Hitpoints V1 in Cubase

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Hitpoints V1 in Cubase

hello everybody Andrew Blake from the digitalaudiomanual.com today we are going to begin discussing hit points in Cubase but before we start I want to remind you that there's a link below to the free content navigation guide which is an easy to navigate webpage with links to all the content on this channel and besides that in the near future I'm going to begin adding tips and other bits of information that will only be available there you know things like simple steps that will get you started and up and running quick things that are in the videos but are written down in simple steps that serve as quick reminders when you need information down the road if you're working with programs like wavelab or Cubase plugins or the cable guys shaper Box 2 and many many other projects that are in the works then I know you're going to find just like I have that this is an invaluable study Aid and the other thing I want to make sure you understand is that this is not a simple PDF this is a constantly updated page that has any information that is new or anytime videos are changed really anything updated and once you have it you will always have the latest information constantly updated so if you haven't gotten it already go to the link below click on it and save it to your favorites it's my gift to you and it's absolutely free Okay so let's get started all right so hit points what are they they are incredibly useful that's what they are let's talk about what they look like first if I go to a sample like this from my media rack pull it into the project to where it brings in a piece of audio into my project and then I double click on this piece of audio which then opens it up in the sample editor if we examine over on the left there's a tab that actually says hit points and if I open that tab up and then I look at the audio that I just brought in you'll notice that you'll see the audio but you also see these lines drawn at particular beats or time intervals along the audio and this is Cubase taking its best shot at trying to figure out where the Beats or particular intervals of audio are on a piece of audio like this like if you look at the piece of audio that's kind of droning on here could be a pad or it could be the length of the sound of the drum once it's been hit you notice there's no real hit point in that that's just a long droning sound but the initial attack that has these hit points and you trying to take your time to calculate these in and draw these in for yourself so that you can manipulate the audio is kind of hard time consuming you know challenging so Cubase does a solid favor and automatically puts it in to start with once this stuff is put in the way you can manipulate your songs or audio or sounds or whatever increases quite a bit because there's a lot of new options you can do by having these hit points in here you could slice this audio you could take sections of it out it basically gives you a grid to work with on the actual audio itself one thing to pay attention to in Cubase in the preferences if you go up to edit and down to preferences as you start down your little list on the left there's a thing that says audio if you click on that when you go down on the right there's a check box here that says enable automatic hit point detection and basically if that's unchecked of course when you bring in these audio pieces they're not going to have those little lines and slices on them but you want those little lines and slices typically so if that's not checked then you want to check it especially for this discussion that we're having here besides double clicking this in the sampler editor you can actually see these hit points right in the project I'm going to take a little Zoom tool and really zoom in on this so I can see it and as I make it big enough so where I can see it the same thing applies there's these little lines drawn on the various beads slices or areas of what seems to be you know more than just the little drony parts so it kind of goes without saying that hit points are going to work better on things like drums or anything that has Rhythm to it as opposed to some again like long synth hell drone note or something like that some hit point 101 when you're first messing with these assuming that you're in this hit points tab I'm talking about you'll want to hit this edit hit point button over here to activate things and as you're moving sliders around like this here you will see hit points kind of come and go so if there's one here that you don't want to see disappear or be altered if you go up to the Little Triangle at the very top of any of these hit points it'll turn to an option that says lock the hit point and if you hit that it keeps it from being altered by these other added things you may do to it you can also go back up to that little triangle and it will turn to an X and it'll say disable hit point if you don't want to mess with that hit point and you can also just quickly disable them by holding shift over the actual hit point and hitting it that way if you hold your Alt key and click somewhere you you can draw in hit points and then once you've put a hit point in if you just move your mouse over it the mouse pointer turns it with like a little arrow and you can move that hit point around if you want so looking at this edit hit point option over here on the left assuming I haven't able to edit hit points the first thing you have here is the threshold and I turn the threshold up I'll have less hit points as I bring the threshold down it will draw in more hit points following that you have the intensity which in some ways does the same thing as you turn the intensity up you'll basically have less hit points as you bring it down you'll have more hit points then you have an option for the minimum length and the further you bring this up basically it will it'll space out the hit points more so the further down this is the closer the hit points can be then you have an option for the Beats where you can actually specify I only want this on certain beats on a quarter note eighth note Etc then if you come down to the next option says remove all then it just takes everything out of there and if you go back up and hit the edit hit point again then it goes back to the original default where it was then from this point you have just a whole host of useful options to do with your hit points if we go down into this create option here first thing you have is slices so if I hit this now it gives me a warning because it says I'm in musical mode I have to disable that and say okay disable it at that point it just slices the audio up so then you have these little pieces you can do things with you have an option to create a Groove quantized from it this is real useful if you're actually taking something from a real drummer or you know anything that has a rhythm that you want to use when you hit the groove option and then I go back into my project when I look up at the quantize screen it's now been filled in with a specific customized little quantize option which will now quantize anything I put into my project midi or anything else to match this audio I just had you have an option to create markers if I go over and hit the marker option I don't see anything on this screen but if I close the screen down and now I look at my marker track it's inserted markers forming at all the little hit points you can make regions out of these slices if I hit the regions option now over here on the right it has created and named all these different regions and regions allow you to actually take these little pieces and drag them into your project and if you watch the series on the pool that we did you can actually import you know regions right from the pool and bring them into the project you can actually create separate audio events you hit events here I now have specific little pieces that have all been sliced up for me I can go down and create warp markers which then it you would go up to the audio warp tab but now you could take these warp markers and stretch your audio or change the timing on it and then you have this option which is just almost completely crazy they give you the option to create midi notes so if I hit that I get a little screen that comes up with some various options I can pick the length of notes whatever I want if I hit OK it looks at all these hit points and then I go back into my project and it's now created a midi part with notes drawn in at those particular Parts this is the kind of thing where you could take a base part you know and coordinate your Kick Drum right to it there's so many things you can do and they make this so easy some other things that happen when you enable this edit hit point when you go in between the hit points you get a little speaker and if you click on that it actually plays The Little Slice another feature is if I hit one of these slices and it plays it with that speaker now if I use my Tab Key I can just go right through the rest of them all right so that's it for today if you haven't picked up your navigation guide be sure to grab that before you go there's links to all the content on the channel I'm also trying to put in headings for ones that are the big subjects I put in playlists so it's easy to see the whole playlist if you want you'll probably see that new happening on the navigation guide if you haven't seen it yet so hit points let's get into these and figure them all out and become experts at using them this is a very useful feature as we will see as we go along there's so many things that this uh Cuts up the work and makes the work a lot easier on many things all right great job guys here I'll see you on the next video