Cubase 13: The VST Plug‑in Manager

By John Walden

The VST Plug‑in Manager, with its multi‑panel layout, lets you create custom collections of both VST Effects and VST Instruments to streamline your workflow within Cubase.

Organise your plug‑in folder with VST Plug‑in Manager.

With so many bundles, demos and tempting offers around, many of us probably have more plug‑ins than is really manageable when we go to choose one in the middle of a busy mixing session; it’s all too easy to get lost among the possibilities. Thankfully, though, Cubase makes it easy to get your plug‑in folder under control, thanks to its VST Plug‑in Manager. It offers plenty of options to customise which plug‑ins are visible and how they’re arranged when you open a plug‑in selection panel, and a little time spent here can repay itself many times over when your projects are in full swing.

Call The Manager

When you first launch it, Cubase scans your computer and creates two default plug‑in lists (Steinberg call these lists ‘collections’): one for VST Effects and another for VST Instruments. It also does a quick scan every time it is subsequently launched, so it can detect any new plug‑ins you’ve installed. By default, these collections are what’s shown to you whenever you go to select a plug‑in effect or instrument.

The Studio menu (or a key command) access the VST Plug‑in Manager, in which you can view the contents of these two default collections. In its left window, you can view three different categories of plug‑in that, between them, should include all of the plug‑ins that are installed. These are: VST Effects, VST Instruments and the Blocklist. The latter, which may well be empty, is simply a list of plug‑ins that Cubase has scanned, but thinks might have compatibility issues — if you can’t find one you’ve installed it’s worth checking here; you can force a plug‑in off the Blocklist if you are feeling brave, but I’d probably test that in a fresh project just in case! If you select an individual plug‑in in any of these three panels, the bottom‑left panel shows further useful information about it, including where on your machine it is installed.

The panel on the right shows the plug‑ins in the current ‘collection’, depending upon which tab (VST Effects or VST Instruments) is selected in the left‑side panel. These will, at first, be the Default collections (this name appears in the tab at the top of the panel). But you can move, remove, or add plug‑ins to the current collection within this panel, including reordering (almost) any folder structure. For the default collections, via the top‑right drop‑down menu, you can choose to show the plug‑ins organised by Category (eg. EQ, Dynamics etc.) or Vendor; this choice is reflected in how the plug‑ins are shown when you’re making selections in your Cubase project.

You can compile a ‘favourites’ list — a compact selection of your current ‘go‑to’ plug‑ins that make it easy to find the right effect or instrument.

List Of Lists

The VST Plug‑in Manger also lets you create your own custom collections, and there are a number of reasons why these might prove advantageous compared with the catch‑all ‘default’ list. For example, you can compile a ‘favourites’ list — a compact selection of your current go‑to plug‑ins that make it easy to find the right effect or instrument — or to hide expired demos, duplicate versions of plug‑ins or any plug‑ins installed within a bundle to which you don’t actually have a licence.

The drop‑down menu located top right lets you create new plug‑in collections and instantly switch between any of the existing collections.

Alternatively, it could be useful to create collections with only the plug‑ins available to any collaborators you work with — a collection containing only Cubase Elements’ stock plug‑ins, for example, the more comprehensive Cubase Pro options, or a specific third‑party developer’s bundle. Another possibility is more streamlined collections designed for specific tasks, such as composing, tracking, mixing or mastering. In each case, you can customise what’s visible so that you don’t get bogged down with certain plug‑ins or plug‑in formats that you don’t currently use or need to see (for example, mono versions, VST2 versions or older trial plug‑ins).

Two points are worth emphasising. First, adding or removing a plug‑in from a particular collection doesn’t change its actual installation status on your computer, just its visibility in Cubase’s various plug‑in selection panels. Second, whether in the default collections or new custom collections, your VST Effects and VST Instruments form separate lists.

