Create Realistic MIDI Productions Using Cubase

1. Introduction: Hey there, my name is Will, and I've been producing music in my own commercial studio and my home studio now for about 15 or 20 years. In that time, I've done a lot of production for bands, for singer-songwriters, individual artists, EDM. And these days I do quite a lot with TV and film, music production, writing cues and that sort of thing. And I have relied throughout my career heavily on Cubase. One of the reasons for that is it's amazing capabilities for building realistic and expressive compositions using midi. Now, Cubase is unparalleled with its many features and its usability. And in this section, what I want to focus on is the power of Cuvier's, the individual features, whether it's the score editor, whether it is note expression which is a VS T3 feature that was started in Cubase. Or just using typical CC controllers to create that expressiveness in music that's so important to help us differentiate between what's fake and what's real. In this section, I'm gonna be talking about all of those different concepts, as well as offering insights from the perspective of a producer that's hopefully going to help you understand how to choose your instruments and then how to use them, and how to ensure that what you are producing really does have that realistic real-world sound. It really sounds professional. And how to achieve that both in terms of using your controllers, but also in terms of behind the scenes. How to make sure that Cubase is configured correctly so that your workflow is optimized. Now, if you are a producer of any kind, if you're obviously doing TV or film or trailer music, you're looking at ways to improve the realism of yours, your recordings. This course is going to be great for you. If you are an EDM producer or you are an engineer, mixing engineer working in a commercial studio. But you want to be able to add ensembles. You want to be able to add realistic piano or a string backing tracks for your artists than this course is going to be great for you. It's going to be a rather cohesive and comprehensive course centered around the middy concepts within Cubase. So if that sounds like it's a good match for you, then I look forward to seeing you in the course. Thanks for checking it out. 2. Choosing Libraries: Now one of the first things you're going to have to deal with when you start trying to create realistic media productions is choosing your libraries and your sounds. And I have a couple of tips that I think make a huge difference. And you'd get this same tip from just about anybody who's doing this professionally. You need to have sound libraries and VST instruments that are capable of dramatic dynamics and contrast in terms of timber. So what does that really mean? Well, timbre is the difference between something when it's soft or when it's loud. E.g. if we were to just sample the sound of a trombone, and we were to use that same sample of the trombone at every level, whether it's loud or whether it's quiet, it doesn't sound real because when a real trombone player blows through their horn, the intensity of their air, how hard they're blowing. That changes the Tambora. How bright is it? How dark is it? If you're a guitarist, you know, playing on the low strings, your guitar sound a little more melancholy and a little more dull. Whereas the higher strings on a guitar sound brighter and sharper. These kinds of timber oil changes are essential to getting a realistic sound. Now, there's another aspect to this, which is just variation, right? So we can get variation in Midea with things like velocity share. We're going to talk about using ADCC controllers in order to use expression and modulation, that sort of thing. But an important thing to make sure is integrated into your sound libraries of choice are things like round robins. That's where you have multiple samples. And the sampling engine, the instrument is choosing a random or cycling through a collection of samples. In other words, even if you hit that same trombone pitch repeatedly with exactly the same velocity, you don't get exactly the same sample. And that actually is what a real trombone sounds like each time it's played, even if it's the same player at the same moment, trying to get the same pitch and the same dynamic level, it is going to be slightly different and that feature is built into VST instruments is called round robins. Another thing to look at is velocity layers. So a lower mini velocity, say around 60, should trigger a specific sample that's different from a sample that's triggered at a velocity of 80 or 100 or 120. And that's because as somebody plays an instrument, whether it's abode instrumental guitar or a trombone, at different loudness is that instrument is going to have different timbres. And it's important that your instrument has sampled those different timbres that they're designed within the instrument to be triggered by different velocities within your midi. So you want to look for round robins, you want to look for lots of velocity layers. And those kinds of features are going to make a big difference as you move forward. If you don't have those features built into your instruments, then a lot of the work that you can do using expression and dynamics with the mod wheel, e.g. these different mid ECC controllers, different velocities, they're not going to have the same impact if your instrument doesn't have those capabilities. Okay, So you want to first start out with top-notch instruments. You don't have to go out and get the very best instruments. There are lots and lots of great instruments out there that are reasonably affordable, but you want to look for those specific features. Let's continue on. 3. Starting in Score Editor: My compositions start with a chord progression and I'm thinking about harmony in my head. Even if I'm working with an ensemble, even if I'm working with a whole orchestra, my adventure usually starts with some kind of harmonic progression. And I like to sometimes be able to split those out in a score. And other times I want to be able to work with the committee. So I'm gonna show you in this lesson how to just record a simple chord progression. I'm sure many of the students in this course already know how to do that. But I'm really specifically looking at putting that in the score editor and some tweaks we can make the squared error so that the score is readable. But also we are working with midi in our Cubase project window that is gonna be kinda native to the DAW environment. So let's take a look at that. So what I've done here is just created a 16 bar midi event here. And this is based upon these core. And you can hear that playing here through my strings track, Am I strings track is actually an instrument track. And it is running an instance of contact here. And I'm running something called Session strings Pro to. But you could also do this with Halley on Sonic as example. So I'm just gonna kinda walk you through that and show you how this works in the context of the score editor. Now, if I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to just delete all of this. Going to get rid of these tracks. So I don't have anything. I'm starting from scratch. And I'm gonna go over to my instruments over here. And I'm going to choose Halle on Sonic SE, which should be something that most of the students of this course have. Just in case they don't have contact or you don't have session strings Pro. So I've got my instance of Halley on Sonic here. One of the nice things about using Halley on, or Halley on Sonic or Haley on Sonic SE is that they support note expression, which is a VST three feature that I like to use a lot, but it's really only implemented well in these highly on projects, products and within Cubase. So I have not had a lot of luck using Node expression in other Dawes or in other instruments like contact unfortunately, so highly on Sonic is a really nice library actually to get started with, especially if you're trying to just do a mock-up or something like that. Now I'm going to add a chord track here as well. I like cord tracks because they give me a nice overview of what's going on in my music harmonically. So I'm going to switch to the pencil tool. And I'm just gonna put in some chords here. Let's say every 2 bar. And right now I don't have my grid set appropriately. I want to set my grid to 1 bar so that these will snap right to that bar there. So yeah, every 2 bar, I'm going to put in a chord and I'm going to go through, I'm going to just make a real basic chord progression here. I'm going to start with G. I'll start with the G major seven. I'm going to go to, let's say, a D7 chord, not a music theory course. So if my choice and cords doesn't make sense to you, then you won't feel free to contact me and I'm happy to explain where I got these from. Then. Let's see. I'm going to go up to E minor, E minor seven. Then I'm going to, let's see, bring that down to C major. Let's just see how the sound here. Well, of course I've got to run this into Halley on Sonic. And then I've also got to choose an actual sound here. So I'm just going to look for a string ensemble. I'm doing a search for string and then I get these different things here. I don't want an '80s ensemble. I'm just going to go with, Let's see, cinematic strings. Actually, I'll do Chamber Strings. See what that sounds like. That's good enough for getting started on my comps. Shouldn't be checked out. The cinematic style. Little heavy heart, a little heavy handed. So I'll go back to chambers. Alright, then I'm going to change this to, let's say an, a minor. I will go to D. And then I'm going to go back to G. And I'm going to change this, the final chord to achieve. So let's see how these sound. Well, nothing is playing right now. So what I need to do is actually put these in the middle. I'm going to take my chords and I'm just going to drag them up here. And you can see that each one of the chords in my Korczak became an actual midi event. Now when I play it, I'm not gonna make you sit through that whole thing. But suffice it to say that we've got a basic chord progression. Now, I could have also gone ahead and record this into my midi track or my instrument track through my keyboard. So I'm gonna do that quickly. I'm going to go back to the beginning here. I'm going to hit Record and I'm just going to record these chords out from my midi controller. Alright, so I've got those cores written in there. The difference between this version and the original version is that these were played by me. And as a result, they're not exactly on the grid as they were if I just drag these events up there, right? So if I look at this in my score editor, which I can go up here to the score menu and open score editor. What I get is sort of a nutty looking score, and this is one of the things I want to address in this lesson. This is kind of a nutty looking score, and that's because kubernetes is being very, very literal about what I've done and I can actually make it so that in Cubase, I don't have to quantize all of my mini. That's the last thing I wanna do because I want my midi to be realistic. I want it to have some humanity. But I also may want to give people a score that's actually useful. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my score settings. If you don't know how to open that up, you're going to click right here on this little black bar. That's going to bring up your score settings. Once you're in your score settings, you want to click on the staff tab up here. And then of these sub-tabs, you want to make sure you're on Main and you want to look at this section right here that says Display quantize, this is gonna be essential. So right now, it's basically quantizing my, my score to 16th notes. But I'm actually going to change that to something much simpler and do coordinate notes. I'm going to hit apply. And you can see that this score gets a lot simpler, okay? That's much more like it. So I do still have some arrests in here. And that's because my midi chords, they drop off. So that is actually what the media is doing. But I was able to tidy this up significantly without having to quantize my timing. I've also got this F sharp in here naturally. And I can go ahead and change my key by dragging this here. I'm gonna go to that, which we'll see after I hit Apply here is now I don't have the F sharps in my D chord anymore. They're over here in the key signature. So those are some tips for working with the score editor and not in the next lesson, we're actually going to derive the chord track from this score. 4. Deriving a Chord Track: So in the last lesson, we just created a very simple score. I created a very simple harmonic progression. In this lesson, I just want to point out how we can take that score and how we can derive it back into a chord track. Because sometimes I want to just record something first and make the cord Jack later. Other times I start by drawing in a chord track and then I go to the score, but I want you to have the flexibility of going both ways. Alright, so now what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to delete my old chord progression here from the chord track. And I'm going to imagine that I just actually started by doing my recording straight into a midi track and I wanted to get a chord track from it. So it's as simple as I get the opposite way. You do have a variety of choices here. If you want to see bass notes like slash chord notation, you want to know what's in the base, you can select that. I'm not gonna do that here. Include tensions like 9s, 11s, detect arpeggios and turn those into chords. What I'm playing here is clearly block chords. It doesn't have any arpeggios in. It. Interprets sustain pedal. I have not used a sustained pedal. I don't wanna do that. I'm going to hit Okay? And this is what it came up with for me. So the one thing that's a little different here is my B minor seven. I had actually played that a little more as a G chord with a nine on it. But this B minor seven is fine in my chord chart or my chord track rather. So that's how easy it is to derive a chord track. And now any other instruments that I want to load in here, this cord tract can now feed those as well. So if I came over here to VST instruments and I were to grab my addictive keys plug-in here, which is kind of like a Rhodes instrument. And I were to send this Korczak over there. You can see I'm getting both the addictive keys and my original strings. And I can send this Korczak anyway. Now that's really just the beginning of the cortex. As you can see later on in this course, we're going to be spending quite a bit of time deriving different voices like SATB voices, soprano base, that sort of thing from this core track. And that's really going to empower us to do an awful lot of creativity within our production. So in the next lesson, we are going to start looking at using voices to orchestrate. 