Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Monday, August 3, 2026
Cubase 14: Controlling Acoustic Drum Dynamics
By John Walden
Screen 1: With two instances of Compressor on your drum bus, you can both tame transients and add some extra punch, without losing the natural sound of the kit.
Add impact and attitude to your drum parts with Cubase’s stock dynamics plug‑ins!
When you’re mixing, there are lots of processing options that can make a significant contribution to your acoustic drum sound, but dynamics processing can be particularly useful when the musical style or nature of the mix mean the drums must make a larger‑than‑life impact. Such processing might come in the form of gating, expansion, compression, limiting, transient shaping, clipping and even as a side‑effect of tape emulations, amp/speaker sims, saturation and distortion.
So what, on this front, does Cubase’s stock plug‑in collection have to offer? With the aid of some audio examples (available on the SOS website: https://sosm.ag/cubase-1225), we’ll explore all that in this article. It’s a big subject, though, so to keep things focused and ensure that all the techniques I cover below can be achieved in any Cubase versions from Elements upwards, I’ll concentrate mostly on compression, transient shaping and saturation.
And I’ll add one final note before we dive in: remember that the multitude of options at your disposal always includes doing nothing! Your first job is always to listen carefully, and if your drums were recorded well and sound great, then just balancing the faders and allowing the glorious natural dynamics of the kit and performance to be the star of the show may well be enough, particularly if you have any bus processing going on. It’s not an unrealistic prospect, if you’re happy to live without winning an award for crafting the loudest mix in history!
Drums, Naturally
Normally, though, you’ll want at least to reign in some aspects of the performance/recording just a little, even if you don’t want to overtly change the energy or character of the part. For such duties, you don’t need to look for anything special: Cubase’s standard Compressor plug‑in is a transparent and very flexible tool, and well up to the job. An instance, or possibly two in series, placed on your drum subgroup might well be all that’s required.
The first screen shows a setup with two Compressor plug‑ins, each instance having different attack and release times so they react differently. The first is intended just to catch the highest peaks in the signal. Its threshold has been adjusted so that compression is triggered only by the loudest section of a hit: the initial transient. But, the very fast attack and release times mean that as soon as the transient has passed through (and thus the signal level drops below the threshold), the compression ceases quickly — the gain reduction meter should almost just ‘flicker’ to indicate this short‑lived processing.
The ratio you can set to taste, and you can juggle the ratio and threshold controls to finesse the amount and character of gain reduction this compressor gives you. But note that generally you’ll want more assertive settings than the (roughly) 2:1 you might opt for on a mix bus; I used 5:1 in this example. Incidentally, if you crank the ratio up to 8:1 (the maximum ratio the Compressor plug‑in offers), it starts to become something like limiting, and if that’s what you’re after, you could easily use an instance of Cubase’s Limiter here instead. Personally, I like having the additional control offered by Compressor. Once configured, and you’ve noted the maximum gain reduction (around 6dB in this example), you can then apply a little make‑up gain (I used a fairly conservative 3dB here). Because we’re pulling down the peaks, the end result is a sound with less overall dynamic range, but with the sustained portion of each hit (where Compressor has fully released) sounding a little louder (because of the make‑up gain). Judge it right, and the result should be more impactful drums.
The second Compressor instance is optional. The first Compressor has already handled the highest peaks, so this one targets a different aspect of the drum sound. A slower attack time allows the transients to pass through unscathed before the gain reduction kicks in, and the combination of a longer release and a lower ratio (3:1) than on the first instance results in smoother‑sounding compression. Again, the threshold can be adjusted to refine the overall result, and if required (it depends what you want to achieve here) a little make‑up gain can be applied to restore the final level of the drum mix. As with any compressor, the various controls interact, but unless you push specific controls to an extreme, it’s relatively easy to retain a very natural sound, and the gentle compression of the kit’s overall dynamic range makes it easier to integrate into your overall mix. Compressor might not have the vibe of some more esoteric dynamics plug‑ins, but it is capable, flexible and transparent.