New From Old

Creating a new collection is easy. Select the VST Effects or VST Instruments tab in the VST Plug‑in Manager window, then simply choose one of the New Collection options from the drop‑down menu located top‑right. Any of the three options (Empty, Add All Plug‑ins or Copy Current Collection) can be used, but if you’re currently using the Default collection, the last one is probably the most sensible choice, as it may take less time to move or remove plug‑ins from an existing collection than to start from scratch. Collections can be named, edited or deleted, and allow you to create custom folder structures that can be populated with your chosen plug‑ins.

Let’s imagine we’re creating a ‘favourites’ VST effects collection. First, create a New Collection from the menu using the Copy Current Collection option. This will prompt us to give our collection a suitable title (you can change it later). Once done, the new collection will become the active collection; its name will appear at the top of the VST Plug‑in Manager’s right‑hand panel and the plug‑ins within it will be what we see if, for example, we try to add a plug‑in by clicking on a channel’s insert slot.

With its custom folder structure and just a few ‘go‑to’ plug‑ins within each category, a ‘favourites’ VST Effects plug‑in collection lets you quickly pick what you need and get on with your mix.By default, our new ‘favourites’ VST Effects collection will contain folders based on Vendor. I prefer to organise my go‑to plug‑in options by type, though, so a useful second step is simply to create a new folder (just click on the New Folder button located top right), name this folder ‘Vendors’, and drag and drop all the individual Vendor folders into this one. This folder will serve as a useful catch‑all category in any collection; while it hides them in a subfolder, if your current ‘favourite’ selections don’t offer you quite what you need for a specific task then you can still easily seek something out here.

At the top level of this folder structure, alongside the Vendors folder, you can now use the New Folder button as many times as required to create your own custom list of categories. For example, in my own VST Effects ‘favourites’ collection for mixing duties, I’ve got folders such as EQ, compression, limiting, saturation, amp modelling, pitch‑correction, creative, vocals, drums, bass, reverb, delay and tools.

Finally, you can find those favourite plug‑in choices and then drag and drop them into their appropriate place in the new custom folder structure. This drag and drop can be done in two ways. First, you can drag them from the catch‑all folder you created (the Vendors folder in our example) or, second, if you want a particular plug‑in to appear in multiple folders (for example, a channel strip plug‑in might appear in a dedicated channel strip folder and also within an EQ folder), then you can simply find it within the main left‑side panel and drag and drop it from there as many times as needed.

In my case, my selection of VST Effects favourites might only consist of three or four go‑to plug‑ins in each category. When subsequently adding plug‑ins to my project, this makes finding those go‑to choices in the plug‑in selection panels much faster. Creating a favourites collection for VST Instruments can be done in exactly the same fashion. And, of course, you can easily edit/update any collection as your tastes change or new plug‑ins replace older favourites.

Switch & Find

Custom plug‑in collections exist globally on your host system so, once created, they can be accessed in any Cubase project. A further neat element of these custom plug‑in collections is that you can quickly switch between them: just visit the VST Plug‑in Manager, select either the VST Effects or VST Instruments tab, drop down the menu from the top left and you can then choose the required collection. The change is applied instantly so, next time you go to select a new plug‑in instance within your current project, you will see your plug‑in choices as organised in the currently selected collection.

Finally, note that changing the collection doesn’t influence any plug‑ins already inserted into your project — a plug‑in that isn’t included in the current collection won’t suddenly disappear from your project; you simply won’t be able to ‘see’ it in the plug‑in selector panel to insert a new instance.

Pick & Mix

As soon as your plug‑in collection starts to expand beyond the stock Cubase offerings, the workflow advantages of creating custom collections via the VST Plug‑in Manager is an absolute no‑brainer. So don’t let your plug‑in addiction slow you down! 

Published December 2024

The New Korg Kronos: Video Manual Part 1- Intro and Navigation

Cubase 14: Clean Guitar Tones With VST Amp Rack

 By John Walden

VST Amp Rack can get you a nice clean(ish) Fender sound but, unfortunately, matching SRV’s playing style is entirely up to you!

Some software amp sims can struggle with clean guitar tones — is Cubase’s stock VST Amp Rack up to the challenge?