5. Orchestrating With Voices: Now for a lot of music producers who are trying to compose orchestral music for cues and TV trailers, that sort of thing. We often want to be able to think in terms of voices, soprano, alto, tenor, that sort of thing. Because these voices have a lot of traditional connotations as far as what kind of instruments they would be sent to. And it's just one of the ways that we can convey more realism in our media music if we think and behave the way that a traditional composer would think. So In this lesson, we're going to look at how we can start using those voices from this very simple chord progression that I've already played into the project. And you're going to see how voices start to offer us some amazing flexibility within Cubase. So before I do anything to my track, I want to duplicate it. I'm gonna come up here to my basically track versions. I'm going to say duplicate. What that's gonna do is gonna mean I can make changes to this midi event. But if I make some terrible mistake, I can always go back. So that's a good, a good workflow tip. Okay, so I've got this midi event. And what I wanna do now is I want to have it selected. And I'm gonna go up to my project menu up here and select project. And I'm going to go down to chord track. Then from Kortrijk, I'm gonna go to Assign voices to notes. What we're going to see is that each of the notes within this were assigned a voice. So let's actually look at the midi down here in the key editor. Let's just choose this note right here. So you see now up here it says voice is Soprano. This has been assigned to tenor and bass. So each of these nodes has been assigned based on Cubase is idea of what would be the most appropriate voice. And I can do that automatically by going Project chord, track down to assign voices to note. The difference here is now if I go to my old version, right, my old track version, the original. And I look at that Midea. This note does not have any voice value. If I wanted to select one and manually assign it, and I can do that. But in one short motion of my mouse, I created a version that has all of that already in it for me. So now I have soprano. Every one of these nodes has been assigned a voice. And that's gonna be important as we move on, because what we wanna do now is assign these voices to different kinds of instruments right now, another really nice feature within the key editor that I often use a lot is over here, this little paint palette event colors. Now the default is always set to velocity, but I really like to use a voice. So check this out. Now when I'm looking at this, I get all my greens are tenors, all of my oranges or base. Alright, I've got this brown color, That's base two. And then I've got Sopranos in purple. You got my altos and red. So it's very easy for me to see visually when I choose to view the part colors based on voice, It's very easy for me to see that I've got different voices. I've got four different kinds of voices. I've got soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. And these two, alright, so I've actually got five different voices here. So I can think to myself now, what I wanna do is I want to send these out to five different instruments, something suitable for ten or something suitable for alto, soprano, and so on, so forth. You can also do this with the logical editor. So I'm going to show you an example there. I'm gonna go up to my original here. So this is one in which there are no voice settings. I'm going to duplicate this one again. Alright, if I wanted to rename these, I could come over here to track versions in my inspector. And I could say, okay, this was my auto and this is going to be my manual. And this is my original. That'll make it a little easier when I'm looking at these options here and choosing between them, right? So I've got my manual. This is one in which I'm going to use actually the logical editor. So I'm gonna go up here to Midea, and I'm going to scroll down to logical editor. And I'm going to go to apply preset. I've already made this preset. I want to show it to you. So down here and wills presets. I've created these logical presets called assign Alto, bass, soprano, so on so forth. Let me actually just look at those and explain a bit what they're doing. If I go to setup instead, then you can actually see the presets and how they're configured. So let's say that I want to assigned soprano, right? Well, what I'm doing is I'm saying, OK, where the type is a note and it's inside this range where the highest pitch is basically between A2 and C5. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to assign that to the soprano voice. So using the logical editor can be a very effective way if there was something very particular, like I knew that I had a VSD instrument that I wanted to use that had a very specific voice range, then I could manipulate how these different voices are assigned to customize it to my VST instruments by using the logical editor. Now, in the next lesson, I want to look at some simple orchestration rights. And now we've got these voices set. I'm going to go back to my auto version, which was assigned by Cubase. And I've got the voices color highlighted in the next lesson, we're actually going to assign those two instruments and see how that starts to help us come up with a basic orchestration. 6. Simple Orchestration: Having different tracks for different instruments is gonna give us a lot of flexibility for mixing, for adding effects, and also for recording and overdubbing the mid ECC and expression elements that are gonna give our middy that realistic quality. So I prefer to try to put these tracks into, or these sounds into individual tracks as much as possible. These days with computers being as powerful as they are, we don't really have to worry so much about maybe only having one instance of Halley on Sonic e.g. we can afford to create multiple instances because the average computer these days is more than capable of handling that burden. So I can see that I have these five voices, right? I've got my soprano, and I've got my Alto, I've got my tenor, they've got bass, and I've got base two. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to assign those to actual specific instruments. So I'm gonna start over here. Let's create another instance of Halley on Sonic. And the main reason I'm using Halley on Sonic here has to do with making sure these are instruments that most students in this course are going to also have. So I may not have the same breadth of choices as if I was using my full library hard drive. But be assured that as students probably have access to all the same instruments. So let's start by creating strings. What I'll do is just make this a little more efficient. I'm gonna go ahead and right-click over here and we'd go add instrument track. And this is going to give me a window that can help me just create a number of these tracks more rapidly. So I'm going to choose Halle on Sonic, and I'm going to choose four more. So I'm gonna get a total five tracks. I'm going to hold option command and hit B, and that is going to make my lower zone disappear. So I've got these five tracks right here. I'm going to actually color these so I can tell what they are. I'm going to go up here and turn them red. Alright, so I'm going to call this, I'm going to have this be my violin one. I'm going to have violin two. I'm going to have viola, cello. And base. Alright, well, I'm going to add a few woodwinds as well. I'm going to add three different woodwinds here. So I'm going to go again to add instrument track. This time, I'm just going to add three, right? I'm going to color these a slightly different colors. So maybe I'll go with blue. Alright, so those are gonna be my, my wind instruments and my purse. Wind is going to be flute. My second wind is going to be clarinet. And my final one is going to be bassoon. So now I've got these instruments here. I can actually afford to get rid of the top track if I want. I'm not gonna do that, but I am going to just make it a lot smaller, narrow. These are way. Okay, so now I want to actually load these instrument instances. So I'm going to go to violin, going to search for a violin. And it doesn't have to be anything particularly amazing. Solo violin. Sounds very nice. I'm gonna go to violin two, load up that instrument. Violin. Now I could go with exactly the same solo violin, but I'm going to try something a little different just so that it gets a different timbre, right? These two, they have different, let me play the same note. So they haven't just a slightly different tamber to them. Many go over to viola and load up a viola here. Solar viola. Sounds good. Go to cello. And I'm just basically going through each one of these tracks and adding the elements of my my basic orchestration. And what we're gonna be able to do is pull voices from our chord track into each one of these. Now, when I get to the base, what I'm doing with the base is I'm going to run base to the voice base two into my base. So another way we could do this is we could go to strings and base. That's the only string bass that I have apparently. So in this case, I would need to send me that base out too. A different instrument. What I'm gonna do actually in this instance, maybe switch that over to contact. But it would not be something that I can send out to all the students because they may not have contact. So I can do that easily selecting my bass track over here, coming over to my V STIs and I can see that it's been highlighted here. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change this to contact. And in contact, I'm going to go to strings. And I'm gonna go down here to actually string ensemble. And I'm going to load up basis. I've got a very nice base now. Then I'm going to go into flute, can open that up to search for flute. See about living. It's fine. My clarinet. And these are all steps that are made a lot easier by knowing that I am going to be able to pull voices out of my chord progression. See? That sounds like the sound that rich to my ear, but it's a good enough demo. Okay, so I've got all of these instruments set up over here, violin, viola, so on, so forth. What I wanna do now is actually bring in my copy of the midi, like so. I'm just bringing these into each 1.1, a blue one here. All right, So now of course, most people would say, Oh, that's who needs a chord track. This is very simple. I copied it down into all of these tracks using my Option or Alt key. What's the big deal? Well, well, here's the thing is that you're going to see after I assign this violin two specific voice, that most of these midi notes disappear, What's more? They are going to be rearranged. So I am going to come over here into the inspector and I'm going to select chords. Now, if you don't see the follow chord track option up here where it's grayed out. That's because you don't have any midi in here. That's why I started by loading the median here you need to have some kind of midi event with some notes. Because what follow-up chord track is gonna do is move those nodes around. If there's no events, it can't do its work. I'm going to choose a single voice. And it's going to ask me this question, I generally say follow directly. Now you can see a bunch of notes went away. And I can choose my voice up here. I can say soprano. Actually, what I wanted to do here for violin two is select soprano again. But I want to bring everything down one octave. So I can do that using a midi Insert. I'm going to go ahead and add maybe modifiers. And right here I'm going to use transpose -12. So essentially it's the same as violin one, but it's an octave below. Then on the viola, back to my chord track, I'm going to say single voice. Yes. And then my single voice here is gonna be Alto, shallow. I'm going to have to zoom out a little bit here. Cello, I'm going to do exactly the same thing. And this process just takes a little bit of setup, but it actually saves a lot of time down the road. So here in my cello, I want the voice to actually be tenor. And I'm going to choose base here. And then I'm gonna go to flute. I'm going to assign this the same voice as my violin. So single voice? Yes, and soprano, clarinet. I'm going to match the cello with this. I could do cello or I could do the viola. But what I'm going to do is select, Well, maybe I'll go with Alto for that voice. And my bassoon that is going to be down here with base. So now I have a pretty full arrangement. Going to go ahead and mute my original string ensemble. And now I can mix these different instruments however I like if I wanted e.g. to bring up my mixed console, I can go ahead and mix the different instruments to my tastes right there. But now I have each instrument, kinda solo. Violin two. When they are an octave apart. The cello and the bass, flute, clarinet, and my bassoon. So when we look at some of these parts, e.g. right here, I can see that this is. Marked as a base, and this is marked as soprano. So when I dive into one of these parts, right, I'm only supposed to see soprano here. I can see that because of my color-coding. I've got soprano, I've got a, I've got ten or I've got all sorts of stuff in there. So let's sort that out. What we're gonna do here is we're going to use combination of key commands and the logical editor to speed up this process. So I'm gonna go up to the midi menu and down and logical editor, I'm going to say setup. And then I've created a preset here called select, not voice. And what it does is where type is note. The context variable is not soprano, right? So this is something I can just change each time. It's whatever midi event I have selected over here in my project window. When I hit Apply, it's going to select notes here that are not. Again, delete those notes once they're selected. I can go up here to my violin, which is also soprano. Going to select there. And delete. Come down to, I think my viola. Let's see what my viola was set to. Set. Alto. Got my Alto set part. If you double-click the event, then it's loads the, instead of just loading the midi event into the bottom window, it actually selects the window here, which means that when you hit Delete, you'll be deleting selected notes in the key editor rather than deleting this midi event. So that's important to double-click that. And now I am going to look for Alto, something, anything that's not Alto. Alright, select that and hit Delete. Now I have only the altos left. So I can go through here. I can go to Cello. This is gonna be tenor. Too much change this voice. Tenor apply. Hadn't selected this. And let's go apply that. My base, I should be just selected at base. I want only my base to exist there. There we are. There's my bass notes. Flute, It's going to be, should be actually soprano. Clarinet is going to be out of it. So let's do flute is soprano. And I can delete all those. My clarinet is alto. So I'm going to change my parameter to the alto, apply, delete my bassoon down here. So learning how to use the logical editor for this kind of thing can really make a very big difference to your workflow because it can really speed up and also make things very accurate. I think that's an important aspect of this as well, being pretty accurate. So now I've just got these limited voice sickness. Now, if I were to bring all of these together right into my midi part, my multiple sort of mini part editing down here and the key editor. That's really nice because I can actually see the different takes right here. I would need to rename them if I wanted them to be more readable rather than just a bunch of Halley on sonics. But you can see that the voices are changing as I go through and select my different layers. And if you wanted to rename those, then you can rename them over here in your VSTS rack. So hopefully that has helped you understand how you can Use the chord track to manipulate and create voices. And I just want to point out before I shut this lesson down, Let's say that we were looking at this part here under this C chord. This note right here is coming in as a g, So that is the fifth of our chord. Now, if I were to go ahead and I change that to a diminished chord, you can see that then my note here has changed to a route rather than the fifth because there's no perfect fifth in that court. The other thing is that these notes over here changed. And that is because up here in my chord track, I have adaptive voicings selected. And this is really cool because it is going to change, not just the voicings of the chord that changed, but then subsequent voicings based on good voice leading rules. So that's pretty awesome as well. That means that I don't have to think so much about having good voice leading rules. And that means that my good voice leading is coming through automatically, which is making it sound more traditional, which is making it sound more familiar and thus more realistic. Now, in the next lesson, we are going to look at some of the steps for refining these voices a little bit in terms of their playback. 