cubase sounds

[mercuryavenue]

whats the lowdown on cubase vst instruments? are there as many as in a motif? how many come standard? can i make a radio quality album with cubase? i can get cubase for around $700 but if i want a good range of instruments do i have to spend more? And finally is there a midi keyboard i can buy for cubase that has as many keys as a piano and can i play it the same when i use cubase's piano effects?

[Fullerene]

Merc

I've been learning Cubase for the past few years, and I wouldn't pass myself off as the last word - I'd be glad to share a couple things I've come across:

1. There are potentially unlimited VST instruments available for Cubase, including any number of soft synths. Typically pro versions of Cubase ($700) will ship with 3 or 4 synths built in (I have an older version shipped with 3, Embracer, Halion and A1) I've since added some other VSTs including a decent grand piano sound.

2. Cubase is a great program, you could make a radio quality album with it. Like any serious bit of technology there is a real learning curve with it. I'm not sure of your experience level, I'm learning it from scratch and I've found it challenging at times. Cubase can literally do almost anything to a sound or piece of MIDI data - it also has amazing mix and master capabilities.

3. There are a variety of Midi controllers and MIDI capable synths/keyboards that will work with Cubase, I believe Yamaha now owns Steinberg which makes Cubase. I would suggest starting there in terms of compatability. Usually 88 key synths are much more expensive, you might be able to find something at about 54 keys with the right interface and sounds for reasonable money. I'm shopping for a new controller myself - but I'm using a legacy Midi capable keyboard as a controller and it works fine. It's likely you'd have to shop for a VST piano sound to trigger from the keyboard. I found the 'Grand' sound from Steinberg to work fairly well and is pretty reasonably priced. I have seen piano samples that cost substantially more advertised and I would imagine that they would sound much more realistic.

What I would also offer is that it's important to have your interface to the software pretty well researched and figured out - in that frequently you can run across any number of driver, latency and other issues at that level. If in your scenario you're going to create entirely in MIDI inside the computer and then mix and output - you just need a great MIDI interface, I try to combine MIDI and Acoustic tracks in some of the stuff I'm working on and that's where the interface is crucial. FireWire devices are definitely worth it to cut down on latency and monitoring issues.

Hope this helps, good luck with your project.

f

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