The Blog

After my grace-period update for Cubase 6 finally made its way to me in Tokyo, I installed it eagerly. Fortunately for me, I spend a good amount of time reading the forums and was thus prepared for the nasty bug that people who upgrade from Cubase 5 to Cubase 6 will experience.

After installing Cubase 6, I was unable to save new templates. Additionally, all of my key commands weren’t working right, and I couldn’t save a new set of key commands or even load any of the default ones. This made it pretty difficult to get anything done, since I rely heavily on the use of key commands for my workflow.

Luckily, I remembered reading about this on a forum and found the post again. Apparently, the problem is that when you install Cubase 6 on the same machine as Cubase 5, it tries to import your preferences, but it does so incorrectly, causing this strange behavior.

The solution is to trash your preferences in Cubase 6 and in Cubase 5 and then launch Cubase 6 again, where it will rebuild your preferences the right way. If you’re on Windows and have never interacted with your Cubase preferences before, they can be found by going to: “Start/All Programs/Steinberg Cubase 6 64 bit/Cubase Application Data Folder” and deleting everything except for the 4 folders containing panels, presets, project templates and scripts.

The path in the ‘Start’ menu above is the easiest way to find your preferences, since the folder is a hidden folder in Windows. However, if you enable the viewing of hidden folders/files, you can find the preferences at this path: “Your_User_Name/App Data/Roaming/Steinberg/Cubase 6_64″

Other than that slight annoyance on installation, Cubase 6 seems extremely solid, which is not too surprising, because 5.5 was quite solid and this update is more of a refinement than a huge rewrite.

It’s kind of a shame that they didn’t do any work on their bit-bridge for 32bit plugins, but jBridge works perfectly and is only $20, so I can’t get too worked up about it.

Omnisphere is the incredible synth by Spectrasonics that just keeps on giving.

Like all the other Spectrasonics products, it was great at launch, and it just keeps getting better. I won’t go into the gory details about how this is my “desert island” instrument… not synth, but instrument, or how you could conceivably produce any sound worth hearing with a copy of Omnisphere and a MIDI keyboard or sequencer. I can’t even think about this synth without getting a little choked up sometimes. I guess you get the point, it’s a bargain at any price.

In addition to providing great sounding, bug-free software, Spectrasonics treats its registered customers like kings and queens, with regular product updates that don’t just fix bugs, but that add significant and useful functionality.

The way Spectrasonics operates and innovates is really starting to make everyone else look bad. There are more than a few companies who release an instrument, let it die and then release a new one as soon as sales taper off, even though there are still bugs throughout their product line. Spectrasonics seems to have a longer-term approach, viewing each instrument as a platform to be continually refined. And when they do refine a product, it is for the purpose of attracting new customers, instead of fleecing the current customer base. A few companies (ahem, Waves and Avid) could take a page from Spectrasonics.

Anyhow, this update includes many new patches, an improved browser, new synthesis modes and options for sound design (including LFO assignable bit crushing and sample rate reduction, as well as a cool visualizer for the granular synthesis mode). And of course, in addition to the free iPod app which already exists to select patches, there will be a new iPad app that will act as a vector control for auto-selected or randomized parameters… adding a little of the feel of a Kaoss Pad to Omnisphere. It will be available for free to registered users on February 15th.

If only my other plugin manufacturers were this on point.

Expression maps are a huge part of the reason I recently switched to Cubase.

It didn’t used to matter before I got into heavily-sampled instruments, but lately I’ve been using a lot of instruments that use key-switching to change articulations of an instrument. Using EastWest Play instruments (for instance) starts to get complicated when you have 16 different articulations assigned to MIDI notes below and above the register of the instrument. It’s pretty impossible to remember things like, “for the cello section, you have to draw in an F#7 to get a pizzicato.”

The Articulations lane in Cubase is such a simple idea, that it’s kind of amazing that other DAWs haven’t copied it yet. And now that I often work with key-switch controlled sample libraries, I can’t imagine living without it.

Although there is not an official set of expression maps for the EastWest products, I was able to find a full set of expression maps, complete with dynamic markings on another composer’s website. Click here if you’d like to download them.