7. Refining Voices: Now we want to look at refining our voice playback. We've been able to successfully create a harmonic structure. We've divided it up into different voicings using the logical editor and the chord track and some other features in Cubase. But now, to start bringing reality of realism into the performance, we wanted to do two things that we're going to cover in this lesson. That is, first, think about the player. E.g. if you're a horn player, you've got to breathe. So having ludicrously long lines where a horn player never gets to breathe. Of course, the BST instrument can do that, but it doesn't sound realistic because that's not what a real player does to thinking about the player. That's one really crucial factor in all of this. The second thing is to think about your phrasing and articulations, right? So in strings e.g. you have pizzicato, legato, these different articulations. And it can be appetizing since they're all right there, there's just kind of use them willy nilly than smack them around wherever just to keep things interesting, but don't do that. Think about the mood. In other words, use a pizzicato when you're trying to convey levity or lightness, use legato when you are trying to convey a sustained mood. Think about the mood that you're trying to convey and choose the articulation that best matches that. And that will bring your articulations into this realm of realism. And we're going to look at both thinking about the player and thinking about articulations. Let's move on over to the computer and take a look. I had used contact here for my base because Haley on Sonic did not have an adequate sound. But the nice thing about using least one instance here is that I have all of these different articulations here. And that's going to come in really handy here. So let's listen to some of these, right? So that's Legato. I'm going to turn Legato off. And I'm going to change my articulation here to pizzicato. So it has a sort of tip toe sound. I could choose spiccato, which is a little more intense. I'm gonna go with spiccato. And this is, I'm just doing this in the contact instruments so that you can hear different articulations. I'm not getting the same options. E.g. when I go into my cello instrument over here, I'm not getting the richness of articulations here, but it is important to understand how these articulations are going to affect your composition, right? So if I'm just looking at my base here, the solo, this, and I've got this spiccato happening there. It's a little dull. But one thing that I can do here in order to use this articulation more effectively, right? So we're getting into realism here is that spiccato is not so often used just to play a whole note kind of sound. It's used a little bit more for an ostinato sort of sound. One way that we can sort of create an ostinato rather quickly is using our midi Inserts. I'm going to go here and I'm going to load an Apache Sx. Now if I were to use that, but with an articulation like legato. Sounds very strange, but with the spiccato, then it follows along very well. So now you'll notice that if I play here, there's obviously, no, maybe the media is playing. So what the heck's going on here? Well, it's my cord Jack. My cord Jack is set to use any monitor track, which is basically this one here, the one that's selected. So what I can do is I can mute my chord track. This won't change the follow chord check feature. In other words, if I change one of the cords, it will still change the midi within here. But it's not actually going to send this chord progression out to any instruments. And now when I play, I don't get anything until there's actually a midi note. Now I'm going to bring down my release a little bit over here again, these are nice features to have in professional library. Makes my sound there, my arpeggiated sound, just a little bit more lively. Let's listen to it again. If I didn't want something quite so busy, I could go back to my Apache up here. And instead of having it set to 16th, I could set it to eight. Calms it down quite a lot there. I can change the length of the note to a 32nd. That's sort of has a similar effect to changing the attack and release. So I'm just kinda playing these pulses, right? I'm no longer arpeggiating the chords in the cord Jack, I'm just getting these pulses. Now what I wanna do here is I am going to just narrow range here. I'm going to choose, I'm going to actually hit the two key which selects my range tool. And I'm going to select these bars and I'm going to hit Option P and that's going to loop. The reason I want to do that is I'm going to do a little kinda rough mix here. And I want to be able to hear a very specific part of the music while doing this. Alright, so I've got my base in there. Now. I want my viola. Bring everything down, bring them in slowly one at a time. So I'll start with the bassoon here, because I might do the same thing on the bassoon. I'm going to bring in midi modifier or sorry, actually the are patchy SX. I'm going to change this to eight as well and the length to thirty-seconds. Let's just see how that sounds. It should have a complimentary effect with the width, the base. Let's see how the clarinet comes in. Not a particularly thrilling sounding clarinet. See how it bringing the fluid, right? Let's see about bringing the viola here. One down and just getting a general sort of lightweight and mix there. What I'm really looking for is to reassure myself that what I did in terms of creating a rhythmic baseline that, that worked, that I like the way that sounds. It's now going to go back to the beginning. Obviously, some of these nodes are sounding very stark, especially in that first violin. And we're going to address that pretty soon. But what I wanted to demonstrate here was first of all, using articulations within the base. You can do that with an arpeggiator if you need to just create rhythm. And then if your instrument, like my string ensemble here, supports different articulations, attack and release controls, then that's definitely optimal. And you can see what a difference that made in my part here. So I'm actually going to bring that up in my mix so that it's so the other thing that I'm demonstrating here that you want to be aware of is e.g. the flute is playing these long notes. But then there's breadth time. There's a chance to take a breath. And I'm looking at that from the standpoint of the clarinet as well. And the pursuit of making sure that it's not just endless notes forever giving them time to breathe because that's part of what conveys realism as well. So in the next lesson, I'm going to bust some of these instruments out to a reverb. And we're going to see that just adding in some reverb is always a good first step to bringing in a sense of realism and personality. 8. Reverb Realism: In this rather short lesson, what we're going to focus on is adding some reverb through and effects track. And this is essentially the same as using send effects. This is by far the best way to do it. You don't want to use certainly reverb as an insert generally, for a lot of reasons that I'll go over, but this is just a quick lesson because reverb really does add a lot of personality. Sometimes your VST instruments will have that reverb built-in. And that's fine too. But I prefer to use effects channels because it optimizes my workflow. And I'll explain why. I've got these seven tracks, which are the basis for my composition so far. And if I wanted to run a reverb here using regular inserts, I could do that for sure, but the problem is that let's say I were to choose a reverb here. One of these reverbs that I have, I could just go ahead and choose a room works. I'm sure most people who have Cubase has, have this plugin. And I could use a room, works on this and it'll work fine. It's just that if I wanted to change a parameter of this, I wanted to have the same reverb used on, say, all my strings, or maybe just my two violins and flute because they are the soprano voices. Then I have to go into three instances. Using an FX track consolidates all of that, makes my workflow way, way, way, way, way, way, way better. So what I'm gonna do here, I'm actually going to select these and I'm going to add them to a group track or rather a folder here. So I am moved, selected to a folder. I'm going to call this folder strings. Just so that I can have a more consolidated view. I'm going to change this, but this also in a folder and I'm going to call that folder wins. Alright. I'll make the winds folder also colored blue. And I will make the strings folder, call it read that way. It's just easier for me to see what's going on. But this is nice because I can keep my, keep my project a bit more succinct. Now I'm going to right-click and I'm going to add an effects track, which is right here. Says add effect track. Here I get to choose the effect which I'm going to use. Reverb, I will use room works, stereo out. All that's fine. I'm just going to call it room works. I know what it is, and I can have my settings here. Let's say I choose plate bright as my preset. Right? Now, there's a couple of ways that I can do this. I can go ahead. Let's say that I were to take my violin. I'm going to solo that. And again, I'm going to use the range tool just to basically loop. Just a loop. A couple of notes here. Now, you're going to notice that if I go to the audio Senza and I were to choose room works and how to enable that. I get a little bit of reverb is I can change the amount of reverb that I want that violin. And you can hear the effects of that. Now I can also do this from my mixer, which is kinda my preferred way to do it. And I'll show you why. If I were to open my mixer here and I were to open up sends, you can see up here, I've got the room works that I had set up for my strings, but I want to add this actually to all of my instruments so I can select them all here. I can come up to this queue link button. And then now they're all gonna be linked. When I do room, room works, you see it added them all there. So if you do it in the inspector like I did in the first example, you can't, you have to go and do each one manually, but using the queue link is kinda nice. So I'm gonna go ahead and just bring everything down to half undo queue link. And now I can go ahead and I can add control reverb for each channel. Now, if I were to mute the reverb, this is what it sounds like dry. This is what it sounds like. That reverb effect adds quite a lot of realism because what reverbs doing is it's recreating the effect that sound has in a real space. And as long as you have a decent reverb plugin, it really is going to go a long way to add some realism. Now, we haven't really touched on any of the most essential elements of bringing this composition to life. We're gonna be getting to that. In the next several lessons, we're going to be starting to talk about Midea expression. And we're gonna be talking about velocity modulation, different cc values. That's all coming up. So thanks for sticking around so far. I just want to say if you have any questions at all, please reach out to me. I'm more than happy to answer questions. And no question is a bad question. So please let me know if you have any questions. If there's anything in the course you wish I spent more time on anything I didn't address that you think I should have addressed? I'm all ears as long as it's constructive criticism and there's something I can do about it. I would love to hear from you. Okay, so now let's continue on in the next several lessons, start talking about expression and mid ECC. 9. MIDI Expression Concepts: Now we're headed into a series of lessons where we're going to look at expression. Now expression is kind of an overarching term for many cc's note expression, which is a b test3 technology. But expression is also one of the particular midi CCS that we use. So I wanted to distinguish between the two. Expression as, as a sort of overarching term refers to anything that we can do to our middy to make it sound more human, more real. And we're going to see how we use CC messages like modulation and expression, which is CC1 volume. We can use vibrato breath control these different values to change the dynamics and change the contrast of our instruments in ways that make them sound more, more like they were played by a human being. And that is really going to be the product of us as producers learning to play the midi controllers. So for this kind of work, you need to have faders or knobs. You have to have some way of intuitively and in a very human way to sculpt and express these instruments. And you're going to hear in the next several lessons how these different CCS work, how they change the sound. And I'm going to explain exactly what they're doing and when to use them. Now, I've also produced a cheat sheet which you're going to want to download because it talks about the main set of expression values and when and how to use them, whether you use them with a knob or a fader, and how to apply them, what they do from a compositional standpoint that cheat sheet is going to be helpful to you if this is all very new to you. So let's take a quick look before we dive into each individual one in the upcoming lessons, Let's just take a quick look at some of these values. Okay, so I have this contact instrument open now I know that not all my students are going to have this contact instrument, but the ones that we were using in Halle on Sonic don't have the extent of articulations and also control. So I want to use this so you can hear what I'm talking about. And hopefully you have your own sound libraries. You may have this exact one which is the string ensemble. But if you don't have this, hopefully you have another one. You can always download the free BBC Spitfire library, which is excellent for being free. It's absolutely phenomenal. And you can explore some of these features, but let's just give it a listen to how this sounds. Okay, so I'm going to take my, let's see me, make sure I'm on the right instrument here. So I'm going to turn off, in this case, going to just turn off my midi Insert. And actually what I'll do is I'm going to duplicate this track so that I have one that I can mess around with. Because I'm actually going to want to turn the articulation to legato because I think that that really helps. That'll help you hear the effects of this much more. Alright. Okay, so let's listen to the effects of dynamics here. I'm going to play a note, hold it, and I'm going to experiment with my big Dynamics NAB, which is going to be tied into my modulation wheel, which is CC1. So whether or not you have a mod wheel on your keyboard or not, you can always take any midi controller with a knob or a fader. You can assign it, maybe CC1, and then you can assign it to any controls and your instruments. If I right-click on this, this is a standard feature of contact libraries. I could do learn mid ECC, and then I could turn any knob or fade or on my midi controller. So it's very easy to set this up and you really want to set up some kind of control that you can manipulate with your fingers, with your hands. For every one of these, you don't want to be doing it with the mouse. You don't really want to be doing it with a pencil. Let's hear what dynamics sounds like. So what dynamics is doing in this context? And generally what dynamics in a Inequality library is doing is it is switching between the velocity layers. So earlier on in this section, we talked about velocity layers and how there are multiple layers within the instruments. So within this instrument there is a collection of samples of this instrument, of this base. And the people who made this instrument sampled that base being I played at many different loudness is a quiet or bow and amid sort of medium volume bow and then allowed bow. And as the Boeing quality like that changes, the timbre changes how bright it is, how deep it is, how subdued is, how harmonic it is, that all is changing into by sampling that and then allowing this dynamics knob to move between those layers. I actually can simulate playing the bass where I'm Boeing harder and then I'm Boeing softer. And that is actually translating not just to, just to a volume which the