Cubase Pro 12 Review

[Jorun Gyllenband]

TheStudio One Effects Review and Studio One Instruments Review appear to have been one of the more popular posts on my blog according to analytics. In a close second Place are the Digital Performer series.

Well, yes. These are my subjective evaluations of these products, but the ratings are not random. First I start out with my rough rating on a piece of paper on a scale of 0-10. The scale roughly looks like this:

There is one other thing about these ratings that is very important: they are contextual to the class of process. While I may use Magneto II on every project in Cubase, and never use Pitch Correct that does not affect their rating. I only consider Magneto II in the context of saturation effects, and Pitch Correct in the context of pitch correction effects.

To use a stereo effect on a mono track, you need to create an FX Channel with your track routed to it, then place the stereo effect on the FX Channel. Total nonsense. Many other DAWs allow you to use stereo effects on mono tracks without the added clutter and extra effort.

edit: I was informed of another workaround Apparently most all VST3 plug-ins can be copied over from a mono to stereo track. When I tested this secondary workaround I was using primarily VST2 still and it did not work properly.

I have access to amazing products like Pro-L, Elephant, Limitless, Invisible Limiter and others. Companies like Melda Production, Izotope, Flux, Slate Digital and others make some really great limiters as well.

It does however have 1 redeeming feature: DIC (giggle). DIC (Detect Intersample Peaks) shows you when the recreated analog waveform would exceed an absolute ceiling of 0dbFS. On many cheaper playback devices this will cause clipping and audible crackling. DIC lets you see that clearly.

The real usefulness here is that the signal causing the effect to enact, and the signal the effect is acting on can be different via sidechaining. An example of this is using your kick drum signal to control the EnvelopeShaper, but have the envelope shaping actually occur on your bass channel.

The big difference here is that I rarely have a desire for an expander to have a specific sound or flair or feeling or whatever fuzzy-nonsense word you want. The Expander offers clean expansion with an excellent GUI.

There is really nothing particularly unique about the Gate despite these non-basic features, but unless you are working with very busy multi-tracked drums, then the Gate plug-in is likely more than sufficient.

Graphical EQs are a bit of a divisive topic. Some folks (primarily people that started working in live sound) think that they are amazing, and others find very little value in them. The GEQ-10 is a versatile addition to Cubase that will satisfy the former and may convert the latter.

Besides the bank of 10 filters, which seems straightforward enough, GEQ-10 comes with multiple modes for the filters. See the manual for how these modes work, but know that they add a great deal of versatility and usefulness to this plug-in.

Unlike the Brickwall Limiter, which seems to be purposed for use as a final stage limiter at the mastering stage, Limiter is a simple limiter that you can actually use on your audio temporarily because of its zero-latency behaviour.

Magneto II does impart a tape-like saturation that is pleasant, and it imparts some sort of not-very-tape-like filter to the signal. Once you forget that Magneto II is supposed to be some sort of tape emulation, you can transcend to a state of satori.

I hate multiband compressors. The basic premise of throwing 3+ filters on your signal to reconstruct it again is usually enough to turn your mix in to a squishy mess of squishy squish squishiness. Yeah, cross-overs are everywhere (even in places I review well, but once you start messing with the envelope of the signal as well, all bets are off.

Often room mics are boomy, washy, echoey messes of pure awesomeness. A major issue with them though is that washes of cymbals can cause the kick/snare/toms to be covered up a bit more than you would like. MultibandCompressor to the rescue!

Take your 3rd band, turn on the sidechain filter and set it to around 200hz (you can click the label and enter this manually, nice) with a q of 1.0. Set the frequency range to about 3khz-10khz. Ratio to 5. Attack to 0.1. Live Mode off. Hit play and set the threshold until it starts working.

Pitch Correct can correct to the nearest-note, to a(n imported) scale, to midi input, follow chord track or simply transpose. With the ability to use the chord track, Pitch Correct is truly a unique and useful tool.

Pitch Correct also has the necessary tools to preserve, or change, formant. You can do fun things like make yourself sound similar to the average voice of the opposing sex, or crazy effects in either direction.

Quadrafuzz v2 is a tremendously useful plug-in if you work with anything that you want to make dirty in any way. It also works as a multi-band gate should you need something like that. One thing that bothers me is that the tape and tube distortion modes sound far too similar for their monickers.

