Steinberg Cubase 6 Manual

271
The Sample Editor
Editing regions
The region selected in the list is displayed in gray in the 
waveform display and the overview line.
There are two ways to edit the start and end positions of a 
region:
•Click and drag the region start and end handles in the 
waveform display (with any tool).
When you move the pointer over the handles, it automatically changes to 
indicate that you can drag the handles.
•Edit the Start and End positions in the corresponding 
fields in the regions list.
The positions...

272
The Sample Editor
Musical Mode
Musical Mode allows you to lock audio clips to the project 
tempo by using realtime time stretching. This is very useful 
if you want to use audio in your project without worrying 
too much about timing.
If you want to use Musical Mode, verify that the length in 
bars corresponds to the audio file you imported. If neces
-
sary, listen to your audio and enter the correct length in 
bars and beats.
When Musical Mode is activated, audio events will adapt 
to any tempo...

273
The Sample Editor
4.Activate the Musical Mode button.
Your loop is warped and stretched automatically to adapt it to the project 
tempo. The rulers reflect the change.
In the Project window, the audio event is now shown with 
a note symbol and a warp symbol in the upper right corner 
to indicate that time stretching has been applied.
Adjusting complex audio material to the 
project tempo using Musical Mode
If you want to use an audio file with unknown tempo or if 
the beat of your audio file is not...

274
The Sample Editor
Correcting the local definition grid
In some situations, you might not be able to get satisfying 
results with the “Auto Adjust” function. In this case you 
can manually modify the grid and tempo of your audio file. 
Proceed as follows:
1.On the Definition tab, activate the Manual Adjust tool.
2.If the grid start does not correspond with the first main 
beat, move the mouse pointer to the beginning of the au
-
dio clip until the tooltip “Set Grid Start” is displayed.
The mouse...

275
The Sample Editor
10.Click and drag the grid line to align the single beat po-
sition with the waveform, and release the mouse button.
•To remove a misplaced beat edit, press any modifier key 
so that the Eraser tool is shown and click on the adjusted 
grid line.
ÖIf you want to hear your changes immediately, you can 
activate Musical Mode for this procedure. The warping will 
be recalculated after each edit.
Applying swing
If you find that your audio sounds too straight, e. g. after 
having used the...

276
The Sample Editor
To correct the timing using the Free Warp tool, proceed 
as follows:
1.Open the audio file that you wish to process in the 
Sample Editor.
2.Activate the “Snap to Zero Crossing” button on the 
Sample Editor toolbar.
When this button is activated, warp tabs will snap to zero crossings.
3.If you want to use the Free Warp tool for selective tim-
ing corrections, you can define the local definition grid and 
activate the Musical Mode function.
The next step is to find out where a warp...

277
The Sample Editor
When you have successfully detected the hitpoints for an 
audio file, you can do a number of useful things:
• Change the tempo of the audio material without affecting the 
pitch and audio quality.
• Extract the timing (a groove map) from a drum loop. The 
groove map can then be used to quantize other events, see 
“Create Groove Quantize Preset” on page 111.
• Use slices to replace individual sounds in a drum loop.
• Extract sounds from loops.
You can further edit these slices in the...

278
The Sample Editor
Auditioning and hitpoints
•You can audition the hitpoint slices (i. e. the area be-
tween two hitpoints) by pointing and clicking in any slice 
area.
The pointer changes to a speaker icon and the corresponding slice is 
played back from the beginning to the end.
Navigating between hitpoints
•You can navigate between the slices using the arrow 
keys or by pressing the [Tab] key.
•You can select the next or previous hitpoint marker us-
ing the Locate Next/Previous Hitpoint commands....

279
The Sample Editor
•To move a hitpoint, press [Alt]/[Option] and point the 
mouse at the vertical line of the hitpoint. The mouse 
pointer changes to a double arrow and the tooltip “Move 
Hitpoint” is shown. You can now drag the hitpoint to its 
new position.
Moved hitpoints are locked by default.
Slicing audio
Once you have set up the hitpoints as needed, you can 
slice the audio by clicking the Create Slices button on the 
Hitpoints tab. Alternatively, you can select the “Create Au
-
dio Slices from...

280
The Sample Editor
Slicing multi-track drum recordings
If you have a multi-track drum recording that you want to 
quantize using hitpoints, you can put all the tracks belong
-
ing to the recording in an edit group, calculate the hitpoints 
for the relevant tracks (e.
 g. Kick, Snare, and Hihats), and 
use the “Divide Audio Events at Hitpoints” command on 
the Audio menu (Hitpoints submenu) to slice all tracks of 
the recording at once. This is described in detail in the sec
-
tion “Quantizing multiple...