inexperienced ear might hear this and just think, Oh, well that's just a volume change, right? There's loud and there's quiet. But it's more than that. There's actually these layers going on behind the scenes and the timbre is changing. So I can actually simulate the bot strength here, even though I'm not actually recording the base now, expression has a similar sound. Let's listen to that. But this really is just volume. So this is a percentage of the midi volume, so media is C7, and we're going to talk about this in more detail. But this is a percentage of that between expression and dynamics. These two are really essential to any kind of getting real realistic middy outcomes from especially symphony instruments. Expression is CCM1, modulation is CC1. And then we also have other CCS like vibrato that we'll talk about. Birth control is Cdc2. Standard volume in Midea is C7. And there are other midi values used for expression, like the sustain pedal or velocity. How hard is the key hit? It's very soft or hard. You can actually see in this area here on this particular instrument, this little icon is showing how, what the velocity is. So that's like a very soft velocity. That's very hard velocity is actually showing you what the velocity is. My hit at that point in time. So there is a lot going on with mini expression. You want to get familiar with really just a handful of cc values, what they do and what they do in your instruments. Now we're gonna move forward and we're gonna look at many of these individual features one at a time to talk about how they're used, what they're used for. 10. Velocity Expression: We're going to start looking at these different attributes by looking at velocity, because it's probably certainly the most common. It's built into the original midi spec, and it's gonna be common to every instrument no matter how nuanced or even how old or new it is. But it's still plays a really important role. So we're going to talk about that first and then we'll dive into some of the other controllers coming up. Okay, so let's take a look at a velocity. I'm going to go ahead and just CT enable this track. And I'm going to just play a few notes in, so I'm going hit record. Alright, so let's take a look at this midi right here. Now, it's all being locked onto the same note. And that is because I have this instrument, this bass instrument is configured to use cortex, right? So what I need to do actually is just create a dummy instrument. I'm actually going to drag this up here. Instead of using the bass instrument down here, I am going to go ahead and use this instrument up here, this Halley on Sonic. This is the original one that we had started with. So let me go ahead and start that again. Record and just record some notes. Okay. So that didn't force it into OneNote because it's not doing the single note. Follow Kortrijk. Okay, So this is just very simple midi. Down here. This is velocity, all of these different values down here. And I'm just zooming in here so we can see each one of these nodes has a specific velocity value here. And we can see when I'm in here, this is a velocity value of about 4,755.61. And this one over here has a value of about 76, right? So this velocity is first and foremost the thing that is going to choose a velocity layer. One of those many samples that a good instrument has taken, good VSD instrument takes many samples of the instrument being played at various volumes. And then they turns those into what are known as velocity layers. And those velocity layers will be defined as this sample plays when the velocity is 40-50, this sample plays when stream 506,070.80 and so on, so forth. So that as the velocity goes up and down, you actually get different samples. You actually get realistic nuance in the instrument. And this velocity was taken from my keyboard as I played. So if I hit the keyboard hard, then I got a harder, higher velocity. And if I play it softly, I get a low velocity, which you really don't want is this kind of thing where all the velocities are the same. You don't want to use fixed velocity, e.g. I. Can do that on my keyboard here if I were to record and turn on fixed velocity, now no matter how hard I hit the keys, we'll see that in this up, all of the velocities are had full maxed out and they're all the same, right. So that's that's no good because that's not the way a human being placed right away. We've killed the chance of our realism. This over here is much more what we wanted. And let me go ahead and just go back to the original here, right? So you can see how varied this velocity is. And that's one of the main reasons. It's a real value for you as a producer to record these parts into play them, rather than just to write them in. Because when you write them in with a pencil, they will have a fixed velocity and then you have to do all kinds of work to change that, right? And that is kind of defeating the purpose. If you just play things in, you try to express yourself through the performance. You get varying velocities and right off the bat, you're gonna get way, way, way better results. So what is velocity Exactly? It's not volume. What it is is it's volume at the moment that the note is played. Volume can change over time. Multi-volume see C7 can change over time. Velocity is an instant when that note is played, What's the volume of that note, even if the volume or expression values change afterwards. Now we're gonna move forward in the next lesson, looked at Mitty modulation, which in many contexts is also going to be known as Dynamics or CC1. 11. Modulation Expression (CC 1): Now we're going to talk about Midea CC1, where you're starting to talk about midi continuous controllers or CCS. And these are different from velocity. Velocity is a piece of data that is sent in the midi protocol along with note on and note off message is CCS continuous controllers. There are different kinds of data altogether, so they're kind of in a different class than velocity, even though we use velocity and CCSE to create this realism that we're trying to create. This is the first of the CCS that we're talking about. It's CC1. So very easy to remember. It's, it's technically just called modulation. And most of the time it'll be linked up to the mod wheel on your midi controller or keyboard. If you have one, and if you don't, then you can assign midi CC1 to just about any knob or fader and use it in this way. But maybe CC1 is generally controlling modulation. And in the case of orchestral instruments for sure, and many other types of instruments that I've come across. Modulation, CC1 is used to move between the velocity layers after that velocity value, right? So the velocity value is one fixed value with that note and it's helpful. But we may want to change that over time without changing the volume of the track. Because remember, volume is just is just how loud something is. But the Tambora never changes. You just turn it down or you turn it up. But when you're working with modulation of this kind is more properly called dynamics. It is certainly that things get quieter and louder. But as they get quieter and louder, they're tamber change as they get brighter, as the bot is harder, or the horn player blows harder, you get brighter, tamper a sharper Tamar as you play the strings on a guitar more softly, then you get warmer round or tamber, rather than if you pluck them hard, you get a brighter, sharper Tamar. So the tampers are changing and that's what midi see, C1 is often used to do. I'm going to use midi CC1 here on this example. And we are going to see how that starts to be a lot of realism into it. Alright, so we are looking at midi CC1. We've got the velocity down here in our controller lanes in Cubase, but we want to actually add another one. So I'm gonna go down here. I'm going to click Plus, and I'm going to see some of the most common ones listed here. I'm going to hit modulation and essentially going to add a new lane here to my key editor, which is exactly what I want. So these, these, this can get a little crowded sometimes that's okay. We still see our velocity we're at right now, midi CC1, we're not seeing anything. Now, if I move my mod wheel, you can see their values changing right there. So my mod wheel is definitely feeding CC1. What I wanna do now is I'm going to overdub, right? So I'm going to, I'm going to play this little motive back. And then I'm going to record my mod wheel and you're going to see sort of a automation like line show up in this controller Lane. I'm going to start back here so that I have a little bit to go. And once I hit record, you're going to see it start to draw the line. Alright, so what is this curve down here doing? Well, what it's doing is manipulating value within Halley on right here. So I'm gonna go to the edit controls here. We're going to see down here, this modulation wheel is going to be anything that's CC1 or modulation is tied into, is going to change that that parameter. So if I were to take cutoff e.g. an hour to learn new CC and I would connect that up to CC1. Now you'll see that this cutoff knob follows along with that. Now, in a more advanced instrument, like the studio ensemble or the string ensemble that I'm running on the base, the dynamic value would actually be choosing would be moving between different velocity layers within the instrument. So choosing it would work in tandem with these velocity values and actually allow me to. Kraft, how the velocity is being changed. And I think what I'm going to do just for the benefit of audio example, makes sure that you guys can really hear this. I am going to load a more dynamic instruments. So I'm going to load up contact here. And I'm going to just use an ensemble here, but this is going to be from a different library. So I'm going to bring in my ensemble here. Alright, so I'm gonna bring this down onto there and listen to this example. And you'll see that this dynamics, we'll, It's constantly moving along with the mini. That gives you a much clear example of how midi CC1 dynamics modulation is going to help your recording suddenly sound a lot more realistic. So if I were to take away all of this, which I could do by simply coming up to the midi menu up here. And you can go down to functions. You can say delete continuous controllers. And you see that all the Delete, I've deleted that from that event. Now if you listen to this, played back with just velocity, it sounds very stiff. Need to turn up my dynamics that there's some kind of sound. Let's listen to this. So no matter how great these samples are, the fact that each sample is just being played at a very static level the whole time is problematic. And when I allow myself to have this curve down here, my CC1 curve, and it's driving this dynamics value. And then my instrument knows to use this CC1 value in order to navigate and choose dynamically between different velocity layers, I get a much more nuanced playback. So when you are doing this, one of the things that often works well is to sort of crescendo a little bit through individual notes. So I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to use this line tool. Just use a line and I'm going to draw. Now I know I said it's best not to draw things. It really is better to play them, but this is a good way for me to clearly demonstrate what I mean, what I'm doing here. I first of all, I want to turn the snap off. So it's not snapping to my grid. I want to just basically create these ramps for each individual note, right? So that each note is played with a little crescendo. Every note that's getting played has a crescendo. And listen to the way this sounds. It sounds more expressive. And what I want ultimately to do is something similar to this where I'm crescendoing but now with such straight lines, but with something that is more effectively played in like the previous curve that I did play in. There is, there is a quality to this flowing line that's much more like a real player and that's ultimately exactly what we're looking for. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to look at expression. Expression is another mini CC message, mini CC at 11. In my instrument here it's dedicated to this expression value. We're going to talk about that and hear how that sounds. 12. Using Expression (CC 11): Next up is Medici CS101, Amity CCM1 is generally referred to as expression. Now it can be used as with any mini CC, it can be assigned and kinda learned to just about anything but generally expression and ADCC. The idea of using it is that it's a percentage of volumes of midi volume. Now, the volume is generally see C7. So you can have see C7 working like a regular volume fader in your regular mixing console. And you can use automation to automate that particular value. The volume is probably a very easy concept for most people to grasp. Expression is a percentage of volume. So it's sort of like a volume within the volume, if that makes sense. And it really winds up adding another level of dynamic range to our instruments that human beings bring out in there playing. Part of what we do is we manipulate instruments to get different timbres, but we also manipulate instruments just to get louder or softer volumes as well. So we can use expressions to do that. Generally speaking, what you want to do is as you bring your Dynamics down, want to bring your expression up. As you bring your Dynamics up, you bring your expression down. So expression should function as a way of calibrating any changes in volume against your dynamics, your dynamic changing loud and quiet. It may be that you want a softly bowed sound, but you don't necessarily want it to die away in the mix, right? So you can use expression on a fader or a knob to bring the expression up as the dynamics come down, you always want to be feeding the two against each other so that you're maintaining the same role within the mix, within the blend within the ensemble or within the orchestra. But you are still able to work with Dynamics without necessarily having to get too loud or too quiet. Let's take a look and see how this sounds when we start working with expression as well. So in the previous example, we had dynamics being played out here. We could see this wheel moving following cc values. Now what we're gonna do is we are going to add yet another value over here. We're going to add expression which is C, C 11. Now between modulation velocity and expression, you can do 99% of what you really need to do in terms of making your sounds realistic. Let's go ahead. I'm going to show you that I already have something. One of the keyboard controls, which is actually a touch strip that is mapped to CC1 and you can see my values there. So when I am recording this, you're going to see that I get another curve down in this lower window and it's going to work in conjunction with my velocity and in conjunction with my modulation dynamics. And you're going to see this little slider over here and my instrument change. And you're going to see too, that this is going to add another dimension of realism. What I'm trying to do is maintain a consistent volume with my expression as this dynamics value changes. That's what I'm trying to do and the reason why I'm using expression. So let's go ahead and record that. So what I'm doing there is when my modulation is going up, I'm sort of diminishing its overall effect, trying to create a softer overall volume against the louder dynamics so that it doesn't pop out and it doesn't disappear. And what you'll see over here when I play it back is that now both this expression value and the dynamics value are changing. Alright, so I may even bring this down a little bit more. Right here. I can hit record. I just as this modulation data crescendos right here, I shouldn't bring this down just a little bit more. So I'm going to overdub a little bit there. Like so. And that makes it a little bit of a correction. Alright, let's listen to that back. So if there's anything about that Midea that I'm uncomfortable with or not what I was looking for. I can make changes after the fact. Let me switch to my select tool here. And I can actually select all of those and I can use these little handles down here. You see there's kind of amplify or diminish. I can even tilt them like so. I have definite the god, a lot of options for manipulating it after the fact. So that in a nutshell, shows how we use expression and modulation kind of in tandem with each other and almost playing them against one another. Notice, it's very important that you actually play these parts. I played the original part giving me a lot of variation in y velocity. Then I used a controller mod wheel to play in this CC one value. So again it has a human, has human field. Again, I used a knob so that I or a touch strip so that I could record CCM1. Having all these elements recorded by a human being is absolutely invaluable. Doing them with pencil tools and lines, no matter how creative you get, it's not going to sound nuanced and re-elect will if you get good at doing it on your own. So I want to recommend very much that you always play these things in by hand. Now, coming up next, we are going to look at vibrato very quickly. 