What’s going on? This is Nicky Twist from WinkSound.com. And on these clips here, I’m going to show you basic overview of cubase and how to start projects to bring sounds in and how to just really get started to make it all happen and use cubase which is one of my favorite programs.
So the first step is obviously you open up cubase which we already did. And then we go to FILE and open up a new project. And you can start with any one of these, but I like to start with an empty track and add things along as I need them, so I don’t have a bunch of MIDI and audio tracks randomly open with nothing on them it keeps a little more clean and neat for me.
The first thing you’re going to need to do is pull over your toolbar and you’re going to want to put in how many beats per minute you want your track to be depending on what style of music it is. For what I do, I’m going to go to 130. And the next thing we’re going to want to do is pop open whatever kind of track we’re going to start with. Let’s say we’re going to start with an audio loop you right click on the left section here. You go to audio track, go to OK and it will pop your audio track up on the left. Now if we want to add a MIDI track we right click on the left side and we go to add a MIDI track and there’s your MIDI track right there.
So now let’s pull in some audio. So we go to the audio, we highlight it. So that’s where it will pop in our samples. Whatever is highlighted is where it will bring it unless if you are under MIDI and you’re doing audio, it will automatically open up a new audio track with the sample on there.
So we’re going to click on audio here, we go to FILE, scroll down to IMPORT you got to specify what you want to import. Now, if you want to import audio from a CD you go to audio CD and you extract that off of the CD. But we’re going to go to audio file and then you got to find your folder that has your audio in it. Here’s something important to know. You got your snap right here. You can turn your snap on and off. Now when you turn the snap off, you could place the sample anywhere but it’s not necessarily its going to be on the right place or on time because it doesn’t put it in a specific location. Now when you turn the snap on, it will put it right on the loop as you see it places right on the exact spot.
So you got your snap to grid here. Now you can adjust your snap to grid. If you have the screen of smaller size you keep it on bar and this way it goes right to the numbers. Now, if you make the screen larger and you want to move it over let’s say half way in between the one and two you can’t on bar. So what you have got to do is use quantize and then you can adjust to where you want it—1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32. What you have here is your colors. You can pick a color for our tracks so you could separate all the tracks and be able to visually see them easier. Then we move to the left you got this auto scroll here which means if the track is playing and it goes beyond the point where you can see it automatically moves the screen for you. And then to the left of that we have all your tools. And then as you go further to the left, you have your mixer. This opens up the mixer. This opens up your audio pool window you can see all the audio you have imported in.
Alright now that we went through a few things and we have our audio and MIDI tracks opened up that’s a basic overview and you can go from here and start building a track adding more MIDI and audio and layering and whatever great ideas you have.
I hope these clips were able to help you out with what you want to do in cubase and help you move in the right direction with this music. Now, if you have any more questions you can reach me at NikiTwist@WinkSound.com the new social video network for audio creators.
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