The plug‑in marketplace is awash with more guitar‑rig simulations than I care to count, but might you already have what you need in your DAW? Cubase’s stock VST Amp Rack (included in Cubase Pro, Artist and Elements) is not only easy to use, but also very capable. To demonstrate this, I thought it would be fun to try and create something inspired by a couple of classic clean (well, clean‑ish) guitar tones. So, with a few suitable audio examples to accompany us along the way (available on the SOS website: https://sosm.ag/cubase-0225), let’s get started.

Jimi Meets Stevie Meets John

Inspired by Jimi Hendrix (think ‘Little Wing’), and a source of inspiration for countless others not least John Mayer, it doesn’t get any more classic than the glassy cleans of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Lenny’. In a hardware world, the most obvious choice would be a Strat‑style guitar into a Fender amp — unless you have a superstar budget, in which case perhaps a Dumble amp. In practice, though, plenty of combinations can work, and the key element is finding the sweet spot for the amp’s input gain. This needs to be set just high enough that the dynamics of the playing can control: the sound is super‑clean when played softly, but becomes lightly overdriven when the playing is harder, as the valves start to generate more harmonics.

So, let’s assume you have a suitable guitar that’s equipped with single‑coil pickups. Can VST Amp Rack get us in the right ballpark? It certainly offers a number of Fender‑inspired amp models. The other obvious element of SRV’s ‘Lenny’ sound is a healthy dollop of a fairly expansive reverb (more ‘hall’ than ‘spring’?), and again the plug‑in ought to have us covered here.

The first screenshot (above) is a composite created from VST Amp Rack’s virtual amps, mics and post‑effects tabs, and shows the key settings I used to capture the essence of the overall sound. I picked the Tweed amp model and its associated cab, and to my ears it does the Fender clean sound very well, but it would also be well worth you experimenting with the Blackface or Deluxe models.

Note that your mileage may vary depending upon the output of the pickups on your guitar, just how hard you play, and your gain staging. At first, I found that I had to crank pretty much every control on the amp to get the Tweed model to start to overdrive when I played more forcefully! Of course, in the virtual world, you can easily fine‑tune the input gain of your DI signal: you can use your audio interface’s instrument preamp gain to drive the amp model harder, or to back things off a little. You could also look to the gain at different stages inside the plug‑in. For instance, you can put the Overdrive pedal into the Pre‑Effects section, set with a low gain, and then set the Level control so that it provides a ‘clean boost’ that drives the amp that little bit harder. However you achieve it, finding that ‘just about to go into overdrive’ tone is based on getting the right balance between the input signal level, the amp’s gain/volume controls, and how hard you play. So do be prepared to experiment.

The cabinet and microphone choices are perhaps secondary elements to the overall sound in this case. I simply went with a position nearer the speaker edge and backed away from the speaker slightly, as I felt this let the sound ‘breathe’ in a more natural way than when positioned right up against the cone centre.

Finally, to emulate the other key element of the tone, I added both delay and reverb effects in VST Amp Rack’s Post‑Effects section. The delay is not actually doing a great deal here: with a short delay time setting, low feedback and low mix settings, it’s just there to give the faintest of slapback‑style effects. In contrast, the reverb’s Type and Mix controls have been adjusted to add a very healthy dollop of ambience to the sound. The Type control lets you move between Studio, Plate, Room and Hall (which was my choice here), while the Mix control allows you blend in less/more of the reverb effect, as required. I constrained myself to creating the complete tone inside VST Amp Rack, but you could, of course, add the reverb as a send effect using one of Cubase’s various studio‑style reverb plug‑ins if you wanted further options.

The audio examples that accompany this workshop step through each of the stages involved in creating this tone, and explore how changing the input gain influences the clean/overdriven balance. Obviously, I’m no Steve Ray Vaughan, and the result is not identical to the iconic original, but it does capture the essential characteristics of the sound in a way that lets you explore that mood and playing style. Incidentally, for comparison, I also provided three more examples of the same tone that I recreated using well‑known third‑party virtual guitar rigs. They do all have their own character but, importantly, the version captured through VST Amp Rack is not shamed by the comparison. For a stock plug‑in, that’s really impressive.

