Hitpoints V2 in Cubase

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Hitpoints V2 in Cubase

hello everybody Andrew Blake from the digitalaudiomanual.com today we move on to our second video as we continue to discuss hit points in Cubase 12. 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 okay so we're on the second video as we get into the subject of hit points all the previous videos and the navigation guide in the link below but first let's talk about navigating through some of these hit points so we've already kind of discussed what the hit points are like if I open this up in the sampler editor this drum track you can see all these lines at the different percussive hits but you can just as well navigate through those in the project if I zoom in on this for a minute you can see there's still all those little lines are still drawn right here in the project window and if you haven't changed your default shortcuts that Cubase gives you you can use the shortcut keys of alt and n to move forward through these hit points right here in the project or alt and B to go backwards you can use the hit points to slice up audio for example on this drum part if I double click this and open it up in the sample editor it shows all the hit points you know at the various places and if I go over here and hit slices it makes slices at all those hit points now instead of just leaving you with like you know a bunch of tiny little pieces of audio all sliced up now if you double click on the same piece that you just sliced up which gives you a view of all the little pieces all sliced up and you can actually take these pieces and you can drag them out of the original lineup you can move them around you can change their order you can do all kinds of things to them if you want to change them and you know morph your Loop into something else but the advantage of making slices like this as opposed to just audio warping it is there's no change in the pitch or the actual sound because these slices will expand or contract in this part editor as necessary with a Tempo although I would say if you're doing extreme Tempo changes you know fast or slower this may not be the best option for that for example you know if you really really speed this up or slow it down you're going to have gaps in between these slices and again there's ways to deal with that we're going to talk about that in a minute but in gen General that's the limitation of doing it this way but if you want that real accurate sound of the snare and the kick and whatever you have here without it changing some way this is actually a very good option let's play just a little bit of it I'm going to speed it up and slow it down so there's the temple it's at if I speed it up so you still have the same exact drum sound without it being changed slow it way down but see there as I slow it down now you start to hear the gaps in between the sounds and you can see that there's gaps in between the Sounds here so you can slice up multiple tracks at once with this hit point thing as long as you have a pretty clearly defined set of sounds like these drum sounds if I select them all and I go up to audio down to hit points and you have the option here to create the slices from the hit points and it takes into account that for example this one with a kick has small slices whereas this effect of a long hit I have here has these longer slices in it and even a little piece here that it recognized as a hit this is going to respond to the tempo of the track if I spin it down the audio stays in sync so as we said earlier that when you use this option of slicing the audio with hit points sometimes you're going to introduce the situation of having gaps between the audio and Cubase has you know given us a couple of options to deal with that let us look at those real quick so here we have the sliced drum Parts as they are and right now they sound pretty good yeah you know without any changes to them because they're at the exact Temple that the audio was before it was sliced so there's not a big difference in the way it sounds but if I speed it up say we go up to 200 here actually I'm not seeing a big difference there now let's go down slower let's the temple was at 128 so let's take it all the way down to somewhere around 100 or so and there I can definitely hear something breaking up in the sound and if I look at it this little hit I have here kind of a special effect hit let's look at this real quick let's zoom in on this see this big gap right here in the audio so that's nothing but empty space when it's played so what they have here in place is a couple of options for closing these gaps so let's look at those if we go up first we have to select the audio which we have here and actually they recommend that you do this as well go to the channel look over in the inspector here there's a button stands for auto Fades and when I click on that you get all this stuff but it's suggested when you're doing any kind of Gap stretching like this that you turn the auto Fade Out making sure that's checked and make sure you have a length of at least 10 milliseconds that's just what's recommended I have found you actually have to experiment quite a bit if you want a really good result but let's take these recommended settings and try it see what happens so we have this piece and we have this big gap in audio right here go up to the audio menu and shoot down there's an option here for advanced and you have a couple of options in this Sub menu one says close the gaps using Time Stretch and one says close the gaps using Crossfade so let's take this first one that says close the gaps time stretch and it made a big process there where it checked the whole track I'm going to solo this real quick let's listen to it that's pretty good but I can hear some artifacts in that so I'm going to control Z out of that let's do the other option they give us we go to audio go down to Advanced again this time we have one that says close gaps Crossfade let's try that let's solo that and listen to it that's actually pretty good that's pretty close to the original sound there's one extra thing they say to try to do here and that's to go back to the audio down to the advanced and there's an option at the very bottom that says delete the overlaps so basically if you have once these things are stretched if there's any overlap of the two parts it's going to get rid of that let's hear what that did that's pretty good here the whole thing yeah that did pretty good as far as keeping the sound original now here's the thing if you wind up speeding this back up again they say you need to undo all of this and start all over again basically so this is not easy or a quick fix for anything in terms of being able to quickly change your audio but the slicing of the audio probably does produce the truest to the original sound and that's it wraps up all there is in the manual about hit points as usual if you haven't grabbed your navigation guide make sure to grab that before you go it has links to all the content on the channel ever growing free to use constantly being updated with new videos just like this but it makes looking for them a whole lot easier so in summation the basic thing with the hit points is you know it's a great way of slicing up your audio or matching events or creating regions or any number of things and we also know that we can browse through them with various shortcut keys so another skill we can add to our list of things we know well in Cubase as always it's great to have you guys here and I'll see you in the next video