Control Room Cubase

[Maricel Fergason]

Asan example: At my home I have two nice near field monitors, but as I am working in my living room you can imagine the treatment of that room leave an bit to desired (the well-known trade-off between room tratment and having an girfriend that has an bit of an resistance about turning an living room into an studio ).

So - I use an Acoustic Room Treatment system (IK ARC-2 plugin) on this spot to get some usable results (yes - I know, but for me it seems to work). This plugin is last in the chain, so its sits in the master (output) channel. So far nothing that needs the Control Room.

So - this is where the Control Room is really usable. I can set up two seperate stereo output channels (I use an firewire connected Focusrite Saffire that has 6 outputs). One channel for the nearfield monitors with the ARC plugin in that channel, and one Headphone output channel with the TB-Isone plugin. The big advantage is that neither plugins have to be swiched off when you do the final mixdown, and you cannot make mistakes by switching on/off both plugins when you are using only one output cannel.

When I get near the end of my mixing phase, I have a general set of mastering plugins that I use also. I use the generally mastered mix to catch those inevitable highs or lows that pop out when you start to compress. That way you can fix them in the mix before going to the full mastering phase.

Another nice way to use control room is to make instant A/B comparisons between the track you are working on and other reference tracks without having the reference tracks play through any master bus processing you may have. You can set up your reference tracks to be routed to the four Cue Mixes and then switch between the Cue Mixes and your main mix.

Say, for example, I am tracking a Drummer (and have Control Room and Listen Enabled etc) and I hit the Listen button on one of the Kick Mics, will this only affect what I hear in the Control Room (physical control room) and the Drummer will not be affected by it (and just have the mix he/she has asked for)?

One thing to watch out for: You might have a situation where you are clipping your master Stereo Out but if you have the Control Room volume turned down low enough, you will not be hearing the clipping through your monitors so you might think everything is fine but if you bounce the session it will be clipped. (If however you have a dither plugin on your stereo out, you will hear any clipping that is taking place, even if Control Room is set lower.)

This is what the Cue mixes are for. You can have a completely different mix sending to each of the 4 Cue mixes and adjust those mix downs via the Cue Sends to tailor the mix balance for a vocalist/drummmer etc. This is all done without affecting your main mix.

I considered using one Cue Mix for each alternative mix, but you have to assign a unique physical output channel to each one (in VST Connections). However, this would prevent me from clicking one of the Cue Mix buttons to send the different sets of plugins to the same output channels and monitors/headphones such that the only difference between the mixes is the plugins.

The premise behind the feature is software control for monitoring. It provides a set of options for selecting monitors, creating cue mixes, and managing how it's all used. Studio One can definitely benefit from a similar feature set.

Let's imagine I have an interface--any interface--that gives me four pairs of analog outputs and four pairs of digital outputs, plus some number of inputs for recording or external sound sources (iPhone, artist's laptop, etc.). I have two pairs of monitors, and a headphone amp at the mixing desk. I connect the monitors/amps to my first two pairs of outputs, I leave one pair open for things like re-amping, and I connect the final pair to my headphone amp. I also use ADAT to connect the four digital pairs to a DAC I'll use to feed headphone amps in my live room.

First, there would need to be a way to tell S1 what outputs are what. So in the Audio I/O Setup grids, you could specify that certain inputs and outputs are Aux In 1, Aux In 2, or Monitor A, B, C, or D, or Cue Outputs, or Headphones. That way the outputs are well defined and can be dedicated to their intended purposes. If you needed to route a channel directly to the monitors, instead of going through the Main Bus, you could route it to "Monitors" as opposed to "Main". And speaking of...

In S1, there could be a panel the size of the Record panel below the edit, mix, or arrange views, in which you can easily fit controls for monitor switching (A, B, C, etc.), monitor source selection (Main, Aux 1, Aux 2, etc.), and monitoring level that's separate from the main fader. Next to that, buttons for dim (and its level), mute, mono, side image solo, channel swap, and even "dim solo"/"listen" mode toggling. In addition, a Talkback section, and a headphones section with its own level that uses many of the same options as the monitors.

Then, as maybe a separate channel type in the console's Outputs view, there could be options on the appropriate outputs for the Cue mixes for things like PFL/AFL and Click send level, while in the main console view, Cue sends are distinguished from normal PFL/AFL sends better than just being permanently visible above the channel I/O. A pop-up menu below/next to the Track List could let you select a Cue mix for Sends On Fader. Output faders could act as output trims. And of course, what makes Cubase's Control Room so cool:

On all the outputs, an insert rack for plugins! So EQ and limiting could be on the Cue mixes, while each of my sets of monitors could have their own instances of Sonarworks Reference loaded up, and I wouldn't need to worry about bypassing them all before exporting a mix.

There's lots of engineers using digital mixing consoles as their studio interfaces. Sure, they have similar-ish routing available within, but without mapping every channel's output in the DAW to a fader on the mixer, you don't get quite the cue mix capability from the hardware you do from the software. Having these options in the box would make even AudioBox VSL-sized setups complete, 100% solutions for a recording/mixing studio. Kind of what comes to mind when I hear "Studio One."

The "Listen Bus" feature in Studio One 5 is only a small part of what this feature request is about. The current implementation of the "Listen Bus" only applies to Songs, not Shows or even Projects! I can hardly believe that. There's another FR on the site specifically just for that.

Like I said to begin with, and like everyone below this, this featureset needs to be implemented thoughout the entirety of Studio One, or it's only a half-measure. In the current state, the Project page is useless for anyone using room correction plugins, because none of the monitoring is correct when the plugin is enabled. That's asinine.

I still want PreSonus to consider this FR in full, not just as a way to make Sonarworks work a little better. A whole "master section" solution would make this a killer recording DAW. Think about the ways people actually use software like this. That's important. Otherwise, your users are likely to go where the features are thought out with greater attention to detail.

In a traditional studio (for want of a better term) there are normally two working areas: the studio itself, or live room, where the performers do their thing, and the control room, where the engineers and producers do theirs.

A significant slice of most studio mixing consoles is given over to managing the various signals that need to be thrown around in a setup of this kind: multiple monitor feeds in the control room, cue mixes in the live room, talkback mics, auxiliary input signals and so on.

For inputs, the Control Room supports a single talkback mic channel and up to six External Input channels, intended for bringing in signals from devices such as external CD/MP3 players, decks, and so on. For outputs, the Control Room allows up to four cue mix channels, a control room headphone channel, and up to four control room monitor channels.

With the exception of the talkback mic, which is always mono, each channel can be configured for mono or stereo operation, and External Inputs and Monitor Outputs also support multi-channel surround configurations.

One of the really cool things about using the Control Room is that it allows you to insert effects. As well as allowing meters to be added to those channels, this could also mean a bit of compression on a cue mix, an EQ on the headphone output to correct for frequency-response inaccuracies in the cans, a hard limiter on a monitor output to protect the speakers from unintended high levels, and so on.

4. Notice that Cubase has created a new Control Room Monitor channel called Monitor 1. Expand this to see its constituent busses, and route these busses to the audio interface outputs that drive your main studio monitors.

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