13. Using Vibrato: Now we've talked about the main middy elements that are going to bring realism to your performances. Mainly velocity, very important and you play it by hand. Cc1 modulation, which often is going to correlate to what we call dynamics. And then C, C 11 for expression. Those three are the essential nuts and bolts of getting some realism into your midi. But now we're diving into some subordinate, though very helpful midi CCS. And then we're gonna look at how we can use S3 as a vibrato value. And what vibrato is going to do is allow us to add a little bit of interests and animate any sustained notes. Any passages where e.g. in a legato string part or horn part. What we're going to see is that if we use vibrato to animate or add texture to sustained notes, that it's going to make the performance feel a lot more lively, a lot more energetic, and a lot more realistic. I'm gonna be using midi, see S3 for this. So I'm going to load up ensemble right here. So once again, I'm going to come down and I'm going to add a new lane. Now I don't have S0, S3 here. So what I can do is I can say setup available controllers. That opens up this window over here. And I'm going to add controller three. That list hit. Okay, so now I can come down here and I can select Control three. Now, if I want to hear this vibrato, sometimes I have to change my instrument. I'm going to go to strings, find this string ensemble. I'm gonna go with the violas instead. The nice thing about this is that it's going to actually allow me to play with vibrato. I want to make sure that I have legato selected. Just going to make a little change here. I can actually select in this more advanced instrument here different kinds of legato. I'm gonna go with vibration or vibrato control here, which I can then assign this to whatever I want. I'm going to use Medici S3. Let's just listen to a simple example. This is no vibrato. That's with the birth brought a value here is part of this particular articulation and gives me a knob for controlling it. So I'm going to, since I've mapped that now to see C3 down here in my C S3, I can actually record that in, since I really just wanted on this legato note, in this case, I think it is okay to probably just use a straight up line. Alright, so I might do something like that. So I'm basically just ramping up my vibrato as the notice sustained. And this is the best application for vibrato. And I can see over here as I play it back, I can see this value here changing as the vibrato goes up in value. Now, I actually want to push that a little higher. So I'm going to open my window a bit more so that I have more kinda viewers, viewer ship into it. And I'm going to bring this all the way up. Very peak there. Kind of exaggerated a little bit. Like so. There we go. I might actually bring that up even earlier. So I can even bring the note value out longer so that, that broader effect would be felt a bit more like that. So that's how I would want to use vibrato mainly as a way to animate and add a little bit of interests too long sustained notes or long sustained parts. If you had portions of your composition where there were long legato notes, you can, you can do that with vibrato. And it really depends on whether or not your plug-in, your VSD instrument allows you that control. Alright, next we are going to look at midi volume, see C7. 14. Volume Expression (CC 7): In this lesson, I've made a few changes to the session, the project that I'll explain. But we're going to look at volume and automating that using C, C7 and just see how that works with dynamics and expression. So most notably here, I changed my instruments from Halley on to spit fire audios discovery. Now, this is an entirely free orchestra, but it sounds infinitely better than the sounds that we had Halley on sonics. So in the event that you want to hear and get a better sense of how dynamics and volume and all these other CCS that we're working with are going to sound against a more modern instrument and instruments sampled libraries that are really designed to work with Dynamics and expression and that sort of thing. Switching to spit fires. Discovery here seemed like a really sensible idea for the continuation of this section. And you can actually see the expression and the dynamics over here. This expression on the left and dynamics on the right. You can see these move. This is going to be reverb and different basic articulations. You can also select instruments up here. You can also select instruments based on where they are traditionally located in an orchestral arrangements. So I did transfer all of the instruments. I'm no longer using Halley on. I'm not using contact for anything. This is all the Spitfire audio, BBC Symphony, discovery, and entirely free sound library. It's about 200 mb, so it should load onto all but the oldest, oldest machines should run fine. Sounds a lot better. Has all of the expression details that we want to look at. So I will be sharing that as the project that you can download along with this lesson, it should be preloaded with this plugin. Of course, you will have to have it installed. But like I said, getting your hands on it is free and pretty easy. One other change that I made in the previous project, I had a mini modifier up here, transposing the violin part down instead. Now, violin one is actually transpose up. So that has to do with the ranges that are available within the Spitfire plugin. So at this point, we have much richer sounding instrumentation. If we were to look at our original example over here, we will actually see here in this. This is from the last few lessons where we had recorded CC1 and CCA1 and vibrato here we're going to see CC1, sorry, changing dynamics here on the right. And we're going to see C, C 11 changing expression on the left as we play this part. As you'll see, both of these are going to be moving up and down. Sorry, let me open up that instance. Here we go. So you can see that happening right here. Now you can see as the dynamics goes up, the expression comes down. And that's the intended purpose is that dynamics are controlling the sampled layers, the velocity layers of our instrument. And as that gets louder, we want the expression to balance it, right? So it's an exchange between these two controls that maintain the overall level. But dynamics is really impacting the TAM role changes. Now, one thing I'll just make a quick note of in this free Spitfire library is that they only have one dynamical day or so. This dynamics is not nearly as rich as you'd have in the other contact library that I was using there, the symphony series e.g. or many of Spitfire is professional libraries. You're gonna get many more dynamic layers and that's going to get you a better sound. But like I said earlier, this is free. It's really great for what it is. You're not going to really compete with the professionals if you're only using this library. But in this course, it's a very suitable way to get started. And a big step up from any of the stock sounds that you're going to have in Cubase. Now, one thing that I like to do is to bring all of my string parts e.g. together, and use my multi-part editing down here in the key editor. But the problem is, how do I sort out which notes I'm really working on at any point in time, the violin one, violin, violin three, right? I don't want to get off topic from the volume seven. It's just that this is a necessary workflow tip. Right here. There's a drop-down box contains all these values and that is essentially the names of these individual parts, right? So how do I rename them to the appropriate channel? The easiest thing to do here is you just double-click there. You hold the Shift key and you hit Enter, and you'll see that it renames any events on that channel. So I'm just going to do that very quickly. And you'll be able to see this in the project once you download it, because the project I share for each one is after the end of my recording the lesson so everybody can see the benefits, so everything they've learned. But this way, when I load up all of these in the key editor, now, I can see that up. Let me select all of those parts. Now I can see my parts here and I can just choose the viola, and I can come back and I can see where my viola parts are. That's really, really helpful. So let's go ahead and add some volume curves to each of these voices, right? So I'm going to get rid of my velocity here, and I'm going to change it to main volumes, see C7. And I already have a control, a midi controller set up to control this. And as you'll see, when I turn that, it's seeing my values. So as I record, I can just go back to the beginning of this section. And I'm going to hit Record and then I'm going to adjust the volume. So I've kept a very sort of conservative curve here. What I'm tending to do is kind of swell up and down, creating that as I go. Now, if I were to switch over here to the violin two, we'll see that there's no main volumes. So this is just a really nice way to do all this from inside one editor. And I can see that now I'm dealing with the purple soprano parts. If you wanted to see what's colored, you come over to this color right now my colors are set to voice. So we can see violin, one violin, viola, that's changing voices. Cello is changing voices and bases changing voices, right? So the coloring is always here. I'm selecting the part that I'm editing. And then I can come down here and I'm just going to go to that first note. Since the base is really a pulse, I am not going to actually add volume to that, but I am going to do it for the cello. So let's go and record that here. You'll notice I like to go up on one chord and then down again the other side. That sort of pulsing up and down over the course of a few measures can add a really nice emotive quality and realism to what we're doing. So we did the cello, we had done the viola earlier. Let's do a violin to keep in mind that the value of doing this in a manual way is that you're doing it as a human being. You're effectively playing your midi. And that is crucial to the overall realism. Alright, so we've gone ahead and recorded, see C7 midi volume for each channel. And what we've effectively achieved here is a much, much deeper level of realism. Part of that is that we chose a better library with the Spitfire discovery. And part of it is that we've now added in expression and we've added in modulation for Dynamics. And we've added in this volume control. Now, one thing I always want to make clear is that when we switch to the mixed console here, we can see that we have a set of faders all set up here. This was my original mix. And generally when I'm working with volume, I want to be very clear about what's going on in the middle volume and what's going on in the mixer volume. So these are not related. In other words, when my, let's go back to the key editor here, when it's loaded up. Volume here, so we can see this, okay? So this curve here, it's mid ECC. This is not automation on my actual channel. So as this is ebbing and flowing, that is not having any impact on my channel, which is right here. Cello, right? So as we play this part, e.g. we can see up in our graphic here that there's the overlay of the controller data for midi volume. And it is not going to impact how this fader moves at all. So let's go ahead. So this fader is an entirely separate volume entity and it's really about your mix. So this is really beautiful because we can create this expressive performance, which is really what a, what a string player or a wind player would do. They would play their parts with actual sense of using level in volume as, as a part of their expression. And then we might record that performance, record the whole orchestra, and then mix out the album, right? That's what the mixing stage is, what we want to use. All of these four, there is a, an impact that you want to be aware of as you manipulate your volume curves for your middy, that it changes essentially what's going on in your mix, even though these fader positions are not dictated or related directly to what you're writing with your see C7, you are changing the volume. And then furthermore with expression, you are changing the volume within the volume and the volume of your or the effect of your expression, e.g. let's go ahead and look at that. All of this is an extension of volume, really. This flute part right now does not have any, any expression written into it. As we can see, there's an empty layer right here. I'm going to bring this down to just adjust the view. There's an empty lane, but as we write an expression part, it's going to be impacting the volume because expression is a percentage of volume. So it's like drawing a curve for that is determining the percentage of these volume levels. And then finally at the end of your gains structure is this fader, which is deciding well how much of that is in the mix. So you want to be really careful and aware of all of these implications. It is bringing in a lot of realism, but you also must be aware that it's affecting the levels and the volume at different tiers and where to make it change it in order to get the effect that you're looking for. Now in the next lesson, we are going to look at using birth control C, C2. 