So you want to export the individual instruments played in Superior Drummer as audio files? Easy! Here’s a step by step way to do it. For this tutorial, I’ll be using Cubase 5.

First, create a new empty project in Cubase, and after it opens, click on Devices/VST instruments, and select Superior Drummer:

Note that I’m not using the usual function of adding a VST instrument track; this is important. If you add a normal VST instrument track, you won’t be able to use SD’s multiple outs. Make sure to use this method.

When you add the instrument, Cubase will ask you if you want to create a MIDI track assigned to Superior Drummer – go ahead and click Create.

Now, in Superior drummer, click on the MIXER button, and in the mixer window, in the OUTPUT row, click the orange text which reads “Out ½” – the menu that appears will have many options; we want to select “Multichannel“.

Now, go back to your VST instruments panel in Cubase, and in the row for Superior Drummer, you’ll see a button next to the E button which is used to open the mixer window for the VST instrument. This is the outputs button. Click on it, and click “Activate All Outputs“:

Now that you’ve done that, look at your Cubase project window; you’ll notice that you’ve got multiple channels – one for each of the outputs in Superior Drummer:

Now, go back into Superior Drummer, and open your MIDI Grooves, and browse to the one of your choice:

Now, drag this MIDI groove onto the MIDI track that Cubase created for you at the beginning of this project, and the MIDI will appear in your project window pane. Click on the MIDI clip to select it, and then right click it; in the menu that pops up, select Transport/Locators To Selection:

Now, hit play on the Cubase transport. You’ll see that each of the tracks (as long as there’s an instrument playing on it) will be showing output:

It’s a good idea at this time to name those tracks to match those in Superior Drummer:

Now, let’s say we want to export the Kick to an audio wave file, so we can use it in other productions, or effect it with audio effects. Simple! Solo the Channel assigned to the kick drum:

If you’re playing back audio, you should only hear that kick drum now.

Now, click on File/Export/Audio Mixdown:

In the window that appears, name your track, select where to save it, and under the “Import into Project” heading, select “Audio Track“. This will create a new audio track with that Kick drum wave file on it; you can also import it into your Pool, if you wish.

When you’re done, hit “Export“, and exit the audio exporter when you’re done. When you go back into the project pane, you’ll see that you’ve got a brand new Wave file on a new audio track; this is your Kick drum!

You can repeat this process for all of the drums you wish to export and use as audio files, and then do with them what you wish!

I hope you found this useful. Happy drumming!

-Brian

by G.W. Childs IV

Every music application has some way of color coding regions, clips, tracks, etc. However, isn’t it interesting how you don’t see anyone using them, with exception of people, like myself, who create demos for music software?

Let me be the first to say that colors are not a silly thing to add to your tracks. It’s not childish, and it’s not meant to make things prettier. Color coding a clip, region, etc, can really help you quickly identify parts, which makes editing and arranging much easier.

For example: I can decide that any part colored red is a rhythm part. As I go back through my song, I can clearly see all of my rhythm parts and differentiate those parts from the green guitar parts.

Second example: I can color code all of the clips or regions green that are apart of my song intro, the chorus could be blue, the verse could be yellow. When I go back to edit my song, I can clearly see all of the parts that make up my song and can jump around accordingly.

Finally, one of my favorite things about the color feature is one of the most simple: Colors can mean whatever you want them to. You can set up a color coding system for the way that your brain works.

However, I wouldn’t get too complicated, occasionally, you may want to pass a song along to a friend to do some work on and if you can easily explain what the color coding means, he can follow your system and this helps the collaboration go even more smoothly. When he returns the song to you with his revisions, you’ll be able to clearly hear and ’see’ what he’s done.

I wish to mix my tracks live into 4 parts- bass, drums, keys and odds & ends and have them running concurrently on 4 Audio tracks live .

We would call these “STEMS” or “GROUPS. Are these “stems” recorded to their OWN tracks or do you want to be able to mix them into “GROUPS” Live?… So that you could make adjustments WITHIN the “groups” or “stems”? IE: All drums would be coming out of a “STEREO PAIR” but, you may want to be able to raise or lower the snare live… For this tutorial I will assume that all your tracks are separate…

I need to learn how to send these out of Cubase 4.5.2…

You will need to create GROUP tracks in Cubase…

PROJECT>ADD TRACK>GROUP CHANNEL…

In the OPTIONS box that appears, choose to create 4 and make them STEREO.

You will now have 4 STEREO GROUP CHANNELS.

NAME each one just like you name an AUDIO TRACK . IE: DRUMS / BASS / KEYS / ODDS&ENDS.

