#Cubase tutorial book full#
#Cubase tutorial book series#

Create a new Instrument track using HALion Sonic SE. Score editing in Cubase Pro: step-by-stepġ. This time around we’re going to get the ball rolling by looking at the basics of Cubase’s scoring tools, but be sure to come back for future instalments where we’ll be digging into some of the Score Editor’s more advanced features and functions.

#Cubase tutorial book full#

And once the score itself is created you may require different layouts and arrangements of it: A full score for a band leader, but individual parts for each instrumentalist, for instance.Ĭubase has the tools to assist with all of this, but the Score Editor is a very deep topic so we can’t chomp through all of its mysteries in a single sitting. There’s more to notated music than just staves and notes, though – there are clef marks, key and time signatures and all sorts of other symbols, markers and text that may need to be added in order to create a finished score. In general, these modifications are applied ‘on-the-fly’ so that any changes made to the underlying MIDI recording will bubble up to the Score Editor in the correct way. Layers of adjustmentĬubase’s Score Editor acts as a sort-of visual layer that sits over the top of the music, and that allows all sorts of modifications to the appearance of notes on the stave without those changes impacting the underlying MIDI recording. The practical upshot of all of this is that you can’t just open the Score Editor and expect to see notation that accurately reflects what you had intended – the initial appearance is often more like a page of spider’s footprints! You may think of using quantisation to accurately align note-on events and note lengths, but hard quantising would kill the nuances of the performance, whilst iterative quantising is unlikely to solve problems caused by over-accuracy, because some timing subtlety will remain. This issue can then be compounded by notes that are played slightly off-time, and which therefore result in unintended rests being created to ‘pad’ the note start positions and/or length.

#Cubase tutorial book series#

a 1/4 note), but is in fact a smidgen shorter or longer than a quarter of a bar as measured by a super-accurate computer, then it may end up being drawn as a series of tied notes whose lengths add up to what was actually played. When Cubase can’t work out what was intended, it falls back on pure accuracy, which isn’t as desirable as you may think.įor example, where a note is played as a crotchet (i.e. Cubase does try to notate what you intended rather than exactly what you have played, but there are limits to what this can achieve, especially when it comes to complex polyphonic parts. If you are coming at things from the other direction, aiming to notate something you’ve already performed and recorded as MIDI data, the computer’s lack of innate human empathy and understanding can create other complications.

Ultimately it falls to the performer to decipher the composer’s intended meaning, as computers – modern advanced AI aside – are not the best at interpreting things that are so… well… human. But music notation is a much more interpretive form of script, and whilst it is perfectly capable of defining a specific pitch without any ambiguity, the timing, feel, fingering, dynamics and so-on can be much more open to interpretation. When writing a spoken language such as English there is not much room for ambiguity in how you represent each word – you either spell a word correctly so that it can be understood, or you dot’n, and it ins’t. Unfortunately, things are rarely as straightforward as they may appear!

“Fabulous!” we all thought back in 1989 when we witnessed our improvised keyboard noodles being instantly converted into notation, “No more spending hours with pen and expensive manuscript paper writing out parts for ‘the talent’ to perform”. Cubase has been able to convert MIDI recordings into such notation, as well as allow the user to enter music in notated form that can then be played as MIDI notes, ever since the very first version. Printed music, notation, scoring, ‘the dots’ – call it what you will, this method of representing music in a visual form has existed for hundreds of years, and remains the principal written language of music.