More Control
Sometimes, you’re going to want more detailed control over the dynamics, and if that’s the case then you might want to consider compression of the drum kit’s close‑mic channels. If a transparent result remains your aim, then the same dual Compressor configuration we used for the drum bus is a perfectly suitable starting point for individual kit pieces. But you’ll want to tailor the settings to suit the dynamics of each drum element, of course. This is particularly useful for the key kick, snare and hi‑hat or spot‑cymbal mics.
Screen 2: At the channel level, it’s pretty easy to achieve additional control over a specific drum sound — but always listen out for interactions with the rest of the kit and your bus processing.
Depending on how you’re approaching mixing your drums, you might want to configure this compression with any drum bus dynamics processing you have in place bypassed — in changing the peaks and levels of the individual mic channels, you’ll change how the bus compressor reacts. Note, though, that each mic will have captured spill from other kit pieces, so if you wish to do any of this work with your drum element soloed to better hear what the compressor is doing to the track, you’ll still need to listen to the processing in the context of the whole kit — particularly overheads and room mics, with which all the close mics will interact.
Once the individual drum dynamics have been tweaked, you can re‑engage the bus‑level processing, which might need small adjustments. For example, if your channel‑level processing is now catching the initial transients, you may be able to back off the same processing on the drum bus. Or if your kick and snare are now louder because of make‑up gain, they might be tripping the bus compressor more, and you might either want to back off the threshold a little, or use a side‑chain filter to reduce the compressor’s sensitivity to the kick’s low frequencies to avoid pumping.
Targeting individual mic channels also lets you explore additional options on a specific drum, without worrying too much about undue impacts elsewhere in the kit. Yes, as I said, there’s often spill and with it a risk of changing phase relationships other mics, but the risk of significant problems is less than with radical EQ. One of those additional options might include replacing Compressor with one of Cubase’s more characterful compressors or other dynamics processors. The bundled compressor options depend on the Cubase version you’re using, but there are plenty of free alternatives if you need one, such as Klanghelm’s DC1A and MJUC jr. In this example, I’ve gone for two additional (and I suspect often overlooked) options that are available in all versions from Elements upwards: EnvelopeShaper and DaTube.
Throwing Shapes
In the second screenshot, I’ve placed an instance of EnvelopeShaper after my dual Compressor configuration (you can also use this without the separate compression, by the way!). This allows you to shape the transient and sustained (release) portions of a typical drum hit independently and in some interesting ways.
The Length control sets the duration of the ‘attack’, so determines how much of the drum’s initial transient is influenced by gain applied using the attack knob. You can subdue the transients by choosing a negative attack value, or emphasise them with a positive one. The latter can add extra ‘click’ to a kick or initial ‘snap’ to a snare for better definition, for example. But be careful — you’re likely boosting the peaks, which could lead to the signal either overloading any plug‑ins you have downstream, or peeping above the threshold of your bus compressors, making them react differently.
The release control then applies a gain adjustment to the ‘sustain’ (non‑transient) portion of the drum sound. So positive values tend to make the ‘ring’ or ‘body’ of a kick, snare or tom more obvious, while negative values generally give you a tighter‑sounding drum. Negative values will also tend to reduce any bleed from other drums, along with any room sound, rather like a gate can. There are more sophisticated transient shaper plug‑ins out there, but do you really need them? I find EnvelopeShaper easy to use and very effective!
Klanghelm’s MJUC jr — one of many great‑sounding free ‘character’ compressor plug‑ins you can check out if your version of Cubase has fewer options.
What A Character!
Some compressors (in hardware or plug‑in formats) don’t just turn the signal up and down — they can also add additional character to your drum sounds, with subtle transformer‑ and valve‑like distortion that we might call ‘saturation’ or ‘harmonics’. To emulate this, there are various options in the different versions of Cubase, including in the channel strip, and plenty of third‑party options including freebies such as those mentioned above. Since all Cubase versions come with DaTube, I’ve used that here.
As shown in the screenshot for my kick drum channel, I pushed the Drive control quite hard and then backed off the output to balance (to taste, by ear) the processed and unprocessed signal. In this case, DaTube’s harmonics add a lovely warmth to the kick tone, and result it a more solid ‘thump’.