On The Edge

For my second example, I chased a sound with the overall character of U2’s The Edge, as heard on their classic track ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’. This is also a clean(ish) tone that results from a Strat‑style guitar being plugged into a finely balanced (in terms of the input gain) tube amp. However, The Edge is all about sound design and, in this case, the ‘iconic’ element is delivered as much by his use of effects as it is the guitar/amp combination.

Getting close to The Edge with dual delays in the VST Amp Rack’s Post‑Effects section.

The second screenshot shows the settings I ended up with. At this time, The Edge was noted for his use of Vox amps, so I’ve picked the British Custom model (and matching speaker cabinet) in VST Amp Rack. Again, I’ve dialled in the gain and master volume controls so that the amp is pretty clean when the guitar is played more softly (for example, arpeggiated chords) but starts to break up when played more aggressively (strummed chords). There is perhaps more obvious contrast here between the ‘clean’ versus ‘overdriven’ elements of the sound, and maybe that’s a characteristic of the amp choice. Again, experimentation is required to find a sweet spot where the dynamics of the sound feel right with your guitar choice and playing style.

In the Pre‑Effects section, a Compressor has been added to provide a little additional ‘always on’ sustain to the sound, while an Overdrive pedal is available as an optional extra. The settings are designed just to add a little extra push to the overdriven element of the sound as and when required, rather than pushing things into full‑on distortion.

It’s in the Post‑Effects section that the magic happens, though. A Reverb has been included but this is set to add only a very modest amount of studio‑style reverb. The key element of the sound is achieved through the use of two delays, each with a different delay time. VST Amp Rack’s effects selection includes three different delay options, and in this case I combined the Tape Delay (which has a nice analogue‑style sound) and Delay (a bit more clinical) pedals in the Post‑Effects section.

In terms of the feedback and mix settings for both delays, I aimed for about three repeats before the signal fades away — the best way to set this by ear is simply to isolate each delay in turn as you tweak the controls. The fun part is then setting the delay times for each pedal using their respective Delay (time) controls. I used Beats mode (engage the red LED next to the Delay knob) so that the delay times sync to time divisions based on Cubase’s tempo. In this case, I set the Tape Delay to quarter‑note repeats and the Delay time to dotted eighth notes.

It’s a classic combination: whether you play an arpeggiated chord/note pattern, or a very simple rhythmic strummed part, the result sounds almost instantly Edge‑like. Incidentally, it would have been nice to have these delays panned left and right, but although VST Amp Rack does support dual amp signal chains (check out the Configuration page), the signal is summed again before reaching the Post‑Effects section! If that bothers you, you could always use delays outside of VST Amp Rack — Cubase has plenty to choose from. Finally, with plenty of ‘space’ added by these effects, I didn’t feel the need for additional ‘room’ from the microphone position, so I simply placed the virtual mic right against the cone edge.

VST Amp Rack stood its ground very well when compared with some popular third‑party amp emulations.

I’ve provided a similar set of audio examples that step through the development of the VST Amp Rack configuration. It’s a super‑cool sound, but it’s also one that requires you to play ‘with’ the effects, by which I mean that if you overplay the part then the dual delays can soon get a bit messy. Again, I found that VST Amp Rack stood its ground very well when compared with some popular third‑party amp emulations.

No Pain, No Gain

As these examples hopefully demonstrate, Cubase’s humble VST Amp Rack is perfectly capable of generating some very usable clean(ish) guitar tones, and it can do so with the minimum of fuss too. So, that’s the box ticked for clean tones. What of the higher gain options, I hear you ask? Well, that’s a topic I might well return to another day. Until then, may all your cleans be sparkly, courtesy of VST Amp Rack!

Published February 2025

The New Korg Kronos: Video Manual Part 6 - Global, Disk, Management

Cubase 14: The New Drum Machine

By John Walden

Each of Drum Machine’s sound engines offers something unique. Shown here is the Kick 4 engine, with its FM‑based oscillator section.