In the MIXER you can now select an output destination for each instrument…

So… You can now set the OUTPUT of each audio track to the appropriate GROUP…

IE: Kick – to DRUMS / Snare – to Drums, Hat – To DRUMS, etc…

Once you have completed the routing, you will have 4 FADERS (The GROUP tracks) that “contain”your different “groups” or “stems” of instruments.IE: 1 fader controls the volume of ALL drums, another fader controls ALL Keysboards, etc. NOTE: They will appear at the extreme RIGHT of the Mixer.

…to an M-Audio Firewire 410 interface , and then route these 4 audio tracks into the mixing desk that I will have on stage.

The FireWire 410 has 8 Line outputs on the back so, you can use these “line outs” in pairs…

IE; 1+2 = Drums / 3+4 = Bass / 5+6 = Keys / 7+8 = Odd & Ends… You would then just connect these

physical output “pairs” to your mixer… Just make sure that the pairs of faders on your mixer are

panned HARD LEFT & RIGHT to maintain the stereo imaging (if there is any).

To ROUTE the AUDIO that is coming from the FADER GROUPS directly to the various outputs

of your FireWire 410 you will need to set some things up in your VST Connections window…

Like this: Open VST Connections…

And you will see this – Make sure you have clicked on the OUTPUTS TAB!!!

Next, click on the ADD BUS button and add 3 Stereo buses.

Then click OK.

You will now see something like this…

Note that EACH pair of stereo outputs is assigned (in the device port column) to outputs 1-8

of MY Device. You should be able to achieve the SAME with your FireWire 410.

Finally, we need to set the OUTPUTS of our newly created GROUP tracks.

Open the mixer, locate the group channels we created earlier and set the outputs like this…

And this…

And this…

And so on.

If everything is set correctly, you will hear your groups out of the separate

pairs of outputs on the back of your FireWire 410.

NOTE: If you are ONLY monitoring the “MAIN” stereo out, you will NOT

hear anything routed to outputs 3-8 until you hook them up to your mixer.

Zplane.development released version 1.5 of vielklang. vielklang is an audio harmonization instrument for easy generation of vocal or instrumental harmonies with up to four voices. The utilization of voice leading and harmony progression models allows vielklang to create harmony parts in a more musical way than traditional harmony processors and makes it a versatile and creative tool for musicians, songwriters and producers.

The new version adds the following main features:

• live MIDI input: play chords or voicings directly on the keyboard to control vielklang’s harmonization
• new harmonization styles: 3-voice intelligent, Block Chords, Fauxbourdon, Organum
• new export options: Audio/MIDI File Export for individual voices, MIDI export of harmony tracks
• improved input melody analysis: new note detection algorithm improves accuracy and robustness
• Ready for Pro Tools 8 and Cubase 5

About vielklang
vielklang allows quick and easy creation of natural sounding backing vocals, brass sections, and other harmony parts with up to four voices. It offers a new musical approach for the generation of the voicings: rather than synthesizing plain parallel voicings, vielklang takes into account the melodic context to create a chord-based arrangement and is thus able to produce musical harmonizations instantly.

Automatic recognition engines take care of initialization of obvious parameters like root note and key to let the user to focus on musical issues rather than tedious plugin configuration.

While vielklang will provide instant and meaningful results, experienced users have the option to edit the result with parameters like range (ambitus) or the distribution of the voices, to modify root note and scale, to edit single harmonies and to change each single pitch of each individual voice. Alternatively, the harmonization can be controlled by direct MIDI keyboard input.

vielklang’s main features are:

• musical harmonization using voice-leading and harmony progression models
• adjustable pitch correction, delay, timing humanization, timbre, volume, and pan for each voice
• Audio-to-MIDI
• MIDI-controlled snapshot system allows several harmonizations per audio input
• one-click modification of tempo, pitch, scale and harmonies
• plug and play: don’t waste time with tedious configuration

vielklang 1.1 is available for RTAS (Mac OS X, Windows), VST (Mac OS X, Windows) and Audio Units (Mac OS X) at a MSRP of $299.00/€249.00

More at: vielkang.zplane.de

If you want to bring (Import) an MP3 or Audio file into CUBASE and analyze it for learning/teaching or

Simply reusing it for a song or track you are composing – Here is how you do it…

For example, if you want to be able to slow down (tempo wise – without changing the pitch) an audio track so that you can figure out what is being played and examine the arrangement or simply use it as a loop, read on…

Although you could technically do this to an entire song (3 minutes +) it’s better to break the song/track up into separate 4 BAR segments. This is because all of the TEMPO/TIME stretching – compressing capabilities of CUBASE are based on the idea of working with “small” 1-4 Bar loops.

So, the first thing to do is define “LOOPS” or small segments of the song/track for processing.

To start, we will define a 4 bar area or “loop” that we want to examine.

To do this we want to set the LEFT / RIGHT boundary (or the start and end of the loop) markers in Cubase… Remember at this point the TEMPO that is set in Cubase has no relationship to the audio

you have just imported since the DEFAULT tempo of a new project in Cubase is 120 Beats Per Minute or 120 BPM. IE: Cubase has NO idea and does NOT care if the audio you just imported has ANY tempo value of any kind.