Two Buses At Once
Another technique that’s well worth exploring for acoustic drums is parallel compression. Some plug‑ins let you do this internally — that’s what a wet/dry mix control gives you — but there are often advantages to adopting the ‘old‑school’ approach of putting a duplicate signal through a compressor on a separate track, and I’ve done that here using a send to a dedicated effects track. This allows you, for instance, to EQ the ‘wet’ part of the signal different from the dry one, which can be helpful.
If you want to move beyond a natural sound, parallel processing of the kick, snare and tom mics can be used to dial in some additional grit without making your cymbals suffer.
In fact, as you can see in the final screenshot, I chose to create two such effects buses for this project. The first receives sends from just the drum shell channels (the kick, snare and toms), while the second gets the hi‑hat, overheads and room mics. The purpose of this separation is to allow you to be more assertive with the close‑miked drum‑shell processing than with the metalwork, which can start to sound weird if overcompressed, or when the longer sustains are compressed in response to loud close‑mic hits.
There are plenty of creative options that you might explore on the ‘shells only’ bus, but I’ve kept it relatively simple in this case with an instance of the Tube Compressor pretty much ‘slammed’, followed by the Distortion plug‑in to add extra grit. As demonstrated in the audio examples, blending just a tiny amount of the resulting signal into the overall drum mix injects a much more aggressive character to the overall kit sound. But you can easily dial in something super‑grungy if you really want to. Importantly, the cymbals, having not been subject to this OTT processing, retain their definition — they sound neither ‘splashy’ nor too harsh.
Bypass Plug‑ins, Not Taste
So whatever version of Cubase you have, you have plenty of scope to experiment. That said, it’s fairly easy to take your perfectly decent acoustic drum recording from ‘natural and dynamic’ to ‘flat and overcooked’, so make sure you avoid the potential for a taste bypass by regularly bypassing your dynamics plug‑ins for an A/B reality check. Side‑step that possibility and, with a combination of taming your transients, reduced dynamic range, and possibly a little colourful saturation, you can increase the overall level, and dial in some attitude, so that your acoustic (or multi‑out virtual instrument) acoustic drum mix delivers just what the song requires.
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Friday, July 31, 2026
Cubase 15: Exploring Omnivocal
By John Walden
The initial beta release of Omnivocal ships with two voice characters.
Find out just what’s possible — and what’s not — with Cubase’s new virtual vocalist.
Steinberg dropped something of a leftfield surprise with Cubase 15: the inclusion of Yamaha’s Omnivocal. Supplied initially in a beta form but available to Pro, Artist and Elements users, Omnivocal is a virtual vocalist instrument plug‑in. Of course, Yamaha have a longstanding history in vocal synthesis — for example, it was way back in March 2004 that we first reviewed their Vocaloid software, whose synthetic vocals have spawned something of their own genre online, particularly within the anime/manga world. But in recent years, developers such as Dreamtonics and ACE Studio have used AI techniques to push vocal synthesis technology forwards, allowing users to craft remarkably natural‑sounding and expressive vocal lines from a virtual instrument in much the same way as they might for a virtual string or wind instrument.
On the surface, it would appear that Omnivocal aims to do something similar — in essence, you just instantiate it on an instrument track, record (or program) a standard MIDI clip with the desired melody, and Omnivocal will then synthesize a human vocal to ‘sing’ those notes. So for those who’ve upgraded to Cubase 15 or are considering it, let’s find out exactly what you can expect from your new virtual session singer...
Singing Lessons
As with other virtual instruments, you can choose between different sounding presets. In its current beta form Omnivocal lets you choose between a male or a female singer, but I gather more options featuring different singing characters are planned for the future. You also get a number of parameters that can adjust the sound character of each singer. For example, you can pick between Straight (more subdued) and Dynamic (more expressive) singing styles.
There are also automatable parameters, such as Formant, Attack, Air, Power and Vibrato, all of which can change the character of the vocal delivery. You can automate these parameters, but they require the synthesis engine to re‑render the sung vocal to reflect your changes. While this happens automatically and very quickly in the background, it does mean that you can’t actually adjust these controls in real time like you might with, for example, a synth’s filter cutoff. That said, pitch‑bend data and the Presence (a tonal control) and Output dials operate outside the vocal synthesis engine, so they can be adjusted in real time.
