Not sponsored
I’ve bought every Cubase release and upgrade from Cubase VST 5 on to the current Cubase 13 Pro with my own money, skipping only Cubase SX 2 in 2003. So there’s no sponsored content here. And I’m also not opining on, if Cubase updates are worth their money, since that’s very subjective, depending on each user’s priorities and financial circumstance.
So here we go – my favourite Cubase features over the last few years – loosely in order of introduction:
VariAudio 3
Introduced in Cubase 10, the new generation monophonic pitch correction is one of my favourite parts of Cubase Pro – not only what it does, but how smoothly it fits into the entire workflow. I have and use Melodyne for polyphonic pitch correction, but on monophonic material, the workflow right inside Cubase Pro is so much smoother. Jef Gibbons made a really nice video about it:
Channel Latency Overview
When recording in real time or playing software instruments, low latency becomes a big deal. So it’s very useful to know how much latency is being introduced by different plugins. It’s really useful to quickly find out which plugins are the most tricky to use while live recording. And with some of the better plugins, they have a “live” mode, which dumbs down the plugin a little, so it has low or zero latency. And if you switch that on, you can immediately see the benefit.
Overall, I’ve long really liked how Cubase tries to be smart about managing plugin latency. I’m not sure, how many other DAWs are as ambitious on that topic. Cubase latency “magic” can sometimes be a source of confusion and grief for newcomers to advanced audio processing or those migrating from other DAWs.
But once the concept is understood, and what it means in practical use, it’s difficult to live without getting a good sense of the actual latency of the plugins in one’s collection.
Import Tracks from Projects
This has pretty much replaced my use of Track Presets. And my templates have fewer tracks again. Rather than using a large template with many inactive tracks, I now just import tracks from other projects only when I’m about to start using them. This works surprisingly well – even the routing of the imported tracks is handled quite elegantly.
p.s. Cubase Templates have been around seemingly forever, and I look at templates as an extension of starting with my own preferences for new projects. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over when starting a new Cubase project, making a template with those things already done ends up saving time on every subsequent new project. Overdoing it can also be tempting, but eventually one can find a nice middle ground.
The Supervision Analyzer Plugin
I was pretty happy with the various 3rd party analyzer plugins I had. But when Supervision showed up in Cubase 11, it became an instant addition to the master mix bus in my main template, and has replaced some (not all) of my other 3rd party analyzers. The plugin also comes with a number of sensible presets that show different analyzer groupings for a number of typical audio workflows. And you can assemble and arrange your own combination as a custom preset, too. The image below is what I typically use as a visual aid to mixing and mastering.
And a not-so-secret use is just as delightful eye candy for the occasional visitor to my studio. One of the inherent disadvantages of having a studio that’s mostly software based is the absence of eye candy. This plugin helps to overcome that. It doesn’t only convey useful information, but also looks cool – even to studio visitors who may not know much about audio production.
The downside is, that quite a bit of modern plugin eye candy puts additional pressure on the graphic processing in the DAW computer. My current DAW computer has a GPU builtin to the CPU and it’s perfectly good enough for audio work. But just a couple of weeks ago, I ended up adding a dedicated GPU card, so I can run more visually informative and/or entertaining plugins.
p.s. I also like the play on words in the name of this plugin.
MIDI Chords from Audio
I quite like working with Cubase Chord Tracks, even without using some of its tricks in generative or auto-correcting music making. In many cases, I’m using the Cubase Chord Track like a piece of sheet music – especially early in the writing and production of a new piece, when I haven’t memorized the chord progression yet. So when I record new parts, I look at the chord track until it’s memorized. The Chord track can also be helpful in being a visual indicator for orienting oneself within a musical piece. Unless it’s one of the myriads of repeat 4 chords ad infinitum pieces. 🙂 Again – a little like sheet music.
I do a good chunk of my music writing/composing starting with a chord progression on guitar. In years past, after recording a basic rhythm guitar track, I would then manually enter the chords on the chord track. Or create a matching MIDI track by playing the chord progression on a keyboard – and then dragging and dropping that onto the chord track. That process created a pretty good transcription of a MIDI track to the chord track.
Since Cubase 12, I can now save myself the extra step when the original idea was developed on guitar.
Now I can just drag the rhythm guitar track to the chord track and viola – Cubase figures out the chords from the audio.