Cubase’s Drum Machine features some good kits, but also lets you create original sounds.

Cubase 14 brought some very interesting new additions to all three of its main editions but, for Pro and Artist users, the new Drum Machine instrument is a real treat. Supplied with its own dedicated track type, it comes packed with a broad range of ready‑to‑go preset kits. While these are all aimed very much at electronic music styles, the engine provides plenty of scope for designing your own sounds too, so in this workshop I’ll explore some of those possibilities by targeting some drum‑meets‑percussive sounds that would be suitable for a more cinematic context.

Show Some Backbone

Drum Machine can, in some ways, be thought of as a cross between Steinberg’s Groove Agent and Backbone instruments. It offers the multiple 4x4 grids of virtual drum pads that will be familiar to GA users, and on these pads you can lay individual drum sounds (or create playable pitched sounds). You also get a ‘lite’ version of the layered drum synthesis/ sample‑based sound‑design tools that lie at the heart of Backbone.

Each sound in Drum Machine can be built from up to four layers. The layers can be based on any combination of the instrument’s various synthesis engines or audio samples. The former are divided into categories based on drum type (Kicks, Snares, Hihats, Toms, Claps, Cymbals and Percussion), but each category also offers multiple options in each of the synthesis engines. For example, each of the four Kicks options has a distinct feature set, going from a simple oscillator combination through to a more versatile FM‑based oscillator. Samples can simply be dropped into a layer from the MediaBay or your OS file browser.

With additional filters, distortion and envelope controls at the layer level, plus both per‑pad effects and global delay and reverb with individual sends from each pad, Drum Machine manages to pack a lot of sound‑design potential into a compact, easily navigated GUI. Indeed, there are enough options here that there are multiple ways to approach any specific sound‑design target. With that in mind, please take the examples that follow for what they are: launch pads for your own experiments.

Boom & Drop

My first cinematic target was a sort of ‘boom with a pitch drop’ sound. I deliberately confined myself to a sound based on a single layer, and the first screenshot (above) shows the settings I arrived at. This is based upon the Kick 4 synth engine and, aside from adding a dollop of Drum Machine’s own reverb, I didn’t touch any of the pad‑level effects.

Kick 4 uses an FM oscillator and offers some interesting ways to change the character of the sound. The key settings to note are that I set the Tune control to ‑12 semitones, for a little extra low‑frequency energy, and both the FM Env and FM Dec were maxed out. While you don’t get full control over all the aspects of the amplitude and modulation envelopes (Backbone gives you more on this front), the latter extends the FM modulation envelope decay time so, when triggered and sustained, the tonal character of my ‘boom’ changes over time.

The other settings to note are the Filter LP Freq (set to 100Hz to focus the overall sound in the lower frequency range) and the relatively long Pitch Decay and Amp Env Decay settings. Alongside the also maxed‑out Pitch Env Depth, the first of these generates an extended pitch drop as the sound sustains. The second lets you influence the overall length of the sound once triggered.

The end result can be heard in the audio examples on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/cubase-0325): a nice beefy boom, with a little growl and pitch drop appearing after the initial hit, and which responds to MIDI velocity. It’s pretty effective even just using a single layer like this, but you could easily take things further by blending in additional layers to target both the initial transient/hit and the sustain portion of the sound.

Take My Pulse

My second target was a ‘pulse’ sound of the kind that might be used to underscore a tension/drama cue to give it a sense of pace. The second screenshot shows a composite of my Drum Machine settings. I used the very simple Kick 1 synth engine but hardly touched the controls, as the main sound‑shaping came thanks to the Filter and Equaliser modules in the PadFX section. A low‑pass filter was set to 150Hz (and given a little resonance), while both Low Cut (100Hz) and High Cut (1000Hz) were used to shape the low and high end, respectively. Add in just a touch of reverb and the sound – heartbeat‑like, but with a little punch to it — was good to go.