Needless to say, having all of the key-switch patches already mapped for you is a tremendous time saver and it’s kind of surprising that Steinberg doesn’t host a repository for them, since VST Expression is a big selling point of their software.

Anyhow, after much Googling, I couldn’t find any expression maps for the Trillian key-switch patches. Just so no one else has to go through the tedious task of setting these up, I’ve posted them online for others to use. You get them by right-clicking and saving this link.

I didn’t go too crazy on them, but I just made it so that when you open a key-switch-multi instrument in Cubase, you can open the expression map with the exact same title and all of the articulations will be mapped to the articulation lane.

While I have at one point or another owned dozens of synthesizers and keyboard instruments, I have recently slimmed down my collection of hardware instruments in favor of their software counterparts.

As I no longer had any MIDI capable synths lying around, I either drew notes in with a mouse or used a USB mini keyboard (the Akai LPK25). I took a perverse pleasure in controlling $5,000 worth of sample libraries and soft-synths with a $60 MIDI keyboard. Yet eventually, the novelty wore off and I started wanting something that felt a little more natural and that covered more than 2 octaves at a time.

I did some research and looked into some of the current options for MIDI keyboard controllers. 61 key keyboards were hovering around $300 or $400, and the online reviews mostly agreed that they were pretty good, but didn’t quite have the quality keyboard action of a professional synth, with many concluding that they just don’t make them as well as they used to. Yet the Novation seemed to be well liked (at $600) and it was starting to look like a pretty good option.

It was then that my music forum trolling finally paid off. After reading a long thread about the merits of various current MIDI keyboard controllers, someone pointed out the obvious solution… Just buy an old keyboard from the 90s second-hand, forget about the sounds it comes with, and you’ll have a nice MIDI controller with a professional quality build for virtually no money.

Sure enough, I was in my local thrift store and saw a Yamaha SY22 for sale (with a case and power supply) for $50. As a synth, it’s horrible… The FM generated sounds are incredibly dated. I mean, they’re really bad, and not in a cool way – they’re just bad. However, as a MIDI controller, it’s a champ. Since it was made in 1990, it has the full MIDI specification… aftertouch, mod-wheel etc. I also went to the music shop and picked up a sustain pedal for $15 – made it a Yamaha, because I figured I might as well have it match the keyboard.

The solid feel of this keyboard (combined with the low latency of my system) really makes it easy to forget you are playing software instruments. This might be my best $50 gear purchase yet.

Steinberg has now officially announced the latest version of Cubase…

I’m not sure if it would be worth a paid upgrade for me, but there are a few nice new features and I happen to qualify for a free upgrade (having just purchased Cubase 5).

There are some major improvements that don’t really affect me, such as Protools-style multi-track drum editing. This would make me very happy if I were using Cubase to record live bands. I can imagine that some people who were using Cubase for composing and Protools for recording their band will finally be able to ditch Protools.

Don’t get me wrong, the latest version of Protools is great, and if I only worked with audio, it would probably be my tool of choice. However, if you do anything involving virtual instruments, PT is some kind of awful… and don’t even get me started about their insistence on real-time export. I’ve heard everyone’s (including some great mix engineers) arguments for real-time export, but it still doesn’t make any sense to me. If real-time export is such an important part of the mixdown, then why does that not apply to video?

Q: Why don’t any of the non-linear video editors (including Avid’s own Media Composer) force you to export in real-time…

A: Because it doesn’t make any sense.

Anyhow, back to Cubase…

There are a few interface improvements and workflow tweaks that will be nice. The audio people got multi-track drum editing. The dance music people got an improved loop-masher (although I don’t see why dance music people would use Cubase over Ableton Live). And us composers got VST Expression 2.

VST Expression 2 allows automation data to be applied to each individual note… pretty crazy. This means you could play a chord and apply unique automation data to each note within a chord! The huge significance of this feature may not be obvious to everyone, but I think it will become apparent once composers get their hands on it.

For now, only Steinberg’s instruments support VST Expression 2, but hopefully other developers will get on board with this new standard sooner rather than later, as it offers more control over virtual instruments that we have seen before.