15. Breath Control & Automation: I'm gonna look at one more CC value because this is a continuous controller to, and it's usually called breath control. And breath control can feature specifically into horns or wind related instruments. If you actually have a breath controller, which is a special kind of midi controller that you can actually play like a clarinet or sort of thing. And then it starts to convey some of your expressiveness into the software instrument. Those kinds of controllers generally going to spit out, see C2. Now, the thing is that C, C2 is not always integrated into instruments, even horn instruments and that sort of thing. Plus, once you're in the box, once you've made the recording, see C2 can be any cc because you can decide which CCS you want to use at any point in time. And there are many that have not already been sort of generically assign. So CCL2 is a variable. It's not as much of a locked-in value as say expression or volume or modulation. But I want to bring it up here because where I quite often you use birth control is actually not with horns, but as a cutoff or a brightness value within an instrument. So I may connect C, C2 to a EQ, e.g. or a filter in order to accentuate brightness using a filter or EQ to accentuate higher frequencies. And I'll actually be using breath control to as sort of a brightness control. That's the way that it normally works in a breadth related instrument. The harder someone blows, the brighter the timber coming out of the instrument tends to be. Correlating breath control, CCL2 to a brightness concept makes a lot of sense. I like to sometimes in my composition have just one more CC value besides dynamics, besides expression, besides volume one more than I can manipulate to bring in another level of realism. And now I'm just going to show you how I kinda configure that and I would use that to control brightness. I'm going to make a simple change here to my clarinet, which is to bring in a brightness elements. So I'm gonna do this by coming up to my inspector here. And I'm going to add an audio insert. And this insert is going to be an EQ. And I'm going to go down and I'm going to choose studio EQ. What I wanna do is I want to have this last stage here. I'm going to disable the other stages. What I wanna do is control this with my midi controller with the breadth. See C2. Now in this context, I have a choice. I can record the C, c value into the Midea. But here I'm actually going to be recording this as an automation tracked using quick trolls. So over here on the inspector, I'm gonna go down to quick controls. I'm gonna make sure it's enabled here. And I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to come down here to insert, insert one studio band for gain high-frequency for that shelf. And then I'm going to zoom out here. And what I'm going to see is that I can use this Learn function, which is in my quick controls is learned function will allow you to just right-click look, make sure learned is enabled. Click any one of your click quick controls, and then you just move your knob and it'll linked it up. I can actually record automation here. So I'm gonna go ahead and going to enable automation rate right there. And I'm going to turn off my cycle mode, switch tools and come back here. And now I'm going to actually write automation with my midi control. I'm trying to create, I'm going to start a strategy of creating more brightness. As the passage continues. As the passage continues, it's getting brighter and brighter. So all I'm doing here is creating regular, traditional automation. However, there is an ability to use breadth Control C, C2 as my controller for this. And you can even take mid ECC within Cubase and you can turn it into automation. And you can take automation from a automation track and turn it into mid ECC, e.g. if we were to look at this part here, and I were to show my expression values. Right now, I just have volume set, but I could extract this volume here. I can extract it up to an automation lane like this by going up to my midi menu, up here, and coming down to my functions menu and down to extract many automation. If I were to right-click on my track and say Show used automation, we'd see now that my volume track has been turned into automation, I could change how this works in so far as I can select what I don't want that to run volume. Instead, I want it to run my insert. Say I could go down here, opens up this window over here, and I can go to my Insert and I could say, You know what, I had as volume automation. I now want to run that against my again. And we're going to see that ride now. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn off read on my original automation. Now we're going to see that this automation which I extracted from the Midea, is now what's going to be driving this gain. So I could actually take this automation and I could use Command X. And I'm going to paste it by selecting all my automation points, making sure my cursor is set all the way at the beginning and paste. And now when I play back, you're going to see that this curve which I extracted from volume, is now the thing that's going to be driving this gain knob here. So let's see how that goes. So again, breath control is not one of the built-in CCS that you always have to be using. But when I want to add more life to something, and particularly I want to work with brightness or tamber. Then I'll generally lean on the breadth Control C, C2 because it's a relatively standardized and understood by other composers and musicians to perform that function. If somebody opens up my project, they should know what's going on. I'm going to go ahead and reverse my cut paste operations so that the project that you guys have access to has this volume curve in the mid ECC instead. And I will see you in the next lesson. 16. Pitchbend Expression: Now, you can also use some very common middy elements like pitch bend in your productions. And this can be really helpful when you're trying to recreate something that an actual instrument instrumentalist performs. In the case of guitar, Let's say e.g. where a guitarist might be bending a note while playing another note and then letting that bend down, something like that. You can achieve that with pitch bend more easily than you can achieve it with other midi CCS, pitch bend is built-in. It's, it's almost essential to any midi keyboard. So you're bound to have a pitch bend controller. But when you're working with symphonic instruments or orchestral, you might add a little bit of pitch bend here and there just to create little variation. And I'm going to show you how I might do that in a very, very subtle ways. What you're really doing here is you are recreating sort of errors by the player, subtle errors. So you're not trying to, you'd certainly want to avoid those pitch bends in this particular instance from being really obvious because really obvious pitch bend in the case of a viola player, e.g. is going to actually be a mistake. But adding in a little bit of sort of tonal shift can actually add some realism. So let's take a look at that. What we're gonna do here is just solo this a viola, and then go ahead. And we're going to open that up in our midi editor. And I'm going to look at these two notes in particular. And I'm going to enable the pitch bend Lane. And I'm gonna go back to the beginning here. And I'm going to record a little bit of pitch bend, very, very, very, very subtle pitch bend that I'm having here. You can see what's happening in the pitch bend. What I'm really doing here is I'm just adding some subtlety that I'm hoping will convey a bit of humanity. It's the kind of thing that breaks up the absolute static consistency of midi notes. Now whether or not my library is going to accommodate that pitch bend is absolutely crucial. But if my library did respond to pitch bend, I would notice that there was just a very subtle imperfection in the performance. I've just done it on a couple of notes. I'm not trying to ruin the piece. I'm not trying to make dramatic changes. Just something subtle pitch bend here is a tool that I can use to introduce a little bit of humanity. In the next lesson, let's look at using key switches. 17. Using Key Switches: Now we're going to look at key switches. Now, key switches are common to most professional libraries and they're used to typically switch between different articulations. So let's say e.g. that you've got your bass playing pizzicato and you wanted to temporarily switch it to playing long notes, as we're gonna do in this example, then you can use key switches to dynamically switch between different articulations. Sometimes key switches perform other functions. If you had a guitar library, e.g. it might switch between neck positions or I might switch between I'm downstrokes, upstrokes or something like that. So any kind of articulation or unique feature that the performer would execute, you can manipulate with key switches. So let's take a look at that now. We've got this articulation chosen here, the spiccato articulation, but we have three to choose from. So you can actually switch between these within this library using key switches. And there all the way down here. At the close that up here, I could come up here and I could say that I wanted to snap two events. Now, when I go here and I draw these notes in, they're going to snap to those events. There's midi events up above them, so that it makes it a little easier for me to make sure that they're being positioned correctly. One thing that you generally wanna do with key switches is you want to have them occur a little bit before your midi note. So what I would probably do here is actually just having selected them all, I'd bring them over just a little bit like that so that the key switch can tell the instrument what's going on in advance of the note actually being played. And we're going to bring all of these down. And if we want to play, Let's see one. We'll see what the long here is going to be. C minus to the spiccato is gonna be C-sharp minus two and pizzicato is gonna be D12. So we want to have this one here, and this one here. We want to actually have up on C-sharp to this one down to C2, that is going to switch back to long. And then this one here, we're going to bring down there. And then this one is gonna be back down to the lungs. And you can actually see that up here in this area. As I change these midi values, it's changing the articulation and that's what key switches do. But when they played back, we're going to have long spiccato, long spiccato along using key switches. A very elegant way to build into your middy. Elements like different articulations that you want to use for legato, staccato, spiccato, pizzicato, adding tremolo, that sort of thing. It's a great way to manipulate the expressiveness of your parts as well. The consideration that I make when I am applying articulations is how does it help me tell the story you want to avoid just using key switches all over the place randomly, just for interesting effect. But rather you want to tell a story with it. So what I'm telling, the story I'm telling here is that the base is coming into support and then punctuate, Support with long punctuate and then support. The spiccato. Articulation for me is functioning like a punctuation, like a period at the end of a sentence, by not having a long drawn-out stroke there. The base is stepping away and letting the violas and the violins take precedence. So that's part of the story that I'm telling and that's why I've chosen these articulations. I would recommend to you that you choose articulations in service of your story, not just because you can use key switches. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to just have a brief discussion about quantizing. 18. Quantize or Not?: Now quantizing is something that has been a part of middy since the beginning. And it's one of the best and most valuable features of Midea is that you can take performances, things that were played at one point in time. But then you can change the timing. And ideally with quantizing, you're really using things to lock them onto the grid to keep the tempo and the timing absolutely precise, very precise triplets, very precise 16th notes, that sort of things that a player might not be able to execute perfectly. But here's the thing is that since players do not generally execute that timing super precisely, they winds up being an important part of the humanity and the realism, but its hind our pieces. So how do we deal with this? Well, I'm going to show you a couple of different things here. First, rule of thumb for me is play everything, actually perform everything, everything you record, perform it in. Don't write it in with pencil. Because then it's typically going to be quantized and it's not really going to, it's just going to have that much less humanity involved. That's the first step. But once you've recorded it, don't necessarily assume that you need to quantize it or there's gonna be any benefit from that. Especially with things like arpeggios. Using things that are highly, highly structured and highly, highly kinda tamped down and restricted to the grid. They just don't sound human and that's going to diminish the realism, right? So I generally do not quantize anything, but as I'm going to show you here, you can use quantizing iteratively in Cubase. And that means you can improve the timing, but you're improving it by a specific amount. You're not really locking everything onto the grid. So let's take a look at that. So we're looking here at this performance that I did, and we had broken down into parts. Now the chords had been played by me on a, on a midi controller keyboard. And we can see that the notes are not landing right on the grid. So we could fix that. Of course if we wanted to, I'm just going to close this instrument here. We could fix that just by quantizing here, we see everything snaps perfectly to the line. I'm going to undo that with command Z. I don't generally encourage that because what's going to happen is your performance is going to be lost. And there's gonna be less realism in the ultimate final product. But there is a really handy feature here called soft quantizing. It looks like these two arrows with a line between them almost like a fraction. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to the quantized panel. We're going to take a look at some settings here. I've got my quantize panel over here. Let's take a look at that up close. So what I can do here is I can enable the soft quantize on off, and I can decide what the strength of that is going to be. Essentially this means improve the quantisation by 60%. If I click, if I enable that, right, and I go head and eyes, soft quantize this. We can see that it did improve it, but it's still not right on the line, like it would be if I were to not have this soft quantizing there and I would quantize now, it locks it right onto the line. Perfectly. Soft quantizing is a really nice way to sort of be a lot more subtle. I'm going to undo both of those. And I'm gonna look at a couple other options here for quantizing. So you can set a catch range and a safe range. So the range, as I bring this up, you can kinda see how it moves around the beat. I can set the grid, let's say I set two quarters. What is the catch range? Within that range, you see changing here. Those notes that are within that range will actually be subject to whatever quantisation rules, including the soft quantize. Safe range here means that things within this range will not be quantized. That means, I could say, Okay, look anything that's within about a triplet of my quarter note, leave those alone. Anything that is within this range, then I want to quantize it and I want a soft quantize it. And I could change the amount to say, 30%. And now when I quantize them, I can go ahead and I'm just gonna do this one note because it's clear right here. If I hit Quantize, it didn't change it at all because it's not within my catch range or it's within my safe range. So you can really look at your own performance and make assessments about what you really wanna do with quantizing. So you can actually improve the rhythm of a performance without dehumanizing and stifling the life and humanity entirely. This is also a nice thing to do when you are quantizing drums. It can be really handy. Too soft quantize, say the high hat, where you want to have a little bit, you don't want to have that right on the grid. But maybe the kicks, you want to put those exactly on the grid. Maybe the snares, a little head or a little behind. You can use the catch and safe ranges to make sure that any of those nuances in the performance, original performance are maintained even as say the kick e.g. is quantized. So you can apply these quantize settings on whatever notes you have selected. So you could select all and kicked notes and apply a quantize value. And then you could select all the high hats and so on, so forth. So in this way, quantizing is much more of a creative and constructive tool used in a blind method of just apply quantize, lock everything down to the grid. I highly recommend against that. If your goal is to produce music that sounds like a human being played it. Now, in the next lesson we're going to look at a technique for controlling velocity with the mod wheel. And this can be done in a situation where you don't have a Dynamics control within your instrument, but you do have multiple velocity layer. So I'm gonna go over that process in the next lesson. 