My first thoughts about Cubase 10 Pro with our Arranger Keyboards

[Normanfernandez]

I've had Cubase for about two weeks

The Interface of a DAW is massively different from our Arranger Keyboards.

Few things that I'm finding difficult to do. 
1.. Almost Everything has to be Recorded on a DAW.
     You may get a Drum Loop but for the rest of the Instruments.

2. A lot of the Native Instruments ( Funk Guitar) ( Strummed Acoustic)
  Are hard to Understand and also Follow the Correct key.

3.  I had difficulty to sync start my Recording. 

4. Being Virtual, a lot of the Functions are not on the surface

5.  Just to find a balance between two instructions is hard.


For a lot of reasons the Keyboard feels more connected to the Performance. Even with it's flaws. 

This is not a rant or something to Discourage people from DAWs. 
But I'd prefer the keyboard any day...
Regards Norman

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Hi
Cubase takes a lot of time to get your head around ,but if you keep going and ask questions you will start to progress.
I too have had many head scatching moments..

All the Best
John

[Pino]

Norman
What do you want out of Cubase
Correct mistakes, add tracks, audio?

My opinion
Don't waste too much of your time
You will spend 100s of hours for little return
I have been working with midi for a long, long time
Cubase and YAMAHA arrangers is not a good marriage,👹
Cubase and Korg or Ketron, better.

Better use that time on your keyboard
Practice and you will play very good
Play very good and easy to make a good recording
Easier and much quicker to record directly on your keyboard, add tracks there, the better the player the easier to add extra tracks.

As an arranger player better to spend your time on 'StyleMagic' or similar and make good styles and be able to edit existing styles to exactly the way you want

Once you take the midi from a Yamaha arranger keyboard to a DAW it loses its sparkle, and needs many hours of work to get it back to something good.

Good luck.
Pino

[beykock]

Hi Pino :

You are absuletly right ! 👍

Yamaha arranger keyboards and Cubase are not a happy family yet ... and probably will never be.😰

Since Yamaha and Steinberg are married together
( in 2002 ! ) a real Yamaha arranger keyboard editing PC
and / or MAC program has never been made by Steinberg. 🐻

A wrong marketing decision ? 😻
Only they can answer that question.

Best wishes, Babette

[robinez]

I've had Cubase for about two weeks

The Interface of a DAW is massively different from our Arranger Keyboards.

Few things that I'm finding difficult to do. 
1.. Almost Everything has to be Recorded on a DAW.
     You may get a Drum Loop but for the rest of the Instruments.

true, a DAW is a different kind of area of making music then playing on a keyboard with styles.

A daw is a unlimited track recorder where you can record you own songs. Every track can contain a sound, for instance a piano track, a bass track or a drum track. It depends on your method of working in what you can record on it:

- Midi: record note and control change information for the selected sound
- Audio: a 'wav' recording per track

by combining all those tracks together you can create a song.

you don't have to play all the parts by the way if you integrate a yamaha genos with it. But more on that later.

If you work with audio files i would highly recommend to install LoopCloud, this gives you free audio loops every week from lots of different kind of sample cd's from their collection.

If you work with midi then it is possible to buy midi loop libraries with patterns or you play them in yourself.

2. A lot of the Native Instruments ( Funk Guitar) ( Strummed Acoustic)
  Are hard to Understand and also Follow the Correct key.

That kind of libraries can be seens as megavoices, they have lots of tricks by holding certain notes for your performance, it's nessecary to read the included documention of that library to see how they work.

3.  I had difficulty to sync start my Recording. 

The method to use is called Midi clock Sync (master and slave), basically it sends a midi clock signal to the connected devices. You need to determine if cubase is leading (master), in that case you have to set the genos (slave) to listen to the midi clock and set cubase to send the midi clock through the yamaha driver to the genos. Or when the genos is leading (master) then you have to set cubase to be the slave.

4. Being Virtual, a lot of the Functions are not on the surface

That's because in a virtual environment you can control almost anything. The way to go in cubase is to use the Eight Quick Controls in the inspector. You have to set your midi controller settings (in your case the genos knobs) in cubase to the eight quick controls. Once you have done that you can assign the parameters for each track that you want to control on each cubase track. It's very easy to setup during a project once you have done it once.

The genos has a midi template for that called mst kbd 1 (with aftertouch) or mst kbd 2 (without aftertouch) or clock start A (to slave the genos to cubase), also when working with cubase it's important to set the genos to local off to avoid double note data.

5.  Just to find a balance between two instructions is hard.

there is a seperate document on the yamaha site that explains how to setup your genos with a computer:
https://nl.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/4/329494/computer_en_rm_m0.pdf

also in the genos reference menu check chapter 12, there is more info about this.


Another thing which is absolutely a must, is to install the Genos Cubase Patch script:
https://nl.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/0/1150540/Cubase_Patch_for_Genos.zip

You need to create an external instrument in cubase for this to work and when you did this then you can select the genos in cubase as an instrument in cubase INCLUDING all sounds selections by name. Really convenient because if you need a specific sound from the genos on a certain channel then it's just a matter to select that instrument, channel and choose the sound preset from a list in cubase.


