Steinberg Cubase SL/SX 3.1 Manual

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Setting up external instruments
1.Open the VST Connections window from the Devices menu.
2.Open the External Instrument tab and click “Add External Instrument”.
3.In the dialog that appears, enter a name for the external instrument 
and specify the number of required mono and/or stereo returns. If you 
want to set up a MIDI device corresponding to the external instrument, 
click the Associate MIDI Device button.
Depending on the type of instrument, a...

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7.When you are done, close the VST Connections window.
How to use the external instrument
Once you have set up the external instrument in the VST Connections 
window, you can use it as a VST Instrument. Open the VST Instruments 
window and click on an empty instrument slot. In the instrument pop-up 
menu, your external instrument is listed on the External Instruments 
submenu:
Return Gain Allows you to adjust the level of the signal coming in from the ex-...

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When you select the external instrument in the VST Instruments win-
dow, the following happens:
• A parameter window for the external device is opened automatically. This may 
either be the Device window, allowing you to create a generic device panel, 
an OPT editor window or a default editor. For information about the Device 
window, the MIDI Device Manager and User device panels, see the chapter 
“MIDI devices” in the pdf document “MIDI Devices and...

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About the “plug-in could not be found” message
When you open a project that uses an external effect/instrument, you 
may get a “plug-in could not be found” message. This will happen 
whenever you remove an external device from the VST Connections 
window although it is used in a saved project, or when transferring a 
project to another computer on which the external device is not de-
fined. You may also see this message when opening a project last 
saved...

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Freezing external effects/instruments
Just as when working with regular VST instruments and effects, you 
can also choose to freeze external effects and instruments. The gen-
eral procedure is described in detail in the Operation Manual chapters 
“Audio effects” and “VST Instruments”.
When freezing external instruments or effects, you can adjust the re-
spective tail value in the Freeze Channel Options dialog:
• Use the arrow buttons next to the Maximum Tail...

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Mixer operations
Several changes have been made to the mixer, to facilitate editing, 
navigating, etc. A whole new Mixer category has been added in the 
Key Commands dialog for example, allowing you to create keyboard 
shortcuts for the mixer functions you often work with. Several new 
functions have been added to the mixer context menu, allowing you 
e.g. to specify which channels functions should be applied to. These 
new functions are described in the...

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The Window submenu
This submenu is handy for quickly switching to another open mixer 
window, showing/hiding the different mixer panes etc. It contains the 
following options:
•Show Routing View
Allows you to show/hide the topmost section of the mixer which contains the input/
output routing settings.
•Show Extended View (Cubase SX only)
Allows you to show/hide the middle section of the mixer, where you can display differ-
ent settings for the channels (EQs,...

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Copying channel settings to/from several 
tracks in one go
In the previous program version, the channel settings could be copied 
for one channel and pasted into another channel. This behavior was a 
bit cumbersome if the same settings had to be applied to several chan-
nels, as they had to be applied to each channel separately. In version 
3.1 of the program, it is now possible to apply the settings of one chan-
nel on several other channels in the mixer,...

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Panning Bypass
In version 3.1 of the program, it is now possible to bypass the panning 
for all track types except MIDI tracks. To do this, keep [Shift] and [Alt]/
[Option] pressed and click on the pan setting for the respective chan-
nel in the mixer (on the fader panel or in the extended mixer view – 
Cubase SX only). The Panning Bypass state is reflected in all the dif-
ferent pan setting sections, e.g. if you bypass a channel in the mixer, 
this is...

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The Tempo Track (Cubase SX only)
A very handy new feature can be found in the Tempo Track window: 
the Process Bars dialog. This dialog uses the global “Insert Silence” 
and “Delete Time” functions from the Edit menu – Range submenu, 
but uses a musical “bars+beats-based” environment for calculating 
the necessary ranges (or parameters). It also ensures that the time 
signatures stay “in sync” after these operations. This allows for a 
much more intuitive...