While I own a few dozen reverb plug-ins, and I never reach for REVelation myself, I do think that for a wide-range of productions it is likely to be a utilitarian reverb that will work satisfactorily.

I am biased. One of my absolute favorite plug-ins is a convolution reverb.. I feel that Reverberate is worth the purchase for any DAW user, and is irreplaceable. I will be judging REVerence with the assumption that you own Reverberate, because I strong believe that you should.

REVerence is an unusually capable convolution plug-in for a DAW inclusion. While I still would probably never reach for it due to my ownership and rabid fanboyism of Reverberate, it is still an excellent plug-in if you lack the money to make a third-party purchase.

SoftClipper is a simple overdrive (basically a waveshaper) with controls over the second and third harmonic. It sounds pretty decent. I particularly like using it on fairly steady bass instruments such as Bass Guitar or synths.

Besides the mediocre filter, the UI does have one bit of an issue: if you try to adjust one step and move your mouse slightly in to the next column then the adjacent step moves. This can make it very difficult to do any sort of precise sequencing.

Be sure to check my review of the Midi Effects for the section on Step Designer though! (someone remind me if I forget to update that to a link) That post will not be coming any time soon. Thank you Jeanne Dekerle for reminding me!

In 99.9% of modern music, 99.99% of listeners will never notice if/what dither is used, and those few times where it is a very necessary process to be applied, there are more modern noise-shaped dithers that people seem to prefer.

So I originally named the amps that these are modelled after, but I took that out. When viewing these as models of a specific amp, their value is greatly diminished. Some of them sound pretty decent on their own, but as an emulation of a specific amp they fall flat. I will consider these on their own merits and not as an attempt at replicating a specific real amp.

While I have other plug-in amp sims that I prefer much more, I think that VST Amp Rack is useable for a decent number of styles of music. You just need to be familiar with how to tweak a rig and have the patience to do it.

Despite my negative feelings about the WahWah plug-in, I still manage to have a bit of fun with it any time I accidentally select it and while writing this review. It got bumped up a notch or two simply for the fun factor.

Presently trialling the Demo. Quite similar here - apart from thre common complaints abur plugin compatibility, UI redesign etc - stability is a very mixed bag in my experience & also hard to track down. Is not consistent & same project may load or crash and FWIW, in trying to change the sample rate. On macos Sonoma 14.2 or Monterey 12.7.2.

One thing that helped me a little - installing and auto-importing C12 prefs is a dog's breakfast. I got closer to better behaviour in ditching those prefs and building C13 prefs from scratch (if a little lengthy & boring). Still, the sudden hang can be still there - variously: opening a previously saved C13 project, or importing a C12 project.or importing a Nuendo 12 project. I guess one of the upsides is that there is a two month window on the 13.0.02 demo, however time-wasing. Perhpas it migth settle down but so far, no. Another update I suspect.

Ive been using Cubase since 1999, as well as many other plugins, processors, tools, FX, instruments, hardware synths, etc. I have built and supported live production environments at large Sports & Entertainment venues, as well as built networks, servers, desktops, and embedded systems throughout my 30+ year tech career. I've also used Reason, Fruity Loops, and Live, but very little.

That being said, I have had a 20+ year love/hate relationship with Cubase and Steinberg that has finally ended, and it ended on the hate side of things today. I've built and rebuilt 6 workstations for use with Cubase starting in roughly 2000 (when the Core2Duo first released and Steinberg began its long history of being unable to manage multithreaded/HT DSP), ending in 2022 with the final workstation. I've also used 2 laptops for Cubase. Ive used version sx2 through professional 12.0.60.

Cubase Pro offers a very robust set of features and tools out of the box and represents a DAW that was once king of the industry - and still could be with proper QA, development, and customer support. Cubase's UI/UX is top notch, with MIDI and audio routing systems that set the standard for other DAWs that came after, not to mention the high quality of the internal signal path, native DSP plugins, MIDI timing, etc etc. Cubase really has so much under the hood, it is mind boggling.

Here is the reason I give this DAW (And Steinberg) 2 stars, despite everything that is positive about their software, and despite the 20+ years I spent with it: Steinberg QA and Steinberg customer service, as well as the inherent instability of Cubase.

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