Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Monday, February 16, 2026
Cubase 14: Keeping Ambience Effects Under Control
Automated effects ducking can give your vocals a little extra clarity within the mix.
Ducking your reverbs and delays can bring greater clarity to your vocals.
Ambience effects, such as reverb and delay, are an essential part of vocal production in many genres. But slapping on these effects indiscriminately also risks compromising vocal clarity, and even the whole mix: long effect tails can mask or otherwise clash with different sounds, while if you keep the tails too short, then they might not create the sense of space and dimension you’re looking for. In this month’s workshop I’ll explore some ways to unpick this conundrum.
Options
In a DAW like Cubase, one way to tackle the issue is to set your effects up on FX Tracks rather than as inserts, and create an automation envelope for the send levels from the vocal track. Use a lower send level in the busier sections of a vocal to keep things sounding cleaner, but allowing more of the effect to be heard between well‑spaced words or phrases. Alternatively, you can use automation of the level of the FX Track — similar, but this time, we’re controlling the ‘return’ from the reverb or delay, not just what’s sent into it. Either tactic can work well and they both give you very precise control, but it can also be a fiddly and incredibly time‑consuming approach.
The classic alternative is to use ‘ducking’, whereby a gate or compressor reacts to the vocal to pull the effect’s output level down automatically. Some newer reverb and delay plug‑ins — including the reverb and delay modules in Cubase Pro/Artist’s VocalChain plug‑in — have this option built in. Another, perhaps less obvious alternative for Cubase Pro users is to use the new Envelope Follower Modulator: you can set this up to control the send level to the FX Track. If you want to try this, be sure to dial in a negative Modulation Depth, so that the send level is lowered when the vocal signal increases!
I want to be inclusive here, though, so I’m going to take you through an approach that any user can employ, from Cubase Elements upwards, and with any reverb or delay plug‑in. We’ll start by setting up a conventional ducked effect, before refining it to give us finer control over the result.
Line Up Your Ducks
The main screenshot shows the key elements of of our basic ducking configuration. You can hear this in action in the audio examples on the SOS website at: https://sosm.ag/cubase-1025.
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Friday, February 13, 2026
Cubase 14: Ambient Guitar Sound Design
By John Walden
Add a little Shimmer to your guitar for instant ambience.
Use Cubase’s Shimmer and Studio Delay to create atmospheric guitar tones!
In Cubase 14, Steinberg added two new creative effects plug‑ins to the Pro and Artist versions: Shimmer, which is an unconventional reverb effect with some delay built in; and Studio Delay, a quirky stereo delay with, you guessed it, a bit of reverb built in. Both have the potential to transform almost any source in some interesting ways, and in this workshop I’ll focus on one possible application: creating ambient guitar tones.
Target Practice
A quick web search for ‘ambient guitar music’ will throw up diverse musical possibilities, ranging from the pioneering work of Brian Eno to more contemporary albums from Tycho, From Somewhere Quiet and Adam Dodson. Ambient music compositions don’t have to be guitar led, of course, but when guitar is featured, creative effects are often important to the sound — and unconventional use of both reverb and delay are often a big part of those effects. For instance, you might manipulate the harmonic content of the reverb and/or delay, to create a pad‑like sound. Or the reverb or delay might be processed to give it a very analogue or lo‑fi nature, making the tonality very different from the main guitar sound itself.
This sound design process obviously encourages experimentation with effects, and Shimmer and Studio Delay are ideal candidates for this. So, starting with just a simple clean electric guitar tone, courtesy of Cubase’s stock VST Amp Rack plug‑in, just how ambient can we get? Can we transform a guitar into a pad? Can we create delays from our guitar source that bring a new sonic texture to the overall sound? Sure we can! I’ll explain how below, and if you want to hear the results for yourself, you’ll find audio examples on the SOS website: https://sosm.ag/cubase-1125.
Using just its amp and cab modules, the stock VST Amp Rack plug‑in is all you need to run your DI’ed guitar through before applying Shimmer or Studio Delay.
Visit My Pad
Shimmer isn’t the most versatile creative effects plug‑in that I’ve ever used, but it’s great for adding a ‘shimmering’ pad‑like effect to a guitar sound. It uses a combination of reverb and delay, while pitch‑shift and filtering in the effect’s feedback loop influence the tonality of the ‘shimmer’.
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Steinberg Cubase Pro 15
By Mark Wherry
What does the latest version of Cubase have in common with the 1982 science fiction movie Tron?
Since the release of Cubase 14 last November, Steinberg have issued three maintenance releases to the company’s “Advanced Music Production System”. And while this wouldn’t normally be notable — such updates have been common with previous versions — one of these releases contained far more than the usual handful of bug fixes. Version 14.0.20 might not sound like a striking step forward, but it brought substantive new features to what had already been an impressively ambitious upgrade. It also became the first official release to natively support ARM‑on‑Windows systems powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors, such as Microsoft’s latest Surface devices.
