaper is rather more than the sum of its parts. Second, note that UltraShaper has plenty of scope to do ‘subtle’, and it isn’t just for drums; it can do a perfectly good turn on vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, bass or synths, and has potential applications for both individual tracks and group busses, or even your stereo mix bus. Steinberg really have brought us something of a dynamics Swiss Army knife!

Park It On The Bus

For my first exploration, I simply inserted UltraShaper on my drum bus. Whether you’re dealing with acoustic drums or electronic drums (I’ve used both in the Audio Examples that accompany this workshop on the SOS website: https://sosm.ag/cubase-0526), you can start pretty easily by dialling in UltraShaper’s more conventional compressor controls: threshold, ratio, attack and release. These will do exactly what you might expect for any kind of conventional compression task.

Even used for such standard tasks, UltraShaper has a couple of nice touches up its sleeve. First, it has a real‑time waveform and gain‑reduction display that provides excellent visual feedback as you adjust the controls. Optionally, you can also show the compression curve beside this.

Perhaps more significant, though, is the Auto Gain control, which is pretty clever. While it’s not quite a ‘set and forget’ option (it interacts with some of the other control options), it’s pretty easy to set it so that when you bypass UltraShaper, the processed and unprocessed sounds can be closely level matched, even as you make adjustments elsewhere. This makes it far easier to judge exactly what your threshold and ratio settings are doing to the character of the audio, and reduces the risk of significant volume differences clouding your processing...

Published May 2026

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Cubase 15: The Pattern Sequencer

By John Walden

The Pattern Editor now has a dedicated Melodic mode with both Mono and Poly step‑sequencing options and a Chord Lane.

Cubase’s new synth sounds and Pattern Sequencer features are great on their own — but together they’re even better!

Steinberg introduced the Pattern Editor for Pro and Artist users in Cubase 14. While obviously pairing well with the (also new in 14) Drum Machine track/instrument type, as we explored in the SOS May 2025 workshop, you could also use Pattern Editor for melodic applications. But in Cubase 15, Steinberg took the Pattern Editor concept further. It now offers two distinct modes: Drum and Melodic.

The latter is new, and adds some very useful additional options to those I explored in the May 2025 article. So, let’s get into ‘writing mode’ and explore it, along with the new HALion/HALion Sonic Writing Room Synths expansion (also available in Artist and Pro).

To do that, I’ll target some analogue synth‑style sequenced bass, chord and melody ideas. And to help give you an idea of what I’m writing about, I’ve put an audio example on the SOS website (http://sosm.ag/cubase-0626).

Something Old, Something New

If you select the Pattern Event option when creating a new virtual instrument track, the Lower Zone automatically opens and offers a choice between the Drum or Melodic mode within the Pattern Editor. Both of these modes share many of the core features described for the earlier iteration of the Pattern Editor, providing a lane‑based sequencer grid with customisable step numbers (up to 128 steps), per‑lane and per‑step sequencing of parameters such as velocity, velocity variance and playback probability, and the option to add additional controller lanes related to parameters within the selected virtual instrument.

As I described in the SOS May 2025 workshop, patterns can be created manually on the grid in the usual way, but you also get a selection of tools for automatically populating the whole pattern, or a lane within the pattern — either in a completely controlled way, or harnessing a user‑specified degree of randomisation. It’s cool, creative, and can easily be used to nudge a new idea into being. All this core functionality remains but, as in the main screenshot, Cubase 15’s new Melodic mode has additional elements that directly support this use case; I’ll focus on those below.

Melody Maker

When you opt for Melodic mode, many familiar elements appear in the Lower Zone’s Pattern Editor, but there are some new and revised options to suit the melodic context. A similar grid‑based pattern editing panel dominates the display, but it’s now a conventional pitch‑based grid for your melodic instrument, rather than lanes corresponding to individual drums. You can adjust the step count and resolution as before, but when creating notes these can span multiple... 

Published June 2026

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Cubase Pro: Folder Tracks and Group Channels in v15.0.20

 By John Walden

The new combined Folder/Group tracks/channels now appear within the MixConsole and can be opened (as the Bass Folder is here) or closed, providing genuinely useful additional channel visibility options as track/channel counts rise.

Could the new Folder Track features in Cubase help you better organise your projects?

Once a Cubase project’s track count starts to grow, two of its track types can be really helpful in keeping things organised, efficient and under control: Folder Tracks and Group Channels (or, as labelled in the Operation Manual PDF, ‘Group Channel Tracks’!). The former are essentially just containers that let you organise tracks in the Project window, and quickly control their visibility. The latter provide all the features of a standard audio‑carrying channel (inserts, sends, EQ, the Channel Strip etc) but also help you organise the audio routing in more complex projects, allowing Cubase’s MixConsole to emulate the audio subgroup concept of a traditional hardware mixer. Putting both to full use makes managing more complex projects a whole lot easier, but both have been around for quite some time now...

Groups Meet Folders, Folders Meet Groups

In the recent Cubase 15.0.20 update of Cubase Pro, Artist and Elements, though, Steinberg sprang a bit of a surprise: it’s now possible to merge the functionality of Folders and Groups into what you might think of as a ‘super‑Folder’. It’s optional, so the tried and trusted options are still available, but now, when adding a Folder Track to your project (as shown in the screenshots), you have the option to enable Group Track‑like capabilities for any Folder you create. You can also add this capability to existing Folders, of course.

If you have an old‑school Folder within your project, the Enable Group Channel option lets you easily convert it to the new format.

This combined Folder/Group Track option is a feature some users have been requesting for years, probably because a number of other DAWs already facilitate such an approach, so it’s great to see it in Cubase. So, with ‘Folders As Groups’ now official A Thing, let’s consider what it can do for your project management and workflow — and whether there are any catches.

Convenience (In) Store

The new Folders can be opened/closed as before within the Project window’s Track List but, as shown within the Inspector panel, they now also have full audio capabilities.

As soon as your track count requires vertical scrolling of the Project window’s Track List, the convenience of using Folders is abundantly apparent. Whether the new Folder type or the old ones, probably the most obvious strategy is to add one for each subset of your tracks (drums, bass, guitars, keys, vocals...).

With the appropriate tracks placed in each of your (sensibly named) Folders, you can use them in the Project window for the Folder’s long‑standing primary...

Published July 2026

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