The Text box allows you to add lyrics for Omnivocal to sing.
Initially, your melodic line will be sung with an ‘ah’ vowel sound for each note, but you can enter your own lyrics in the Text box on the MIDI Editor’s Info line. It has to be said that, in its current beta form, this aspect of Omnivocal feels a little cumbersome in operation. You can enter lyrics one note at a time, but you can also enter multiple words. For example, entering ‘broken heart’ into the Text box of the first note of a three‑note phrase would spread the words on a one‑syllable‑per‑note basis. So, the syllables of ‘broken’ would be placed into the first two notes (with the ‘oh’ sound being sustained across the two notes) and ‘heart’ into the third note.
Helpfully, once Omnivocal has analysed your lyrics, the phonetic form is also shown in the Text box and superimposed on the MIDI notes. In addition, you can enter some special characters, the most important being a hyphen (‘‑’), which forces the engine to extend a vowel sound across multiple MIDI notes. You can also customise the phonemes used in the Text box (the Omnivocal PDF manual has useful information on this) but learning how to finesse the pronunciation of your lyrics is something that will require a little trial‑and‑error experimentation.
That caveat aside, with your notes and lyrics added, Omnivocal will apply its AI‑assisted engine (all the processing is done locally and based on a voicebank of data for each virtual vocalist) to render the vocal part and, on playback, it is then performed with the rest of your project. And, of course, as with any virtual instrument, you can then change the performance by editing the MIDI note pitch, timing and lengths, changing the lyrics, or adjusting the vocal character as required.
Getting Hooked
Whether it’s in the writing/composing phase, or as a key production element in a top‑tier final mix, we’re now all very accustomed to the concept of virtual instruments being an integral part of the music that we hear. So, in that context, where can this initial Omnivocal beta release get us? Is it useful only as a writing tool (a less ambitious bar to jump) or can it deliver a final performance (a much higher bar)?
To answer that question, I’ve worked through a few examples, and you can find some audio clips to accompany them on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/cubase-0226). I started with a simple target in my sights: creating a vocal hook or two that might be used in an electronic music project. The screenshot with the MIDI clip shows an example of what’s required for this sort of thing. I played the melody in from my MIDI keyboard (Omnivocal provides a simple synth sound for auditioning purposes as you play), over the top of a suitable backing track. I then entered the lyrical content in the Text box, one phrase at a time, and Omnivocal mapped each phrase across the appropriate number of notes based on the syllable count.
This simple vocal hook idea was more rhythmic than melodic, and once the lyrics were rendered by the engine I did some tweaking of note timings and lengths to improve the flow of the vocal delivery. I also picked the Dynamic delivery mode, and set both Attack and Power quite high to provide a more forceful performance style. But while there was some tweaking involved, the initial process was remarkably quick: just a few minutes’ work. As demonstrated in the audio example, I then generated a number of different variants with some ear‑candy processing applied to spice things up. I’ll make no great claims for the composition(!) but in sonic terms at least I feel that Omnivocal is a perfectly capable tool for experimenting with these kinds of vocal ideas.
As seen for our backing vocal example, once you have created one Omnivocal part, as with any MIDI‑based virtual instrument, it’s easy to then create – and edit — multiple variations.
Back Me Up
If you already have a human lead vocal in your project, a second possible use case for Omnivocal would be to experiment with potential harmony and/or backing vocal parts. Again, you can create the required Omnivocal MIDI by playing along to the lead vocal part using your MIDI keyboard. But I adopted a different approach for this example, instead applying Cubase Pro’s VariAudio to my lead vocal, then exporting the extracted MIDI note data. This MIDI data was then imported into my initial Omnivocal track for preparatory editing and the addition of the lyrical data.
