Steinberg Cubase SE 3 Getting Started Manual

							11
Tutorial 4: Editing in the Project
window 
						

							CUBASE SE11 – 132 Tutorial 4: Editing in the Project window
About this tutorial
This tutorial describes some of the procedures for editing in the Project 
window. Typically, this is where you do the “large-scale” editing and re-
arranging of events. Again, please note that this tutorial only describes 
some of the many functions in the Project window – for details and full 
descriptions, see the Operation Manual.
Preparations
This tutorial is based on an existing file, included on the Cubase SE 
DVD. 
• Below, we assume that you have followed the previous tutorial and cop-
ied the “Tutorial Projects” folder to your hard drive.
If not, please see page 114.
1.Close any open projects, by making their Project windows active and 
selecting “Close” from the File menu.
This is just to make things clear and avoid confusion – you can of course have several 
projects open in Cubase SE if needed.
2.Pull down the File menu and select Open.
3.In the file dialog that appears, navigate to the Tutorial folder on your 
hard drive, select the file “Tutorial 4.cpr” and click Open.
Now the “Tutorial 4” project opens in Cubase SE. 
						

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Overview
As you can see, this project contains four audio tracks (drums, bass, 
guitar and strings) with a few events. Try playing back the project from 
the beginning!
Well, it’s obvious that things are pretty disorganized here; the audio 
events do not fit together very well. The goal of this tutorial is to make 
some sense out of this, by editing in the Project window.
While this tutorial describes the editing of audio events, most of these 
procedures can also be used for editing MIDI parts in the Project window. 
See the Operation Manual for details.  
						

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Moving and copying events
Let’s start by making the events start at the same time:
1.Select the Arrow tool by clicking its icon in the toolbar.
2.Make sure the Snap button is activated and the Grid option is selected 
on the Snap pop-up menu.
The Snap function helps you find the correct positions when moving 
and editing, by making objects “magnetic” to certain positions (or to 
other objects). When the Grid option is selected and the Grid pop-up 
menu to the right is set to “Bar” as in the figure above, you can only 
move objects to the start of bars.
3.Click on the first Bass Synth event, and drag it all the way to the left.
Now it will start at the same time as the “Slow Disco” drum event.
4.Drag the next Bass Synth event so that it starts where the first one 
ends.
5.In the same way, drag the Guitar event and the Strings event so that 
they start at the beginning too.
6.Move the project cursor to the start of the project and start playback.
The Snap button   
						

							CUBASE SETutorial 4: Editing in the Project window 11 – 135
OK, that’s much better, but there are still things to fix. For example, the 
Wah guitar event ends after one bar, while the other events last two 
bars. Let’s add a copy of the guitar event:
7.Press [Alt]/[Option], click the Wah guitar event and drag it one bar to 
the right.
A copy of the event is created.
Now we have a two-bar, slightly cheesy disco pattern. We could just 
activate Cycle playback and listen to these two bars over and over 
again. Instead we’ll use the Repeat function:
8.Select all events by pressing [Ctrl]/[Command]-[A] on the computer 
keyboard.
This is the same as using the Select All function on the Edit menu. You can also select 
multiple events by [Shift]-clicking each event in turn or by dragging a selection rectan-
gle around them with the Arrow tool.
9.Pull down the Edit menu and select “Repeat…”.
A dialog appears.
10.Set the “Count” parameter to 3 and click OK.
All events are repeated three times, for a total of four two-bar patterns. This is just the 
same as copying by [Alt]/[Option]-dragging, but much quicker, especially if you need 
several copies after each other.
At this point, our song is eight bars long. It could use some variation!   
						

