Computer Music on Steinberg Cubase 5

Computer Music has managed to bag front row seats to the Steinberg press event and – yes! – Cubase 5 is the big announcement. It looks like our earlier predictions have come true, but what can we expect to see? Read on to find out exactly how the Cubase 5 presentation went down…

The event kicks off with the announcement that Yamaha/Steinberg have joined the METAlliance, but once this is over, it’s straight onto Cubase 5, with a demo and run through some of the new features!

First up is something called VariAudio, which is built directly into Cubase’s sample editor (ie, it’s not a plug-in). It’s a Melodyne-style pitch editor, with graphical pitch editing. It looks very slick and convenient, and could make third-party pitch-editing solutions redundant for some Cubase users. Take a look:

There’s also a pitch-correction plug-in for real-time use (T-Pain wannabes, take note), with the usual options such as male/female voice, scale selection, and so on.

“Reverence is a wonderful thing”, we’re told – turns out that Reverence is a convolution reverb plug-in with plenty of impulse samples supplied, eg, wooden church, stadium, New York ballroom, etc. An information button reveals exactly what room the sample was recorded in. You can import your own impulse responses too, thank goodness. Being VST3, it’s also surround-ready, which will please soundtrack composers who like to screw with your sense of direction.

There’s a new sampling drum machine instrument called Groove Agent ONE. Drag in a loop and it will slice it up into individual hits and assign them to the pads. There are plenty of preset sounds supplied and overall it looks like a useful, no-nonsense tool, if not especially in-depth.

More detailed is the LoopMash instrument, which can take up to eight loops and use “artificial intelligence” to (we think) extract musical elements from the grooves and resequence them dynamically to create fresh loops. Whatever, it sounds pretty cool pumping out of PA system. A colourful animated display showing which bits of the loop are playing at any time. Here, take a peek:

See those eight faders on the left? These are not volume controls, but actually determine how many slices of each loop to use in its replay, and when you’ve dialled in a setting (preset) you like, it can be assigned to the pads at the bottom. Each loop has its own audio output, so you can process them separately in the mixer. Steinberg’s people seem pretty excited about this one, and with good reason, as it’s pretty original – nice one, Steinberg!

The spectacularly monikered demonstrator, Rodney Orpheus, is talking about game and movie soundtracks now, and the inherent problems with creating expressive orchestral performances via MIDI. He reckons that with VST3’s VST Expression system, it’s going to be a lot easier to use the numerous articulations that are needed for a convincing performance. Garritan are already confirmed as a company whose products will work with this. The below screenshot makes VST Expression a lot easier to understand – check out the area at the bottom.

Rodney rounds off the presentation by mentioning a few smaller, workflow-enhancing features. First there’s one we’ve longed for for some time: batch export! Render each track of your project to a separate audio file in one go – simple but effective (we hope). Mediabay has been improved and optimised and there’s 64-bit Vista support, allowing one to address up to 1 terabyte of memory – blimey.

Lastly, there’s a new Tempo track, which replaces the old Tempo window – again, this is something we always wished Cubase had, so that’s another item to cross off our Cubase wishlist. Here’s how the Tempo track looks:

There’s obviously much more to Cubase 5 than what we’ve seen, but first impressions are that it’s a great update, bringing an extra dash of creativity to Cubase.

But how does it stack up against Ableton Live 8, also announced at NAMM? It’s hard to say right now, but stay tuned to this very blog for Computer Music’s first impressions of Live 8!

Tags: Computer Music, Cubase, Hi-tech, namm, Steinberg

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.