With so much momentum during the Cubase 14 era, an initial glance at the headlines for Cubase 15 might seem underwhelming by comparison; however, such an impression belies the work Steinberg have undertaken for this year’s upgrade. Whilst some of the new functionality inevitably builds on more recent additions to the application — particularly the Pattern Editor and modulators — it would be wrong to assume Steinberg’s developers have focused on these areas exclusively.
Hub‑A‑Dub‑Dub
Since the release of version 7 over a decade ago, Cubase’s Hub window has eagerly greeted users at launch, providing a starting point for creating new or opening existing projects. And while I can’t say I’m a fan of such windows, since the amount of utility they provide rarely warrants their gatekeeping nature, Steinberg have finally rethought this feature in Cubase 15. The Hub’s interface has been admirably overhauled, making it both more useful and more visually appealing.
A brief Guided Tour introduces the new Hub, reminiscent of a similar feature in Dorico. Although, unlike Dorico, the tour guide window jumps to each feature being described — instead of remaining in one place and highlighting the relevant feature — and conveys too little information to be truly helpful for Cubase neophytes. Existing users will find it a brief nuisance, and although it only appears once, it will resurface if the Preferences are deleted or disabled, such as when running Cubase in Safe Mode.
The new Hub’s centre area reorganises the recent projects and templates categories into sections, and additional sections can be included for custom locations via a new, dedicated Hub Settings window. This is a great way to provide quick access to Cubase projects belonging to different real‑world projects, and, although you can’t remove the Recent and Templates sections, it’s possible to toggle the visibility of these sections and any others you might add.
Cubase’s Hub window has been redesigned with some useful improvements, such as the ability to configure the centre area with sections based on custom folders.
Each section offers a ‘sort’ control to list projects by name or date in ascending or descending order. But the icing on the cake is a search filter to assist in finding projects across all sections in the centre area; the cherry would have been an option to automatically open and close sections to reveal matching projects without having to do this manually.
Like the Hub in Steinberg’s stage production application, VST Live, it’s now possible to change the current audio driver and set the main stereo output directly from the Hub. Although, being somewhat lazy, it’s perhaps a shame that — unlike Logic Pro’s equivalent Choose a Project window — you can’t specify a surround format for a new empty project in the Hub or activate Dolby Atmos, incorporating the behaviour of the Atmos Setup Assistant.
This is presumably because the Audio Connections window can manage input and output configurations independently of projects, which persist after a project is closed. So, if the previously open project used anything other than a stereo configuration for its main output, Cubase will substitute the Hub’s stereo output menu for a button to open the Audio Connections window.
In addition to being able to set the audio driver from the Hub, Cubase 15 introduces a new Audio Settings window, consolidating the Audio System and Driver pages from the Studio Setup window into a single, dedicated panel. However, rather than serving as a replacement for these same settings in Studio Setup, the Audio Settings window duplicates this functionality, which seems like a missed opportunity to do something more radical.
Behaviour Patterns
Although the Pattern Editor debuted alongside Cubase 14’s Drum Track feature and was primarily intended for programming drum patterns, its underlying nature as a step sequencer — triggering notes on different lanes — meant it could just as easily be used with instruments beyond drum machines. After all, step sequencers have long been used to craft TB‑303‑inspired bass lines or homages to Kraftwerk. The only catch was that such patterns are typically monophonic, whereas the Pattern Editor was conceived as a polyphonic sequencer for programming drums.
To address this minor inconvenience, Cubase 15 introduces a new Melodic Mode, providing the Pattern Editor with a complementary set of tools making it more versatile for both monophonic and polyphonic pitch‑based sequencing.
The Pattern Editor’s new Melodic Mode makes it easy to program sequences monophonically.
Unlike Drum Mode — where lanes are derived from drum kit assignments and can be added or removed individually — Melodic Mode displays lanes for pitches within a defined range. All chromatic pitches within this range are shown on individual lanes by default, but you can also select a root note and scale so only pitches within that scale are shown. For example, setting the root note to D and the scale to Harmonic Minor displays lanes exclusively for pitches belonging to the D harmonic minor scale, which is — of course — the saddest of all keys.
These pitch constraints are particularly helpful when generating patterns automatically using Shapes or Randomisation. Shapes create rising and falling contours spread out over a number of steps, while Randomisation is carried over from Drum Mode and produces a sequence based on user‑defined conditions.
Once a pattern has been generated or created manually, Melodic Mode allows further refinement via the Variation and Density controls. Variation transforms the pattern based on a specified amount of complexity, whereas Density non‑destructively thins out the number of notes deployed. And, if a root note and scale have been set, changing the root note offers a quick and musical way to transpose the pattern.