The other new plug-ins is MIDI Monitor which, thanks to its List Editor-style display, is handy for investigating MIDI issues. There are numerous options for editing beats and transferring them to MIDI clips too. You can apply two, three, or four-stroke 'flams' to each individual hit, with the timing and velocity of them definable by the user. It's a MIDI effect plug-in with a resizable GUI (some of the other plug-ins could do with this!) whereby you click to toggle cells on and off, and drag to change velocity, shown by colour.Įach drum can use one of two swing settings, and there's an offset lane for moving sounds ahead of or behind the beat. One great trick is that you can slice a loop in the Sample Editor, drop the resulting clips onto Groove Agent One, and drag a MIDI clip that triggers the loop back onto the Project Window, a la ReCycle.īeat Designer is GA One's step sequencing counterpart (but it can drive any other instrument, of course). There are 43 good-quality kits supplied, and you can also import Akai MPC files in.
On a per-pad basis, you can set levels, panning, looping, tuning, assignment to the 16 stereo outs, filtering, amp envelope and more. Sounds are added to the 16 pads by dragging, and you can velocity-layer up to eight on each (but you can't stack them to play back together). The new Groove Agent One is a simple MPC-esque drum sampler. LoopMash is a groovy concept, but the bottom line is that getting good results out of it is generally more hassle than it's worth. We often experienced a confusing error complaining about the region being outside the file, too. If your loops aren't already tagged with their BPM in MediaBay, LoopMash doesn't always get the slicing right, so odd-length loops or beats running at double-speed can occur. There are further options, but that's the crux of it. Sliders determine how likely it is that a given loop's slices are selected. Select a master loop, hit play, and slices are pulled from all the loops to 'recreate' the master loop using different sounds. The idea is that you throw in rhythmic loops and they're chopped up, with the slices analysed for similarities. There are two new instruments in Cubase 5, both of a rhythmic bent. Listen to a dry vocal and then hear it processed by Reverence: Instruments and plug-ins Downsides are that it introduces a small amount of latency, which can make it unsuitable for live tracking/monitoring, and that the smooth parameter changing sometimes means a delay before you hear the results of your tweaking. You can set the pre-delay scale the IR to set the decay length set the size of the room (this seems to work by 'skewing' the frequency response) set the mix between early and late parts of the signal and where they're divided apply EQ and engage auto-gain and reverse.Ī matrix at the top of the GUI lets you recall up to 36 reverb setups - very handy! Sonically, it's much like any other quality convolution reverb that is to say, excellent. Once loaded, you can view a waveform or spectrogram (frequency response over time).
It comes with a library of impulse responses, some with surround versions too, and you can import your own. The other new audio effect for Cubase 5 is a convolution reverb named Reverence. Listen to a dry vocal, followed by subtle and extreme examples of PitchCorrect in use: Convolution reverb Quality-wise, both VariAudio and PitchCorrect sound the business. It's only a shame that it doesn't offer diatonic (ie, in key) pitchshifting too. It offers the expected features such as speed of retuning, tolerance, transposition and formant-shifting. You can quantise to a chromatic, minor or major scale, or a custom one defined by clicking notes on the on-screen keyboard. There's also a real-time pitch correction effect called - wait for it - PitchCorrect. With the latter, you step through segments with each key press. Get under the hood of VariAudio and there are more subtle adjustments to be made, such as altering the start or end pitch of a segment, or 'tilting' its pitch curve exporting the notes as MIDI data and setting the notes via MIDI. Typical uses of VariAudio include editing the pitch of individual notes by dragging them applying pitch quantising so that notes are more in tune and 'straightening' notes to remove wavering pitch or suppress vibrato.