I’ve also had some success with full pop/rock song mixes being automatically transcribed quite well.
It didn’t work as well with a track that contained a lot of orchestral legato and overlapping strings that didn’t have as clearly delineated chords as a pop/rock piece often has. But that’s not my typical use case, so I’m very happy about being able to get a chord track from my rhythm guitar draft recording in no time.
The other magic one can do with a chord track is a very big topic worth a separate future blog post.
The MIDI Remote
I’ve long been deep into the rabbit hole of using MIDI hardware controllers to control Cubase and plugins. Cubase has long had something called the “Generic Remote” in the Studio Setup which made that possible. However Steinberg didn’t really improve much on it over the years and it left remote control enthusiasts like me half happy and half frustrated.
Some of the larger hurdles to wider adoption was the fact that is was conceptually difficult to understand and it’s configuration dialog didn’t make it any easier. It also remained riddled with numerous oddities, shortcomings and bugs – which made it disheartening for enthusiasts to encourage wider adoption and discouraged many users from even trying.
So when the new MIDI Remote subsystem showed up in Cubase 12, remote control enthusiasts like me immediately jumped all over it. It was a big step forward and has seen some noteworthy improvements. While it still has a killer flaw when using motorized faders and common modes needed by at least some bi-directional endless encoders, it also has a ton of elegance for creating one’s own custom remote control setup.
The following video by Jeff Gibbons and my accompanying blog post is slightly outdated by now, but it still gives a pretty good idea what can be done with the MIDI Remote. Despite its limitations, I’m using the MIDI Remote on a daily basis – and only a smaller amount of functionality is still working better with the generic Remote. I truly hope that Steinberg will fix the motorized controller issue and doesn’t abandon further MIDI Remote fixes and development like they did with the Generic Remote.
Not the whole story
This post ignores a very significant undercurrent of Cubase releases over the many years:
Steinberg has long been improving and even re-building Cubase internals. Different parts during every release cycle. These often don’t lead to spectacular new features, but they keep Cubase somewhat in tune 😉 with modern developments in computing hardware and operating systems. That includes interface improvements – even when some of them invariably upset some users. And very importantly: Improvements in audio and MIDI processing.
For example, Cubase 13 didn’t bring me any individual new feature that made this list. But Cubase 13 generally feels more snappy on my system and has several small workflow and GUI improvements, that I would miss, if I had to return to Cubase 12. Some of the internal redesigns seem to have also broken some things for some users, but luckily I haven’t hit too many of those on my relatively modern Windows 10 with AMD based system.
Not (yet?) exciting
ARA2 was a feature that had me really excited when announced. I had visions of using Melodyne as effectively inside Cubase as VariAudio 3.
But after briefly testing it, I felt a little underwhelmed, and then started reading quite a few ARA2 related trouble reports on the Steinberg forum, that seem to actually have wiped out work for quite a few users.
But what really made me hesitant, was the the revelation, that using ARA2 seems to make Cubase project files potentially very, very large – due to storing audio in the project file. Normally Cubase stores the project’s audio track data in separate files.
The huge file issue became a bit of a crisis and it felt like Steinberg had to scramble to make huge project files actually work.
So for me that leaves a big software design question mark around ARA2 – at least in the context of Cubase. Is the entire ARA2 idea very limited or even flawed? Or is it just Steinberg still suffering from growing pains?
So I’ll be sitting on the ARA2 sidelines, until there are more glowing user reports or at the very least, that audio data gets stored separately from the Project file. A single monster project file is really asking for trouble.
Afterthought
A lot of audio work is crafty, artisan kind of work, with countless workflows, preferences and opinions. Other DAWs have some superior features for some specific workflows and also for different preferences of working and conceptualizing.
But Cubase is a pretty big tent for better and for worse. And while it’s an old tent – it’s being renewed – arguably more and better than any of the other old tents in this software niche. It’s a functionally very rich piece of software – and with that comes complexity that can be a hurdle for some individuals. And that’s entirely understandable.
But for me, the deep functionality makes Cubase a very competent platform for many of my different audio related adventures – from music writing, production, mixing and mastering – even a bit of audio restoration and occasional video scoring. — I always wish for more, but that’s not exactly earth shattering news. 🙂