19. Mod Wheel Velocity Hack: Now I have encountered instruments that may contain velocity layers, sometimes even ones that made on my own. And I'm looking for a way to control velocity through some other method than how I play the keys, right? So typically when I play the keys, how hard I hit the key that's translated to the velocity value. But sometimes I want to sculpt that velocity value a bit more separately, right? A bit more carefully, or maybe even go and overdub those without having to draw them in with the pencil. So I'm gonna show you how you could set up the mod wheel. Now you could set up really any controller to do this. I'm just going to be using the mod wheel as an example. I'm going to walk you through the process of how you could set up a midi controller like the mod wheel to control velocity as you're performing. And this can give you another added nuance in your performances. So let's check it out. Alright, so I'm going to close down the bottom window and I'm going to come up to this BBC violin part up here. We're going to start new here. Now I'm going to be recording a new part and I'm gonna be actually changing the velocity based on my mod wheel, not based on the keyboard, right? So when I record right now, you'll be able to see that as I record, there were these velocity values being set based on just how I play the keyboard. When we're done, we're going to see that we can actually use a midi controller to control these in real time with this configuration I'm about to show you in Cubase. So let's go ahead and look at how we'd set that up. I'm going to go ahead and delete that. I'm going to make sure my track is selected. And I'm going to go over to midi Inserts here in the inspector. And I'm going to add too many modifiers in series. Add a midi modifier here. And then I'm going to add a midi modifier here as well. So I'm adding two of them, one right after another. The next thing you're going to want to do is you're going to want to hit Record output to track up here. And you're going to want to set your midi controller or midi keyboard to send a fixed velocity. When my keyboard is sending a fixed velocity, it's sending a fixed velocity of full tilt 127. Now on this first midi modifier, we have a value here called velocity shift. Now we're going to set that to -64. Okay, That's basically subtracting half of my fixed velocity, which is set to 127. Then we're gonna go down to midi modifier to zoom in over here a little bit. And I'm going to want to manipulate this velocity shift in real time for mini modifier. So it's basically going to be subtracting 64 from the fixed value input. And then this midi modifier is going to be adding velocity shift based on some kind of input. And one of the simplest ways to do that is actually using quick controls. So right down here I'm going to expand quick controls and zoom out a little bit so we can see what's going on here. Now this is defaulted to different quick controls from the instrument loaded on this channel. But I can override any of these at anytime. I'm going to set this first one here to my midi, Inserts my midi modifiers. The second one here. And I'm going to choose velocity shift. So now this is velocity shift for the second midi modifier. And I can see, let's see, if I scroll out here. I were to bring this up to 72. I can see now that that value is 72, right? So I'm changing that with the quick control. Now, I can take any midi controller of my choice and I can assign it to this quick control. So you can go ahead and you can enable quick controls and you can hit Learn, and then select your quick control here. And then you can turn the controller on your keyboard. And I can see now that I'm getting this value. So I've gone ahead and I've mapped it to my mod wheel. And you can see this value changing now, as I turn that. That means here that back in my midi Inserts that this value right here is being changed. So what I'm gonna be doing effectively is as I play a midi note, since the record enabled here is enabled, the midi notes are going to come in. It's going to subtract 64 from the velocity. And then it's going to adjust the velocity based on whatever my mod wheel is doing. So let's see how that looks. I'm going to try and create sort of a crescendo effect with my, with my velocity values. And this is going to be totally irrespective of what I perform when I'm actually playing the keyboard. You're also going to want to make sure that you have the second midi modifier set to record. And we're gonna go ahead and start. Now you can see that I recorded this rather dramatic arc, ascending and descending as I played those notes. So this is a great way for you to gain control over the velocity layers without actually having your keyboard, how hard you hit the keys be the thing that is dictating the terms. You want to make sure that you set this up during your live recording. It doesn't seem to work. If you're trying to overdub. If you want it to have the overdubbing feature, you would need to have a library that supported Dynamics. And then you could record the dynamics mod wheel that way. But this is kind of a, an, an alternative to being able to manipulate velocity on the fly. Now, we're going to start talking about note expression in the next few lessons. And note expression is going to be a really fascinating extension of velocity and the CCS that we've discussed. And so stick around. Those lessons are going to be invaluable for all Cubase users who are working with midi. 20. Note Expression Overview: I'm going to wrap up this section with a few lessons about note expression. Now note expression is a VST three concept. It's a technology that allows you to actually write in the equivalent of control changes, but on a per note basis, right? So everything we've done so far with C7 or CC1, That's all per channel, meaning that every when we, when we write a curve and expression, it's affecting all the notes on that channel. And generally that's going to be all the notes that you're seeing in that middle part. Note expression is a technology that allows you to sort of play expression data or record expression data on a per note basis. That can be really nice where e.g. you could play two notes and one of the notes crescendos into the other. So you can create a bit more drama, or maybe two notes that start and one that gets louder, one that gets quieter. Or if you were using a guitar, a guitar instrument, sampled instrument library e.g. you could bend the string while playing another string and you could have a dyad going on there, but one of the notes would be pitch bend. So there's a lot you can do with node expression. Unfortunately, note expression has not caught on industry-wide. It is something that's available as part of the VS T3 technology sort of protocol. So really people could implement it if they wanted them, but they really haven't. And I'm not exactly clear on the reason for that. I'm sure it comes down to development time and that sort of thing. What I want to cover here, since this is a class specifically on Cubase, is how to use it within Cubase, you can record it as part of your performance. You can draw it in and you can overdub it. And I'm going to go over the methods for doing that. Show you what it does. Because I think that if you're using an instrument that allows Node expression and that would really mainly be PAD shop, retro log, anything in Halle on, or Halley on Sonic or Halley and Sonic SE. Then you're going to have a lot of choices as far as how you can manipulate individual notes, not just channel specific, but note specific. There is a different technology called MAPE and that is taking on that, that's gaining momentum in the controller world that is very similar to this polyphonic middy expression. And if you have an instrument like that, liking the lead instrument or something like that, you can actually record these polyphonic data as node expression. So maybe there will be a process by which note expression will catch on with other libraries and other plug-in manufacturers if these MP instruments become more commonplace and more essential. But as of now, I've found very, very limited support for, for this note expression technology, even though I love it, I think it's really awesome. Another really cool thing about note expression is that the expression you right, natively is bound to that node, which means you drag notes around in your key editor. The expression follows it, which is really cool. Now you can do that with my setting of preference in Cubase to make sure any controller data follows, but this does it natively automatically. So in the next lesson, we're going to dive in and look at actually some examples of note expression. This lesson has just been an overview. In the next lesson, we're going to get hands-on. 21. Using Note Expression: Alright, in this lesson we're going to use some node expression. I'm gonna show you how to set it up, how to record it, and what it sounds like. So let's get started. So as we get started, there's just a couple of tips I would suggest. First is you should enable Show Note expression data in the toolbar that is right here. Showed note expression data. Double-click opens note expression editor is another thing that I think you should enable. If this is disabled, then what happens is when you double-click and note, it either appears or disappears. Whereas if you've enabled this, when you double-click a note, you get the note expression. I'm editor here and we're going to use that to great effect here. Show node expression data is basically going to show it sort of overlaid over your notes. Right now I'm seeing the note names, but when I enable this, I'm going to actually see lines right now. There's no note expression data here. That's why we're not seeing any. But I would suggest when you're working with node expression, makes sure that both of these are enabled. Now another thing to just keep an eye on is over here by the midi input. This midi input feature here also kinda comes coupled with this note expression midi input. And there are occasions where if expression midi data is doesn't seem to be recorded correctly, then that has to be enabled. But if I if in my demos that's necessary, I'll point it out to you. Alright, so let's click out of there, close up that editor and look at how we can do this. I'm going to record a new part, and I'm going to record some node expression data and show you how that's done. I'm going to create a new instrument track here, and I'm going to use Halley on Sonic SE now I know that the sounds earlier or a little lackluster, but the thing is here that not like I said, not every instrument out there. A lot of my contact instruments, they don't support note expression, but Halley on Halley on Sonic and Halley on Sonic SE do. If you're curious about Halley on Sonic and Halley on Hi Leon is a mothership instrument designing tool. It's got some amazing synthesized or capability. It's an instrument creation tool or sound design tool. And if you're familiar with contact and contact player, Halley on Sonic and Halley on or similar insofar as highly on, enables you to create instruments. And of course, you can use instruments inside Halley on as well, but highly on Sonic is more limited. It doesn't allow so much instrument creation as Halle on does. And it's sort of like a player. Anything you make in Halle on, can be played in Halle on Sonic. Se version is free and comes with Cubase. And the full Haley on Sonic is not free, but comes with a much more extensive library. How the on Sonic, the full version, the paid version, also allows you to layer up to four different sounds. And so there is some sound creation tools, even Halley on Sonic. But if you're really interested in instrument creation, then you probably want to work in Halle on, Halley on Sonic is fine for this demonstration where I'm going to be focused on just showing you how a note expression works. So we're just going to call this note expression demo. We're going to add that. Now when you're looking in highly on Sonic SE here, if you do a search for note X P EXP, right, you'll see that there are a number of patches that have that value in there. Now, there are other patches and most, many of the patches incorporate some quality of note expression, e.g. let's just take a look here at this. I want to find, well, we'll try some accent and brass. Let's see what that sounds like. Let's try another patch. Ones. Alright, so we'll work with that one. What we're going to see, since this is a note EXP patch, is that over here, if we select the channel or the track, and we come over here, we're gonna see a note Expression area in our Inspector. You can see volume. Oops, sorry about that. You can see volume pan tuning. These three are going to be common to just about any patch in Halle on Sonic. But the ones with no dx be, go beyond these basics into things like tone, color, and emphasis. Now, you can also record the traditional cc values as note expression, and we are definitely going to go over that as well. So there are three ways to record or get node expression into your middle parts. You could record it while you're playing. You can overdub it and you can draw it. So let's go through each of those three methods. Now that we've got a, an instrument and appropriate instrument loaded up. Okay, so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to record. In my note expression, I'm going to record some emphasis, okay? And what I'm gonna do here is since I don't have a native emphasis controller knob or something, I can actually come down here and the input, and I can say, You know what, I want, my mod wheel CC1 is just gonna be copied onto emphasis. So as I'm recording, we're going to be recording emphasis note expression when I use my mod wheel. Okay, so let's just go ahead and give that a try. Alright, let's look at what that looks like in the note editor or the key editor. So you can see down here now there's these green lines right in this green color correlates up here to that green color there. You can also see this little green rectangle under my mouse will flash. It's flashing because it tells, it's telling me that the midi controller I'm turning is actually driving that particular node expression value. Now, earlier on I said it's a good idea to enable this button show note expression data. You will see that if I disabled that, you can't see that there's no any node expression. Of course, you're not going to see that there's any expression data down here in the cc, cc lanes because this is not cc, this is note expression. So enabling that allows me to see this. That's how you can record it. And I'm going to go ahead and record another version here, which is going to just be a chord because I want to, I want to demonstrate a simple example of how node expression can affect things. Alright, so we can see that I did not record any values for the emphasis note expression there. But I can go ahead and I can draw it in, and that's what I'm gonna do here. So I showed you the record version. Now we're going to draw it in and we're gonna see how that works, bringing this up here. So all I did, as long as I have this button up here enabled, it says double-click, opens note expression editor. Then when I double-click and note, it opens that up. And as you can hear, when I hold the note, I'm also hearing it and that is because I have this acoustic feedback on it. Turn that off, then I don't get the playback every time. So that's up to you. I'd like to hear it. If I open this note here, I can go ahead and expand this a little bit. What I'm gonna do is switch to my draw tool and I'm going to draw the level of loud like that it plays back. Now this little, you'll see that there's a thick line that gives way to a thinner line. The thin line is showing a release value for this midi note. The thick line is showing the actual meeting notes. If I wanted to. Having this be quiet by the node better. Okay? So what this is doing is just that one note. It's going to be reducing the emphasis. And what I probably wanna do, since I am wanting to make this very audible, is to work with volume. So I'm selecting volume up here in node expression instead. And now when I come in here, I'm drawing with a red line because that's you can hear the