Creating my ‘pulse’ sound was as much about filtering and EQ as it was using the Kick 1 engine itself.

Again, you could add more layers to refine the sound but it could also be interesting to experiment with the combination of the oscillator’s Click settings and the filter cutoff. If you add some ‘click’ and don’t set the cutoff too low, you can create an interesting attack dimension to the overall sound that could be used to give it more emphasis. Alternatively, dial back the oscillator’s Tone control for a somewhat softer end result.

Tick Tock

My third target was a ‘ticker’ sound, something that’s often used as a high‑frequency complement to a pulse. Drum Machine offers a number of potential starting points for this, and I opted for the Closed HH 3 engine. In this case, I made two variants of the sound: a ‘tick’ (mapped to G1) and a ‘tock’ (slightly lower in pitch, and mapped to A1). You could impersonate a ticking clock with this combination, of course, but used in a more percussive role, the two variations simply provide some performance variety.

Set with very short Amp Env Decay, the Closed HH engines all provide plenty of options for ‘ticker’ style sound design.

The final screenshot shows the settings used for the ‘tick’ version. A little reverb aside, there are only three settings to note. First, the Amp Env Decay was made short, so the overall sound is shorter and less obviously cymbal‑like. For the ‘tick’, the Oscillator Tune control was slightly raised and the filter cutoff (which affects both the oscillator and the noise components of the sound) was set to about 11 o’clock. For the ‘tock’ version, the Tune control was adjusted to lower the pitch and the cutoff set to the eight o’clock position. Both these changes emphasised the lower‑frequency component of the sound. There are plenty of other options to explore. For example, if you wished to make the sound more assertive or aggressive, the Closed HH 3 engine’s Dist section or the more flexible PadFX Distortion module could be explored.

Stuck In Reverse

As mentioned earlier, Drum Machine lets you base a layer on an audio sample. I’ve not exploited that possibility in the examples above, but there are plenty of processing options, with low‑/high‑pass filtering, pitch adjustment, a full filter section and adjustment of the sample start/end points and the amplitude envelope. You can also reverse samples but, unlike Backbone, it’s not possible to control the amplitude envelope in a way that syncs to the project tempo — so, if you create a riser effect (for example), triggering it to reach its peak right on your target beat/bar position can be a bit hit‑and‑miss.

You can configure Modulators as automation sources for Drum Machine’s parameters and those can be sync’ed to the project tempo.

Eagle‑eyed Pro users may have also noted that, in its first iteration at least, Drum Machine doesn’t offer a pop‑open upper panel to access Cubase Pro 14’s new Modulators. Happily, you can configure Modulators as automation sources for Drum Machine’s parameters and those can be sync’ed to the project tempo, so you could pretty easily configure a pad’s Level control to gradually increase over the course of (for example) a bar using something like the Step Modulator.

Full Hit Kit

So, Drum Machine might have been designed primarily with electronic drum sounds in mind, but it also offers enough sound‑design features that it can be useful in other musical contexts, and if you’re currently using Elements, Drum Machine might be just another item to add to your ‘reasons to upgrade’ list. With eight banks of 16 pads in a single Drum Machine instance, you could easily build quite a comprehensive single preset containing different types and styles of cinematic hits and sound effects. Yes, there are dedicated third‑party virtual instruments that offer this kind of sound palette too, but rolling your own isn’t hard, it’s fun, and it means the sounds you use will be unique to you. 

Published March 2025

KORG Magnetune Magnetic Guitar Tuner

Cubase 14: Banish Boring Pads

By John Walden

Screen 1: Spicing up our static pad with the new Modulator options by targeting parameters both in Retrologue itself and insert effects on the Retrologue channel.

Want to awaken those sleepy synth pads? Then give Cubase 14’s Modulators a try!

If existing Cubase users needed a single excuse to upgrade to Pro 14, the new Modulator options might well provide it, especially if your music makes use of synth‑based elements. While lots of modern virtual synths have modulation options on board, those only let you modulate parameters inside that instrument. In contrast, Cubase’s new Modulators have track‑wide reach — they grant you access to any parameter on the selected track, whether in the instrument itself, or in an insert effect or a parameter of the channel hosting it.