It’s at this point that the ‘utility’ nature of Omnivocal comes to the fore, because whatever type of backing vocal part you want to experiment with (double, octave, third‑above or counter‑melody, say), it’s now easily explored with MIDI edits. And if you want multiple backing lines, then just duplicate the first and edit the notes. I explored precisely this workflow to create the second audio example, going from some simple doubles to a pair of basic third‑above harmonies, and then finally to something closer to a counter melody... and all with the ease of MIDI editing, which included some subtle randomisation of the note start positions for each harmony part. Whether Omnivocal’s backing lines make it to your final mix or not is another matter, but it certainly makes it easy to explore ideas for backing‑vocal parts in the absence of an actual singer.
Take My Lead
By this stage, it shouldn’t take much of a leap for you to start wondering if Omnivocal could be used to generate lead vocal demos as a guide for an actual human vocalist. Well, it can, and the basic process remains the same. As with the backing vocal example, once you have an initial Omnivocal performance, the simplicity with which you can edit the timing, pitch, lyrics and, to a certain degree, the performance style, make it a really useful songwriting tool.
That just leaves one obvious and very big question: can Omnivocal deliver lead vocals that are good enough to use in a final mix? Well, context is everything here, of course, and Omnivocal is still in beta, so expecting it to jump over the highest of realism bars at this point is perhaps unrealistic. Right now, I think the answer is ‘probably not’! For fun, though, my final audio example is a comparison between an Omnivocal lead vocal and the same vocal part created using Dreamtonics’ Synth V. Currently, the most obvious challenges when using Omnivocal are in crafting notes where words flow across multiple pitches. There are also limitations when it comes to adjusting the length of and emphasis placed upon particular syllables to influence pronunciation and delivery style.
But fingers crossed, there is more to come, and in any case don’t let any of that stop you exploiting Ominvocal’s considerable potential as a vocal sketching tool. Hats off to Yamaha/Steinberg for bundling this fledgling virtual singer instrument with every main edition of Cubase 15: whether you’re a Pro, Artist or Elements user, if you can hum it (or rather, play it on a MIDI keyboard), Omnivocal can sing it.
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Cubase 15: Modulators As Macro Controls
By John Walden
Three Macro Knob Modulators provide broad‑brush control over compression and EQ on each of the main audio busses (group channels) within this project
Could Flow‑style macro controls, courtesy of Cubase’s powerful Modulators, enable you to mix more quickly?
When I’m mixing, after making some initial adjustments to individual tracks that are very obviously required, I’ll often shift my focus pretty quickly to the buses — both my various instrument subgroups and the stereo master. My intention is to make rapid progress by applying broad‑brush strokes to the mix, before my ears grow too accustomed to the sound. In general, this will involve setting an initial static mix balance between the instrument groups using the faders, and then some decisions around compression and EQ.
I recently explored — and was impressed by — Softube’s Flow Mixing Suite (my review is in this very issue), and found it really useful at this stage of a mix, and its macro controls particularly intrigued me. They’re a set of knobs that can each be mapped to control one or more key parameters in a multi‑plug‑in signal chain. For example, a single ‘compression’ macro control might influence both the threshold and make‑up gain controls of a dynamics plug‑in, so that as you turn the macro control, it applies more compression by lowering the threshold, but simultaneously increases the make‑up gain to compensate for the loss in level. As well as saving you having to turn two knobs to achieve one task, this approach means you don’t have to keep opening/closing individual plug‑ins, and you can keep your screen relatively uncluttered.
But of course, impressive as it is, the Softube system works only with Softube’s plug‑ins, and so, with this experience fresh in my mind, I decided to see if I might emulate the approach in Cubase, using the Pro version’s Modulator feature. It worked pretty well, and below I’ll take you through some examples.
One‑knob Wonder
Let’s start with that compressor example. For this experiment, I instantiated Cubase’s Black Valve plug‑in on my project’s main lead vocal bus, but you could apply the same principles to any of Cubase’s stock compressors, used on any audio signal. With my vocal bus (a group channel) selected, I opened the Modulator panel in the Project window’s Lower Zone, then popped that open as a separate floating window (use the arrow button, located top right of the pane). That let me see it alongside the MixConsole, not just in the Project window.
In the Modulator panel,...