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Muting and erasing events
A quick way of adding variation is to remove stuff. We could for exam-
ple let the different instruments appear gradually instead of all at the 
same time:
1.Select the Mute tool from the toolbar.
2.Click on the first two Bass Synth events, and then on the first two 
Hi Strings events.
They are “greyed out” indicating that they’re muted.
3.Start playback from the beginning.
Fine, now the bass appears at bar 3 and the strings at bar 5.
The Mute tool is very useful for trying out variations, etc. However, now 
that we’re sure that we want to remove those events, we might as well 
delete them for real:
4.Select the Eraser tool from the toolbar.
5.Click on the four muted events.
They are removed.
6.While you’re at it, remove the first and the second Wah guitar event too.    
						

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Splitting and resizing events
Well, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all – it may have been 
better with some guitar at the beginning, but maybe with some varia-
tion. Here’s an idea:
1.Pull down the Edit menu and select Undo.
The last deleted guitar event reappears.
2.Select Undo again.
The first guitar event reappears. 
Cubase SE has unlimited undo – you could go back all the way to the 
start of this tutorial by undoing your actions, if needed. However, we 
will only need one guitar event for this:
3.Select Redo from the Edit menu.
The first guitar event is removed again.
4.Select the Scissors tool from the toolbar.
Now, the idea is to split the Wah guitar event into smaller sections, to 
vary them. However, currently you can only make edits at whole bar 
positions because the Snap Grid is set to “Bar”.
5.Pull down the Grid pop-up menu on the toolbar and select “Beat”.
Now you will be able to split or position events at each beat (quarter note) position.   
						

							CUBASE SE11 – 138 Tutorial 4: Editing in the Project window
6.Click with the Scissors tool at the fourth beat in the Wah guitar event 
(at the beat just before the start of bar 3).
The event is split in two; one three beat long and another one beat long. If you were to 
play back this section now, you wouldn’t hear any difference, though.
7.Select the Arrow tool again.
8.Drag the first guitar event two beats to the left and play back.
Not too bad, but we could use a little more guitar in the second bar:
9.Position the pointer in the lower left corner of the second guitar event 
(the one bar long event).
The pointer is shown as a double arrow, indicating that you can resize the event by 
dragging.
10.Click and drag one beat to the left.
What you did was to resize the event. In effect, you make the event start playing earlier 
in the audio clip. Events could be viewed as “windows” looking into an audio clip – by 
resizing an event you get to see more or less of its clip.
OK, that brought some variation to the start of the “song”.   
						

							CUBASE SETutorial 4: Editing in the Project window 11 – 139
Adding a fade
The strings in bar 5 appear rather abruptly – they would benefit from 
being faded in. In the Mixing tutorial we created a fade by automating 
a fader – let’s try another method instead:
1.Click on the first Hi Strings event with the Arrow tool.
The event is selected. The blue handles at the top are fade and volume handles.
2.Click at the upper left handle and drag it to the right.
A thin blue line indicates the fade-in.
3.Play back to hear the fade.
You can adjust the length of the fade by dragging the handle. 
It’s not bad, but it would be even better if the fade-in was slower at the 
beginning and quicker at the end (i.e. more exponential).
4.To change the shape of the fade, double click on the fade line.
This opens a dialog in which you can adjust the fade settings:    
						

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5.Click one of the buttons to the right below the curve display to get a 
more exponential fade curve.
6.Click OK to close the dialog and play back the section again.
Now we would want the same fade to be applied to the second string 
event. While we could repeat the settings manually, it’s probably eas-
iest to copy the faded event:
7.Remove the second string event by clicking it with the Eraser tool.
8.Select the Arrow tool again, press [Alt]/[Option] and drag the first 
string event two bars to the right.
As you can see, the copied event retains the fade you created.
That concludes this tutorial! 
Now you’ve tried some of the many editing features in Cubase SE’s 
Project window. If you like, you could use your new skills to change the 
end of the eight-bar “song”, which ends rather abruptly. For example, 
you could apply fade-outs, resize events to make the different instru-
ments end one by one, or create more copies to make the song longer. 
Or, you can move on to the next chapter, in which we’ll take a look at 
VST Instruments.