NOTE: To set (adjust) the Left and Right “markers” – Set LEFT Marker by holding down the “Ctrl” key

And clicking (and sliding) in the RULER area – Set RIGHT Marker by holding down the “Alt” key and

clicking (and sliding) in the RULER area.

After setting the L & R “Markers we can preview the “LOOP” by clicking on the “LOOP Enable” icon in

The transport bar.

Once we like what we HEAR, we will “split” the “loop” by Right Clicking, Hovering over the “EDIT” category and then choosing “Split Loop” from the sub category of the menu.

Next, we’ll select the area that we just “split”

Now COPY / DRAG this “loop” to a new track… NOTE: whenever you drag a piece of audio –

(or MIDI for that matter) to a “blank” area, Cubase will “Auto-Create” a NEW track for you.

Now, we want to turn what we have identified as our “loop” into a NEW piece of audio.

You will now see this dialog box…

Next, focusing on our new piece of audio or “loop”, we want to figure out what the ACTUAL tempo of this loop is… First, double click on it to open the “SAMPLE EDIT” window.

The Sample Edit Window…

Since we KNOW this “loop” is 4 BARS long, we need to tell Cubase, right here…

After telling Cubase the correct BAR count, it calculates the TEMPO as seen above.

Cubase now tells us that the ACTUAL TEMPO of this 4 bar loop is 104 Beats Per Minute.

The last step before closing the sample edit window is to enable the “PREVIEW”

Button.

After closing the SAMPLE EDIT window, you will notice that the “loop” region

Looks like this…

This indicates that this “loop” or “region” will adjust itself to whatever tempo

You set in the “TEMPO TRACK”…

Let’s open up the TEMPO TRACK window and set the TEMPO…

Like this…

Now we’ll see the BARS and BEATS grid change to the NEW (correct) Tempo!

You can now change the TEMPO TRACK at will and the TEMPO of audio region we worked on will

Change accordingly – Without changing the pitch!

I recently got a call from one our regular clients about some funky-ness while

“Dragging & Dropping” MIDI in Cubase 4. In this case we were using Toontrack’s

EZdrummer. It’s usually very straight forward… You open up the Grooves window in

EZD, find what you want and just drag it over to the MIDI track that is assigned to EZD.

BUT, instead of the “chunk” of MIDI just dropping where we wanted it – It would create a

couple of NEW, UNWANTED tracks. Worse than that, it kept creating new pairs of these

unwanted tracks EVERY TIME we did a Drag and Drop from EZD.

I figured that this HAD to have something to do with a preference in Cubase 4… So, I did

some digging and this is what I figured out…

NEXT…

When you do a MIDI “Drag and Drop, you are essentially IMPORTING MIDI into your

Project so, I had a look at the MIDI Preferences in Cubase 4…

To get to your Preferences, Click on the FILE MENU and then Click on PREFERENCES

As shown here…

NEXT…

What I discovered was right here…

The DEFAULT Setting has these two options (see below) ON!

I’m not quite sure what “Auto Dissolve Format 0″ is or does but,

After much playing around with it, I determined that things are better

With this setting OFF. The next setting is the more obvious one…

“Import To Instrument Tracks”… This one is the real culprit. This

Was creating new instrument tracks EVERY time we did a Drag And Drop.

SO – Shut these two “preferences” OFF and Dragging And Dropping MIDI

In Cubase 4 will act the way you’d expect.

I’ve just discovered something that kind of blew my mind.

If you are trying to use REASON 3.0.4 with Cubase of any flavor via REWIRE… IT WILL NOT WORK…

Unless you download and install this well hidden patch from the Propellerhead site here…

http://www.propellerheads.se/download/index.cfm?fuseaction=get_article&article=vista_installer

NOTE: Cubase 4 LE can NOT rewire to REASON. This was a policy decision by Steinberg.

Fred Here - From OBEDIA!

This is my very first blog post. I just wanted to say hello.

I’ll be posting comments and tips here as well as thoughts that occur to me while my endless

desire to break, fix and figure out better ways to work with Digital Audio Workstations continues.

I work with lots of progames including Cubase, Nuendo, Reason, FL Studio, ProTools, etc.

Although I don’t get asked about it too much - I am also a surround expert so, you may hear thoughts

about that too.

Finally, I’m heading up to the AES show in the first week of October and I hope to bring back some pictures and video of cool new gear.

Later. -Fred

Learn how to use REASON as a virtual Synth-rack with Cubase using rewire.

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Learn how to properly begin a Cubase project so that it stays organized from start to final CD or web MP3. Learn how to keep your Cubase projects organized so that you’ll never lose your work and you’ll be able easily to back it up.

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