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Cubase Tips - Arrange To Perfection

Get the most out of Cubase with this tutorial...

Hands up all of you who used to own an Atari ST. Now keep your hand up if the only reason you bought the thing was to run Cubase. Yep, thought so. Let's face it, Cubase really was the only reason to chose an Atari ST over its contemporary, the Amiga. Now let's be a bit more controversial. Many people would never have started using Cubase if it wasn't for the free and easy availability of pirate copies, and although Steinberg probably see it differently, I would argue that their place in the market today was secured by the piracy that troubled them in the past. Once the Atari became obsolete and we had all gone out and bought PCs and Macs (oh dear) we needed to get a new sequencing package, and what better than the one with which we are as familiar as we are our own mums - namely, Cubase. Now another question. Hands up all of you who have read the Cubase manual? Yep, thought so. You didn't need to, did you? You taught yourself how to use it when you had that naughty pirate on your Atari. Sure, you've never quite sussed out the Interactive Phrase Synth, the Logical Editor seems to be about as logical as the Teletubbies, and God only knows what some of those bloody editing icons do. But that doesn't matter, you can find your way around the program well enough to come up with masterpiece after masterpiece, right? But wouldn't it be nice to know just what all of those extra bells and whistles really do? Well, we thought we'd dispel the mysteries once and for all. We will be running a series of tutorials, each focusing on a particular feature, to make sure you really are getting the most from Cubase. The examples and walkthroughs are specific to Cubase VST for PC, but if you are a Mac owner don't despair, everything is just as relevant, it may just be done slightly differently, and you'll have to make do with only one mouse button. Oh, you'd already realised that. To get this series underway - and to make sure we are all starting from the same point of knowledge - we are going to begin by looking at Cubase's Arrange window. Don't worry all you power users out there, this isn't going to be a lesson on recording parts or creating tracks, there is a certain level of basic knowledge used for creating songs which we shall take as read. Group Tracks As the name suggests, the arrange window is where you can easily alter your song's... err... arrangement. As many of us know, shuffling around all of those individual parts can often become quite a chore, so wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of MIDI pool in the same way as there is an audio pool? To facilitate working in this pattern-orientated way we'll look at one of Cubase's most frequently overlooked features: Group Tracks. Let's say that you had a song that consisted of four main sections: intro, verse, chorus and middle 8. Let's assume

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you wanted to try various different arrangements of these main sections. Obviously it's going to become quite tedious moving those individual parts after a while - step in Group Tracks... Select all the parts that are associated with the intro and then select 'Build Group' from the Structure menu (Cntrl+U). Enter the desired name in the window that opens and click 'New'. You'll see a new column appear to the right of the screen, with the newly-created group listed. Be sure to select only the parts that correspond to the desired section, but also bear in mind that the parts don't have to be adjacent and that their relative positions are maintained within the group. Now from the File menu create a new arrangement. Next, you need to create a group track to place the groups into. There are various different track 'classes' in Cubase, which are set using the 'C' column of the tracklist. Create a new track and set its class to 'Group Track'. You can now drag and drop the groups out of the group list and onto the group track. If you subsequently want to edit one or more parts that are contained within a group, simply select the group that contains the part to be edited, then from the structure menu, select 'Unpack Group'. The group's constituent parts will be restored to normal MIDI tracks. You don't have to use groups purely for sections of songs, either. Another good use for them is to group together related instruments, like brass or drum parts. One shortfall of using groups, though, is that you cannot group audio tracks or mixtures of MIDI and audio tracks. Global functions Cubase provides another set of functions for quickly manipulating large numbers of parts efficiently. These are called Global functions, and are accessed from the Structure menu. All of these functions work in the same way. The area being worked on is defined by the locators and any muted tracks remain unaffected. 'Global Cut' removes the area between the locators and moves all the following parts back to create a seamless join. 'Global Insert' moves all the parts that appear after the left locator to the right locator, thus creating a break in your song. 'Global Split' works in the same way as the scissors tool, except across all tracks. When selected parts are split at the locator points, and if you only want to create one split, then either set both locators to the same position or move the right one to an empty area of the Arrange window. Finally, 'Copy Range' copies all events that fall in between the locators and inserts them at the current song position. As this series continues, we'll be looking at progressively more advanced functions and features of Cubase. Until then...

Adam Crute The Mix 04/00

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