The creative sound‑design options the Modulator system offers are almost limitless but let’s start an exploration of the potential with three (from many) different options the Modulator system provides for tackling a common task: banishing the ‘boring’ from a simple synth pad.

Inside & Out

There are contexts where a static pad sound, such as the Retrologue sound I’ve started with in the audio examples (available on the SOS website: https://sosm.ag/cubase-0425), can be just what the musical mood requires. But if you need to add some sonic movement, parameter modulation is a great place to start. Retrologue has its own well‑featured modulation system, of course, but in this example the preset I’ve created makes no use of that. Instead, I’ve opened the new Modulators panel in the Project window’s Lower Zone and, as shown in the first screenshot, used its modulation options instead.

The new Modulator system provides six different modulator types:

• LFO
• Envelope Follower
• Shaper
• Macro Knob
• Step Modulator
• ModScripter

Any combination of these can be added in the eight available slots on the selected track/channel. To start things fairly simply, this first example just uses two instances of the LFO Modulator type and one of the Shaper. The LFO instances are both sine waves, but are set to different Note (speed) values, and with some Shape and Phase changes applied to the second instance. These target parameters in the synth’s engine, including Filter Cutoff and Osc 3 Fine pitch (LFO 1), and Filter Resonance and Osc 2 Fine pitch (LFO 2). The system for adding targets to a Modulator is beautifully implemented — in the majority of cases, you simply hit the large ‘+’ button, then click the desired target parameter.

In this example, all the Modulation Depth values are set quite modestly, so the changes to both filter and pitch are subtle, while the Note settings mean the modulation also occurs quite slowly. Even with just these two Modulators applied, the pad benefits from some nice tonal and pitch movement.

Up to this point, these modulation moves could have been created in Retrologue’s own modulation matrix. The Shaper modulator, though, demonstrates one of the key advantages of the new Modulator system, because it’s targeting parameters outside Retrologue. In this case, the targets reside in two insert effects, Destroyer and Chopper, but they could have been any parameter in the channel that’s hosting Retrologue. What you have, therefore, is an integrated, channel‑level modulation system, where individual Modulators can provide synchronised modulation of both instrument and channel/effects parameters. This can make for some very cool sound‑design possibilities!

Having added my own tweaks to Shaper’s modulation curve, the modulation is targeting Destroyer’s Drive control (changing the amount of distortion added) and Chopper’s Mix control (changing the depth of the volume ‘pulse’ Chopper is adding). Whether in the plug‑ins themselves, or in any of the three Modulators, there are already plenty of adjustments you could make to finesse the result. But the sound has gone from a static pad to something with tonal, pitch, distortion and volume modulation and, for the purposes of our demonstration at least, is sonically more interesting.

The Modulator system allows one Modulator to modulate another, so there are plenty of creative possibilities.

Up The Intensity

The Modulator system allows one Modulator to modulate another, so there are plenty of creative possibilities, but there’s one caveat. In this first iteration, at least, you can only use a Modulator in one slot to modulate the controls in the main panel of another modulation slot; the parameters in the target parameter sub‑panels, including the Modulation Depth controls, cannot themselves be selected as modulation targets, and in terms of our ‘pad enhancer’ task, that’s a bit of shame...

For instance, in our previous example, we could have added an instance of the Macro Knob in an additional slot and used this to target the Modulation Depth controls in other modulators, thereby intensifying the resulting sonic changes. Unfortunately, that’s currently not possible. Thankfully, by combining the Macro Knob modulator with another highlight of the new Modulator system, the ModScripter modulator, we can create a workaround that achieves a similar type of end result.

Screen 2: Don’t let ModScripter’s JavaScript coding possibilities put you off exploring: there’s an interesting selection of presets provided, including the Intensity option shown here.