feedback in the background. Now, let's go ahead and switch back to the Select tool. I can see what's going on in here. I'm gonna go ahead and take this upper node here. And I'm going to bring its volume like that. So we've got one that's going up and we got one that's going down and we've got one that's staying the same. And let's see how that sounds. You can really hear that. So I'm going to extend by also forcing this. Go silent. Right? Now we can listen to these three together and you're really going to hear how this one goes up and these two go down. And that gives you a lot of expression, expressive power because you can essentially treat individual voices within your, within your harmonies and your parts as if they were really different players. And you can have different flute players essentially perform it with different dynamics. And that can really introduce some interesting realism. Let's look at the inspector over here and just learn a little bit more about it. So you'll notice that there's this dotted line right, under emphasis between emphasis and CC1. And that dotted line means everything above this can be considered to be note expressive, note expression data, everything below it. It can be recorded as note expression. But it's not note expression data per se. It's not actually necessarily doing anything in the instrument until you configure it manually. One tip I would also offer because it has confused me on another is when you're trying to draw something and you're expecting to get a curve like this. But instead, you're getting this right, you're getting something very choppy. It often has to do with the fact that you have snap on. So you can either hit the J key up here to turn snap on and off, or you can enable or disable snap right here. You'll see that as I hit the J key, that this illuminates and turns off, say, as long as the snapping is turned off, then you can draw really, really accurate and precise lines. Now finally, let's say that you wanted to remove some of this note expression, which you can do is you can select note or you can just select the whole mini part if you wanted it to impact the whole middle part. But I'm just going to have an impact this one here. And you can go up to your midi menu here, down to note expression. And then you can say remove note expression and you're going to see it disappear from that node or from the whole part. If that's what you had selected, I'm going to undo that. But you can easily remove note expression. So we've looked at recording note expression and we've also looked at drawing, but let's look at overdubbing because this is for me, one of the most natural ways to get great realism is that I record the parts certainly to the best of my ability. But then I'm going to want to use the process of overdubbing to really refine it and pay all of it by attention to the node expression or the CCS. So this note expression is quite straightforward in the case of my emphasis up here, which is already tied in to the input for CC1. All I need to do over here is click this overdub note expression. Essentially what this does is it's going to exclude any note data. And it's going to make, in the overdubbing process is going to make it impossible. For the key edited record, any midi notes. It's only going to record note expression. So I'm gonna go to this frame here. I'm just going to record some emphasis over that. So I'm going to be rewriting the green line here as I hit record. So I'm gonna hit record. I've got overdub enabled and you'll see that I can rewrite it. So you can see that I was able to rewrite that that easily. I didn't have to create a new midi part and didn't have to worry about midi merge or anything like that. I was just able to hit that overdub button and overdubs. Now, if for any reason you are not able to overdub your note expression, what I've found to be crucial is to make sure that this record in editor is enabled. One of the simplest ways to do that is you just double-click on the event and it prioritizes the key editor window, this lower pain. You want to have this panel B, the active panel. And I've had the best results and most reliable results. Getting overdub for node expression to work when this panel is activated and record in editor is on, you don't have to worry about any of the other values. Of course, you do have to have overdub node expression over here in the inspector enabled. But other than that, you don't need anything else. We've covered recording, overdubbing and drawing. Now in the next lesson, I'm going to look at some more advanced note expression considerations so that you're fully prepared. You fully understand how you can use node expression. 22. Advanced Note Expression: Now I want to talk about some more advanced note expression features, mainly just so that you understand how flexible note expression is. It's probably going to be new to a lot of people unless you've been using it a lot. Some of the features I discussed in this lesson might not have kinda come up on your radar. So I just want to make sure that we cover these things. I don't use them all the time. They're not core features for me, but I know there there and there are definitely times when knowing that they're there and knowing how to access them improves my creative workflow. So we're going to cover those now in this lesson, let's take a look. Let's get started by looking at what we can do as far as recording some of the typical CC. We're going to maybe look at expression here. And I want to record this CC 11 into my midi, but not on a controller ln instead as note expression. The first thing I want to do is I want to select the note that I am going to be changing. And I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to check the checkbox that says record midi as node expression. I'm going to leave overdub note expression on. And I'm also going to check this checkbox that's going to enable that are activated. And really that's going to mean that I can see it over here. You see if I were to disable emphasis than it disappears even though I have shown note expression. So you want to have this checked as an activated so that you can see it on your notes. So I want to make sure that CCM1 is also activated. So I'll be seeing that it's coming in at a slightly different color. Might be a little hard to tell because it's gonna be a light blue versus green. But I'll be doing a very different wave form with this, so we should be able to see it quite clearly. Now again, I have my key editor window active, and I have my record and editor going on there. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to record, but this time I am recording CC 11. I'm recording expression, not one of the native note expression values in this instrument, but cc 11. And as we can see here, this is not exactly what I want. It's recording it down here in the CC controlling. I should have everything in place here, but I'm still getting it down here. And now there's a couple of things that I would check at this point. First, I would go up to the help menu and I would search for automation. And I would look for this item here, CC automation setup, open up that window and you want to look at this area up here, record destination on conflict. What this means is that when something is being recorded in two places, what should Cubase do? And you can choose either midi part or automation track. When it's on automation track, it's going to be recording this to an automation track or one of the sea, sea lanes. But if I choose midi part here, and I hit Okay. Now the exact same values, I go back and I try and record that. What we're going to see actually I'm going to undo so that we lose the automation track here. Now I'm going to try and record again. And we can see that now it's recording note expression over that specific node. If I open it up, I can see this is what the CC 11 looks like or I can look at, well, I'm prioritizing the emphasis value now, right? So you can see both of them here. You can actually come down here and you can select between the two that are recorded if you wanted to edit them. I'm going to show you some of the advanced edit features now, when we mouse over the editor here, we'll see you down here at the very bottom. If we just drag our mouse down, we get this stretch tool. And this does some pretty cool stuff. It warps the entire shape. So if there was a particular point, lets say in my automation where I really wanted it to lock up on this second. Where are we looking at on B2 here of my 41st measure? Then I can go ahead and I can drag that so that I can see that it's really locking on right there on the grid, so that's nice. I don't have to re-record it, I don't have to keep doing trial and error. And you can also warp at different points. So it does warp the whole thing. But if you wanted to stretch it out, try something different without re-recording it or you had something in mind, you're having a hard time drawing it. You can use the Warp feature. There are also scaling handles up here. So you'll notice that I can scale the whole thing on right and left. As I brought up earlier, you can actually drag this out and you create a release value on that midi note. You will see that represented here that there is a midi note release value. So the release value could be nice if you wanted to control the pitch of a specific voice, let's say after the note concludes, maybe on a violin or a piano, where there's a lot of resonant sound in the release, then you can apply some control over that with node expression. Now, let's take a look at one final thing, which is let's look at tuning because this, this comes up for me quite often. When I use tuning note expression. And I'm gonna go ahead and draw. The problem with that is that the pitch range is so extraordinary. What if I just want to go up a little bit? I have to be really, really, really, really careful with my line. And why is that? Well, it has to do with these values over here in the inspector with tunings selected from note expression, I can see a max and minimum level, right? So right now I can go for octaves down or four octaves up. I can just change those to 12.12. And now what I'm going to see is that drawing in that curve is much, much more. I actually made a mistake. And that is that this has to be the minimum value. Can't be the same as the maximum value. So this should be -12. Now it's actually a range. And if I zoom back out and zoom in now, you can see that it's much easier for me to judge because a little motion in my pencil tool here doesn't mean I'm giving up a whole octave or two octaves or three octaves. It's much easier to judge semitones and whole tones now that I've changed that Min and max values for my note expression. So at this point you should see the benefit of note expression, which is that it gives you much more granular control. Plus I love using CCS as note expression because I can see it all here. Seeing it down in the lanes can kind of help. But it's nice to actually see on a per unit basis visually exactly what's going on. I can see that I've got released value over here. You can see that I've got a release valve over here. I can see as much busier. This node has a lot more note expression. And you see if I grab a note and I move it, notice that the note expression moves with it wherever it goes. And I really like that because it takes some of the guesswork out of editing and manipulating these things after I've written CC. And unless you have the correct settings set for mid ECC and automation, then that won't follow the notes. So when you're using note expression, I always know that that's a reliable outcome. Any of my note expression is just going to follow that note and only that note. So that's it for these tips on note expression. In the next lesson, I'm going to suggest a project. And that'll be a great opportunity for you to internalize everything that you've learned and also kinda see how it all comes together in some work of your own. 23. Wrap-Up & Project: In this section, we've covered an enormous amount of information as far as getting more realistic results from your midi in Cubase, a lot of the features we've talked about, like note expression and b test3 and how it's implemented in instruments like Halley on or alley on Sonic. Those are unique to Cubase. But we've also looked at the basic process of using Score Editor and doing some of the scorecard. The quantizing for the display, allowing your body to stay off the grid but your sheet music to be readable. We looked at how you can go back and forth between the score editor and the chord track. How the chord track actually can wind up dictating voices to different instruments in your arrangement. Then ultimately, how important it is and how easy it is to use middy, CCS and Cubase user note expression to start building this expressive, realistic human performance into your notes or your mini parts so that the overall outcome is much more realistic, much more vivid, much more expressive. And we do that with a collection of these mid ECC controls like 1234 vibrato seven for volume 11 for expression, we talked about using Dynamics with the mod wheel and CC1 and the importance of having libraries that support that. Now with note expression, that's something unique to Cubase. But as I stated, I prefer to use all my mid ECC in node expression so that it always is locked down and kind of attached to my midi notes. I'm going to recommend a project here where you start from scratch, write out a chord progression in accord track, just like we did earlier on in this section. Bring that into the score editor. If you are somebody that knows how to do scoring, you're familiar with writing classical notation. Maybe even attempt to write your music in the classical notation and then bring that into the chord track. From there, you can use your score through the cord tract as a way to control voices, and then you can create your different instruments. I highly recommend using the Spitfire discover plugin because as you could hear it, It's a really good quality sounds. It's totally free. You will find that it's implemented in all of the downloadable projects for this section. So once you have that sort of basic core of your harmony and you've got some parts laid out. Go in and add this expression. Start with modulation using dynamics than expression with CC1. Volume. Give consideration to how volume and expression work with the faders in your mixer. Make sure that things are getting too quiet or too loud or too out of balance with each other. Then explore the possibility of writing that CC as note expression. And if you're using an instrument that supports note expression, then it's a great opportunity to use node expression for its intended purposes. Per Note, control changes and see how much more life and expressiveness that brings into your mini. Put that composition together, export it and share it with us, share it with me, share it with other students in the class. I think that collaboration starts by sharing what we're doing. And there's a certain commitment that we make right to finishing things and polishing things when we know we're going to share them. So it's a great opportunity also to refine your workflow if you have any questions at any point in time about some of the features we've talked about, or if there's a feature that's confounding you, one that I didn't address enough that maybe I omitted altogether and you wish that I had covered, please reach out to me and just asked me questions. I'm always checking the discussion board. I'm more than happy to answer direct message questions. The Q&A and discussion boards are great places as well to get in touch with me. And I love to hear from students. I love to hear the music you're producing. I love engaging you in the Q&A process of coming to terms with how these features work and what you can do with them creatively. So I'm here for you. Please reach out. Thank you so much for following me in this class and I look forward to seeing you in another one of my courses.