Cubase VST 4.0 for Macintosh by Steinberg
By Jeffrye Glenn Tveraas jeffrye@harmony-central.com
January 15, 1999
I've finally figured out why there seems to be so little tasty, innovative music making its way to our ears these days. Everyone's time is taken up with trying to learn how to make the most use out of the hardware and software we've all invested in. As the lists of software features grow exponentially and our hard drives bloat with zillions of lines of code providing us options akimbo until our neurons seize up and our brains cramp, unable to absorb and utilize any more instructions, we dream of simple acoustic melodies set against ancient savannas with log rhythms in the distance and curse this technology that at once inspires us and bogs us down. But I digress.
I'm here to relate to you my impressions of this technological tour-de-force in a personal and musical manner. Bottom line - Cubase VST 4.0 (MSRP $399.00) is everything it purports to be. These feisty programmers have given us a veritable cornucopia of state-of-the-art MIDI and digital audio tools that set new standards of performance in desktop recording studios. But there is a price to pay for this bounty. Well, two really. This puppy ain't cheap and its hardware requirements won't be easily met. And the learning curve is steeper than most because (1) there are simply so many options and features to learn and (2) there is NO $&#% INSTRUCTION MANUAL PROVIDED!
Well, not in the traditional sense anyway. There are several Adobe Acrobat files included on the CD that will tell you everything you might want to know about using Cubase VST. But can you leave it on your nightstand and read a chapter at a time before bed or hold it in your hand as you go step by step in front of your Macintosh? No, unless you're prepared to go through a few ink cartridges and reams of dead wood printing them up yourself. I must tell you, not having a hardcopy detailed manual slowed this reviewer down considerably in preparing this article. I call upon Steinberg to reconsider this decision and provide us with the proper tools to learn and use their excellent program. Not having a hardcopy manual for something this complex is a BAD IDEA.
(I found out that someone just published a new book titled "A fast guide to Cubase VST" by Simon Millward. I went to check it out online but I found out it cost about $45, so being the thrifty shopper I am (read:cheap) I decided to wait until I got more information about it before I showed my plastic. It's good to know though that someone else sensed the void and did something about it. Perhaps Cubase should license this book and include it with the program.)
In fact I did call upon Steinberg. Voicemail to be exact. And I also sent email identifying myself and what I was doing and what kind of help I needed. I didn't get a response, BUT this was because I initially called the wrong phone number. Steinberg does have a customer support line (818-993-4161) with real live human beings! That most likely would have made a big difference. (I was having difficulty getting VST to "see" my MOTU Midi Express multi-port module. I finally figured it out but it was a frustration I could have done well without). So armed with difficult to use documentation and no communication and all my years of previous experience using this stuff I dove right into VST and here's what I found.
They did an awful lot of things right. This application is advanced, exciting, impeccably designed, stable, colorful, inspiring and very, very useful. They didn't miss a trick as far as I can see, and they went out of their way to make all the panels and windows look so much like their hardware counterparts that anyone with any previous recording background will get hip to at least the basics of all the features fairly quickly. When you turn a knob or push a slider with your pointer they acts like the real ones that you've always used. This is a good thing.
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| The Arrange and Transport windows (Click for the full-size image) |
And speaking of windows - wow! You could have two monitors working side by each and still not be able to see everything VST has to offer at one time. But even with my meager 15" NEC running at 832x624 resolution I was able to see anything I needed to in order to record and edit my tracks, I just had to open and close a lot of windows as I went along. A small price to pay for all this power and flexibility to be sure.
The basic layout is familiar if you have any experience with MIDI or digital audio sequencer/recorders. And Steinberg did a good job of making sure most menu items have a corresponding key command, and you can set up your own if you like. Not having to mouse around all the time becomes a time saver, and a bit of a wrist saver as well. The transport panel mimics the front end of just about any tape recorder you've ever used with some input options and looping controls thrown in for good measure. MIDI indicator lights come in quite handy when you need to see if your data is actually getting to the sequencer or if anything is in fact streaming from it. You can never have too much information when you're using heady stuff such as this.
The tracks window shows your color-coded MIDI and audio tracks all together and treats them all the same. Stereo audio tracks are interleaved into one track instead of separate L-R tracks so you can't foul up your phasing during waveform edits or moving tracks around. This is a good thing. This window is pretty standard looking too until you see that Cubase allows you to create folders of tracks that can be compressed or exploded at will, allowing you to see an unprecedented amount of data on your screen at any one time. Very cool. And you can zoom in and out your waveform height and width again to display however much information you want to see at any one time.
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| The Waveform Edit windows (Click for the full-size image) |
This is a huge, complex program and I feel like I could write a book about it just to cover everything I've discovered about VST, but Harmony Central does have its space limitations so I'll highlight as much as I can, the rest will be up to you to ferret out if I've succeeded in piquing your interest. Please look to the sidebar for a summary of the features of VST 4.0.
VST 4.0 offers up to 64 channels of audio playback and virtually unlimited MIDI tracks, depending of course on your computer setup and horsepower. Using the same setup as I used for my review of StudioVision 4.0 a few months ago (see specifications at the end) I was able to get 36 stereo tracks of 44.1K/16bit audio to play back cleanly and in sync from my SCSI HD. Trying to go beyond this caused HD overload errors very quickly. Cubase kindly gives you a small window to keep track of the current hard drive and CPU load so you can monitor these important functions to help you decide just how far you can go with your system regarding tracks, effects, etc.
For the sake of experimentation I copied the same tracks to my IDE boot drive and opened up that copy to check out the disk performance and was I in for a surprise. My 4 gig IDE drive played back 40(!) stereo tracks without causing the disk performance meter to ever rise above 40%! This reflects mostly on the lesser performance of the SCSI-1 bus that Apple includes in the first generation G3 computers and it's caused me to have a new found respect for current IDE technology. But then again, how many tracks do you really need for your projects? Oh yeah, I know...more. Anyway this is a computer issue, not a Cubase issue. Whatever you have, you're gonna want more. This puppy will use all the RAM you can give it, and it will use it well too, allocating a set amount to each channel individually to help avoid memory conflicts, as well as the HD cache to lessen the number of "hits" your HD has to take at any one time. Fine tuning a program like this to your particular system is a very worthwhile use of your time. The payback is real and tangible.