Should i buy cubase 6

It should be added that we did not play to a click in the first place, or even begin at the beginning of a bar - this might as well be a random recording dumped straight into program. Playing back the original beat with the metronome enabled proved that the two were both now locked together. This is truly excellent, and makes tempo map creation a breeze, although there are additional functions available if you need to deal with more tricky material.

Things don't stop there. If you want to shoe-horn your 'free drumming' into a fixed tempo project, just select 'Set Definition From Tempo' from the Audio menu, and the tempo changes will be hard wired to that particular audio event. By enabling 'Musical Mode' in the Pool the event will automatically track any changes in the Project tempo by timestretching or pitch-shifting the audio. It's worth pointing out that these tempo definitions can be stored within a project, or as part of an audio file's metadata - especially useful for reusability across multiple projects.

Hitpoint detection has also been improved. We always found that although quite good on some material, the earlier Cubase algorithms seemed to require quite a lot of tidying-up, and were especially prone to placing hitpoints before the main transient peak of certain drum hits. We can confirm that there is a most definite improvement in C6, with much more accurate placement of the hitpoints using just one click. The Sensitivity slider has been replaced with a 'Threshold' control to determine how many hitpoints to use, which works in a manner similar to a noise gate familiar to users of the Detect Silence function , and gives clear visual feedback.

Cubase 6 is now very well-equipped in the multi-track editing department. Although there are no radically new and different synth-based instruments provided with Cubase 6, there are two noteworthy examples of progress on Steinberg's part. HALionOne, although sonically good, was most definitely limited in terms of functionality. HALion Sonic SE however is the little sister to the full featured HALion Sonic workstation, and provides multi-channel access to a range of very high-quality sounds, featuring much more in the way of editing and flexibility than before.

In fact, mixing, effects and control are much more developed here, and even disk streaming is utilised to accommodate growing content size. When ordered you will be contacted with an expected delivery date. Rate this Product. Review Title. Product Experience I own it I've tried it I've heard about it. Catharines St. Your Name. Email Address. Error: All rate fields have to be selected. Submit Review. Add a reply. Submit Reply. Flag this review. Your Email. People with such lofty ambitions are more likely to be put off by the restricted effects library.

Cubase 6's best-sounding effects are absent from the Elements version, and the ones that remain are more utilitarian than inspiring. There are lots of compatible third-party effects in VST format on the market, but with most serious contenders costing hundreds of pounds, relying purely on these can get seriously expensive. Sign up for our daily newsletter Newsletter. And although Steinberg haven't exactly been resting on their laurels — Cubase 5.

Shown for the first time at this year's Winter NAMM show, Cubase 6 had plenty of new features to both delight and surprise. As with Logic 9, the first thing you notice about Cubase 6 is that its physical package has been made smaller. While this is great for the environment, it means that Steinberg no longer supply the Cubase Operation Manual in a physical form, which is perhaps a shame.

However, it has to be acknowledged that PDF manuals have long been commonplace; and should you want to read the manual away from your computer, I suppose you can always put the documentation on a tablet device like the iPad, even though it's not quite the same. Let's not even joke about printing it out. Cubase 6 is supplied on six DVDs, although the main application itself only requires one disc. These tutorials were produced by Streamworks Audio and should provide a good starting point for new users — even though the lady providing the instruction sounds distractingly reminiscent of someone desperately trying to disguise a heavy cold.

Steinberg have once again tweaked the appearance of Cubase's user interface for version six, building on some of the changes introduced in Cubase 5. While some of these changes have not necessarily been welcome — see the Nuendo 5 review for comments on transparent panes and the lack of dividing lines for toolbar buttons — I have to say that, on the whole, I rather like the appearance of Cubase 6.

The interface seems a little more refined, and the Inspector in particular has become much cleaner, adopting the curved Section headers reminiscent of those first seen in Nuendo 3, though I still wish it was possible to disable the recently introduced, limacine animation you now have to endure when opening and closing Inspector Sections.

Anot her aspect of the Nuendo 5 aesthetic that's been inherited by Cubase 6 is the way in which parts are displayed on the Project window. Previously, parts were drawn as solid blocks of colour, but now they're drawn with illecebrous linear gradients, making it much easier to distinguish parts on different tracks, especially at small track heights.