The second screenshot shows a possible configuration. ModScripter is perhaps the least intuitive (most intimidating?) of the modulation types. As the name suggests, it includes a scripting panel that lets you code your own modulation scripts using JavaScript. Thankfully, for those of us who are here to make music rather than code, ModScripter comes with some very useful presets, accessed via the drop‑down menu located top right. There are some intriguing options amongst this selection, including the rather wonderful Apply Randomness, but for this example I selected the Intensity preset.

ModScripter’s control set includes a Modulator Input control (the slider beneath the waveform display) and this particular preset script also provides an Intensity control. In our example, Slot 1’s Step Modulator is sending its step‑based modulation pattern to ModScripter’s Modulator Input; that slider is controlled by the Step Modulator. However, the Intensity control can then be used to modify the (yup!) intensity of that modulation signal, essentially scaling it from 0 to 100 percent. This modified (modulated) modulation pattern in ModScripter is then used to target both the Filter Cutoff and Filter Resonance, but could potentially control any other parameters on the Retrologue channel.

Finally, in Slot 3, an instance of Macro Knob is configured to target the ModScripter’s Intensity control, and as I have Macro Knob linked to my MIDI controller’s mod wheel (courtesy of the MIDI Remote system), I have hands‑on control: moving the mod wheel adjusts the Macro Knob, which in turn adjusts ModScripter’s Intensity, which in turn scales the Step Modulator modulation data transmitted via ModScripter to Retrologue’s filter. Got all that? Phew! Yes, it can at first seem like data‑modulation spaghetti, but for our boring pad, it does provide a way to manually control the intensity of any modulation being applied to the sound. It’s not exactly the same result you’d get by adjusting the Modulation Depth sliders, but it’s certainly in the same ball park!

Multitimbral Modulation

Another strategy for banishing bland from pad sounds is to layer and/or blend two sound sources together. This could, of course, be combined with applying modulation to the two (or more?) individual layers. However, as the new Modulator features work at the track level, if you use two separate virtual instrument tracks for your blending, you can’t easily ‘share’ Modulators between the two layers; each requires their own Modulator configuration...

Screen 3: If you use a multitimbral instrument such as HALion Sonic, blending between pad sounds on different layers can be easily configured on a single Cubase channel.

Except that you can! In fact, there are a couple of options. One of them exploits the audio side‑chain support that’s offered by some of the Modulators — these have a whole range of applications, by the way, and I plan to explore them in more detail in another workshop. The second option is much more pragmatic: simply use a multitimbral virtual instrument! In Cubase’s HALion Sonic (and the full version of HALion), Steinberg have an excellent candidate for this. In my final example, therefore, I’ve set up two (boring!) pad presets in HALion Sonic’s first two sound slots, but have configured both slots to respond to MIDI channel 1. So whatever notes I play will trigger both sounds. I’ve then configured a couple of Modulators to spice up each of the individual pad layers, much as I did for the Retrologue example earlier.

The blending fun really begins when you use a single Modulator to target both pad layers. Slot 3, using a Macro Knob, shows this at its most simple. I’ve assigned the volume of each layer to the HS Quick Controls, and then targeted these using the Macro Knob, but with the Modulation Depth set in opposite directions for each layer. As you rotate the knob, one layer will get louder as the other gets quieter, meaning you can adjust the sound blend as required. You can also do exactly the same sort of thing with other parameter targets, and suitable candidates include pan, filter cutoff and pitch. There are all sorts of possibilities here, and to give you a feel for what you can do, I’ve provided a couple of additional options in the audio examples on the SOS website. It’s so easy to configure the modulation for all of the layers because it can be done in a single location, using the new Modulators panel.

All Mods, No Cons!

I have to say that the Modulators are a brilliant addition to Cubase Pro, and absolutely brimming with potential. I’ve barely scratched the thinnest of surfaces here in terms of what’s possible. My experiments to date suggest that the side‑chain audio input mentioned earlier is well worth further exploration, and the Envelope Follower modulator also seems to hold plenty of promise. So watch this space — this is undoubtedly a topic we will return to in a future column or three!

Published April 2025