So basically,
the genos can be setup perfectly in cubase, to be fair you need to have a good knowledge from cubase to make it work but when you are going to use a daw then some study is needed (it's more complicated then a keyboard), but you can integrate it in any way you want.

I use the Genos with cubase pro 10 and with ableton live suite 10,  in both daw's it works flawlessly.

If you have any additional questions don't hesitate to ask, i would gladly help you further with this if needed.

[Pino]

Hi Robinez

Thanks for a great reply and some excellent tips.

You sound like a man that's put in them 1000s of hours over many years to get to this level of experience, I think the earlier point I made to Norman was exactly that, he really needs to put the hours in and experiment by trial and error, I've been there, done it and still do on some projects, it probably takes 2 weeks just to figure out how to get a project running and getting the feel of the basic tasks.

Could you show us exactly the benefit of recording through Cubase.

Maybe you could record a 32 bar song on your Genos using the onboard styles and save to 'wave' and then same 32 bar song recorded directly to Cubase using the same Genos style and save as 'wave', joint the 2 wave files together and upload here,

I, and I would say other members would like to hear the difference in the two recordings  maybe would encourage other members to get interested in working with external software,

Regards

Pino.

[robinez]

Hi Robinez

Thanks for a great reply and some excellent tips.

You sound like a man that's put in them 1000s of hours over many years to get to this level of experience, I think the earlier point I made to Norman was exactly that, he really needs to put the hours in and experiment by trial and error, I've been there, done it and still do on some projects, it probably takes 2 weeks just to figure out how to get a project running and getting the feel of the basic tasks.

I use cubase since version 1 on the atari st, so those 1000's of hours are probably right. It's indeed impossible to learn all the cubase features in a few weeks, but the basics of working with cubase are definitely possible in two weeks.

Could you show us exactly the benefit of recording through Cubase.

Maybe you could record a 32 bar song on your Genos using the onboard styles and save to 'wave' and then same 32 bar song recorded directly to Cubase using the same Genos style and save as 'wave', joint the 2 wave files together and upload here,

I, and I would say other members would like to hear the difference in the two recordings  maybe would encourage other members to get interested in working with external software,

i've read this multiple times on this forum and my opinion is that it's a misconception to think that the quality is different when you record directly in cubase. Of course the DAC convertors of your sound card will have some influence on the sound but that's minimal and probably hardly noticeable.

What you can do however is use the same wav in cubase that you record in your genos and do some mastering on the endresult. Then the outcome of both wavs will be very different. The mastered version will sound much more dynamic and much more detailed in some area's. I could do a demo of that in the future. But even then, i think it's a demo that not many people will be able to execute. Babette was correct in one of the threads, using software is quite expensive and i use quite expensive add on plugins for that mastering process.

So it's all possible, but there is a cost to it.

Personally i think that most people here will be happy if they see the voice list in cubase and hear the sound coming from the genos through cubase so that they can play and modify midi files from cubase or create their own songs in cubase with the genos. It's not that hard to set that up and if people are interested in such a tutorial i could create one, just let me know that there is interest in such kind of tutorials and what you want to see in the tutorials.

[ton37]

............. Personally i think that most people here will be happy if they see the voice list in cubase and hear the sound coming from the genos through cubase so that they can play and modify midi files from cubase or create their own songs in cubase with the genos. It's not that hard to set that up and if people are interested in such a tutorial i could create one, just let me know that there is interest in such kind of tutorials ........

Dear Robinez, that would be very generous of you! Just as you write: all I want is to (slightly) modify the midifiles I played with my psr., as I prefer working on the PC as that is more 'handy' than on the Yammie itself. Allthought I have a s975, I suppose that the basics would be the same. Groetjes

[Normanfernandez]

I'll be really grateful if you could make a Tutorial Video.

Also Thanks to all for the Help,
It's true I'll need to spend A lot of time on Cubase. 

Also Mastering a song is a good idea.
I could add Instruments from Native to fill up the gaps.

And what I meant by Sync Record.

Our Keyboard has the option to Sync Start.
On Cubase if you hit Record, it doesn't wait for a Midi input to start the Recording.

I'll definitely post my questions here...
Thank again!!
Regards Norman!

[Pino]

Norman

When I start learning a new software I do it step by step
I open a 'note taking' app like 'IOS pages'
I make a sub heading. Eg, Sync Start

Then I will look around the internet, YouTube and the user manual
If I see some information that may help, I copy it
Then I will paste it into my Notes app, inc photos

Then try a few things, if I get something to work then I will make a note of how I got it to work, may help the next day when maybe I forgotten,

Take a break every hour 🍺

Good luck

Pino

[beykock]

Hi,

It takes at least more than 1 year and even much longer before one is capable of making a nice production in a DAW.

A DAW is not a toy but a professional tool to record, edit and master audio.

Blood, Sweat and Tears + a lot of Time, Frustration,  tons of Patience and an important amount of Money.

Not only a DAW is necessary but also excellent hardware is needed to make your dreams come true.

Do not expect everybody will like your final product.

Only fools like me love multitrack recording. 😷

Cheers, Babette