Staying on the subject of colour, Cubase now adopts Nuendo's method of displaying track colours. Previously, you would enable track colours by clicking on a button at the head of the Track List, and a track-colours bar would appear next to each track's meter.

Now, track colours are always enabled, and shown in the area where the track number is displayed. This area used to be coloured according to track type grey for MIDI, blue for audio, and so on , but I think it makes far more sense to display the track colour here. One small thing that might further enhance track colours is if the whole background of a track could reflect its colour, as is the case in Pro Tools.

This could potentially look quite vulgar, but it could also make navigating long Track Lists much easier. One of my favourite features in Cubase 5 was VST Expression, which simplified the process of working with instruments that contained multiple articulations within a single patch.

This was incredibly helpful to those working with large orchestral libraries, where a violin patch might contain different playing styles, such as legato, staccato, pizzicato, and so on.

Using VST Expression, a map could be created to enable articulation changes to be edited visually in a Controller lane, rather than the user having to deal with anonymous keyswitches. However, the real power behind VST Expression was arguably its pervasive implementation across different areas of Cubase.

In addition to being able to switch between articulations such as legato and pizzicato using what Cubase termed as Directions, it was also possible to specify additional Attributes for certain notes. For example, you might be playing the legato articulation or Direction , but want to make one note play an accent using a different sample set.

Assuming your map was set up correctly, this could be achieved by setting a note's Attribute to Accent in the Event Infoline. An accent symbol would automatically be added to the appropriate note in the Score editor. For those who are interested, 'VST Expression' is now used as a marketing term to describe a family of related functionality that includes Expression Maps.

One of the hurdles to overcome when using VST Expression in Cubase 5 was that suitable Maps would first need to exist for instruments. Some Maps were made available by developers, but often users would need to create them manually.

And while not exactly a task that would validate an application for Mensa, this extra step may have prevented some from garnering the full potential of Expression Maps. This situation has changed in Cubase 6. Thanks to a 3. Assuming you have a suitable VST 3. Select this, and you'll be ready to go. The fact that the command to automatically create Expression Maps is called 'Import Key Switches' is an indication that, disappointingly, the concept of Expression Maps in general is still tied to keyswitches.

By keyswitch, I mean a note on the keyboard that triggers an articulation change instead of making a sound.

Although keyswitches are arguably the most common approach used by libraries, it does seem a shame that you can't trigger different sample sets or Sound Slots, to use the Cubase terminology via other MIDI messages, such as program or control changes.

This is particularly annoying given the fact that you can make a Sound Slot change trigger different types of MIDI messages if you want to make a Map that works with older hardware synths.

This makes it possible to colour data in the Key editor by the different articulations, so that legato notes might appear red, pizzicato blue, and so on. This is visually very helpful, but one slight quirk is that while the notes themselves are coloured, the actual Articulation Events in the Controller lane don't follow the same colour scheme and remain a single colour.

This makes it harder at a glance to understand what colour represents a given articulation, and it would be great if the Articulation Controller lane could also follow the 'Colour by Sound Slot' instruction.

To complement the newly improved Expression Maps, Cubase 6 introduces what is quite simply a breakthrough new feature: Note Expression. Since the emergence of MIDI, now nearly 30 years ago, the role of making programmed music sound more expressive has fallen to MIDI controller messages. For the most part, the use of MIDI controllers has worked quite well — except for one limitation.

And since, in most cases, a track in Cubase is assigned to one MIDI channel, it means that all notes on a given track will be affected by the data in the Controller lanes.

It's impossible to play a chord on one track, for example, and only have the top note crescendo — unless you were to assign that note to a different track or MIDI channel. MIDI itself offered a solution to this problem with a special message type called polyphonic pressure sometimes known as polyphonic aftertouch. You might be familiar with 'channel aftertouch' if you have a synth like the Access Virus, where, after you've played a chord, you can keep the notes held down and by applying further pressure, modulate a certain parameter within the synth.

However, the modulation will be applied to all notes on the MIDI channel, as we've just been discussing. The idea behind polyphonic pressure is that it makes it possible for a keyboard to transmit a stream of aftertouch values for each note independently. Anyone familiar with Yamaha's classic CS80 synth will know exactly what I'm talking about. However, keyboards offering polyphonic pressure never really took off, partly because they were more expensive to produce. Another problem was that even though you could record polyphonic pressure messages into a sequencer, there was no really good way to edit that data.