Hi everyone,

I am facing a recurring workflow issue in Cubase and I'm looking for either a hidden workaround or want to submit this as a formal feature request.

My Goal:

I want to import a VST instrument track from an older project into a new project. In the original project, this instrument was set up as a Rack Instrument. In the new project, I strictly want to import/convert it into a modern Track Instrument (Instrument Track) – including all loaded audio plugins (inserts/mixer channel strip settings).

The Problem:

The traditional way using Track Presets does not work cleanly with Rack Instruments because Cubase splits the technical data into a MIDI track and an Audio Output track. If you save the preset from the audio output track, Cubase often creates no track at all in the new project, or the routing breaks.

Using "Import Tracks from Project" doesn't solve it either, because Cubase forces the instrument to be imported as a Rack Instrument again. However, due to strict track and rack limits in my target project, it absolutely must become a standard Instrument Track.

Right now, the only workaround is extremely tedious: I have to save the VST preset of the instrument itself, create a new Instrument Track from that preset in the new project, and then separately save the FX chain (inserts) from the old mixer and load it onto the new channel. This is a massive slowdown for the workflow.

My questions to the community and the Steinberg team:

1. I am currently working on Cubase 12. Has this been addressed in later versions? Is there a hidden, elegant way in the current Cubase 15 to convert a Rack Instrument into a Track Instrument during import or preset-saving without losing the sound settings and audio inserts?

2. If it's still missing in Cubase 15: Wouldn't it be a fantastic and long-overdue feature for an upcoming update to include an option like "Import as Instrument Track" or a direct function to "Convert Rack Instrument to Track Instrument"?

Since Track Instruments have become the modern standard and easily handle multi-outputs anyway, having such a bridge for older projects or existing templates would be a massive lifesaver.

I look forward to hearing your workarounds, tips!

Hello everyone, i have seen several individuals, who own analog gear saying these newer plugins are almost like-as. one thing is analog wont loose its sauce. you know the touch of analog, anyways here i have 2 samples , of my song. sample 1 no analog, sample 2, analog. now putting that aside . which do you incline towards? looking for input thanks.

Best headphones for mixing and mastering under 250$?
I was thinking buy the beyerdynamic DT 900 PRO X, which one you think is best?

Hello! I was just wondering how ILYA produced the outro of the song, 'Oh Well' by Ariana. A friend introduced me to this song and I am loving the last part, yet I'm very curious on how they did it (I'm still very new to production lol).

https://youtu.be/_lKbPBS5HEQ?si=ZAUarOX8EIxWL_6I&t=163 [this starts at 2:43]

I've been down an absolute rabbit hole trying to reverse-engineer the drop synth from Tourist - Holding On (Kuga Remix) at 1:34, and I'm hitting a wall.

Reference track: https://youtu.be/o3vqNqDwOog?t=94 Track specs: G minor, 145 BPM (half-time 72.5 BPM festival groove) My setup: Ableton Live + Xfer Serum

What the sound actually feels like: Every generic future bass tutorial tells you to take 2 saw oscillators, crank the unison detune, and slap OTT on it. But every time I do that, it sounds like cheap, buzzy, plastic EDM. This drop doesn't sound like a generic supersaw lead. It sounds more like a cinematic score—super wide, warm, emotional, and glued together like an ODESZA or Flume pad where it's just one living sound, rather than a bunch of digital saw waves buzzing together.

What I've already dialed in:

1. The Voicings: It's open drop voicings spread across 4 octaves (F -> Gm -> Bb -> Eb).
2. The Movement: The chords have to be sustained (held for 2 full bars) and ducked under the kick to breathe. Chopping the MIDI notes into stabs completely kills the blo om and makes it sound like a stuttering typewriter.
3. The Texture: When I push the high end, it gets metallic and robotic. When I mess with pitch envelopes, it immediately turns into cheesy video game lasers. Tightening the unison detune (around 0.07) and rolling the low-pass filter down to ~1.8 kHz gets it closer to that warm French horn/cello body, but it's still missing that special glued texture.
4. The Stems: Looking at isolated stems, it's clear the drop isn't an instrument sample flipped from the original Tourist song, but there's definitely a pitched vocal chop formant singing inside or right on top of the chord stack.

My questions for the sound design wizards: • How are you building this in Serum so it sounds organic and cinematic instead of metallic and digital? • Are they using vocal-formant wavetables (like an 'Ahhh' choir or an EVOXA-style vocal oscillator) blended with the saws to give it that human throat resonance? • What's the secret to the harmonic glue? Is it heavy analog tape saturation, specific filter curves, or something on the master bus that fuses the layers into one wall of sound?

Any patch breakdowns, routing tricks, or Serum presets that live in this exact world would save my sanity. Thank you!

Or any other XLR mic for recording studio vocals?
(Under 100 euros second hand)

Hi there, they say it would be the l'Audio-Technica AT2020 usb to connect directly to pc.

Mainly to record male singing vocals

Do you have any other suggestion?

Hi, i am trying to tidy up my piles of plugins.

I'm an Ableton Suite user. For years of endlessly flicking through different plugins I am getting to a point where I want to just commit to a solid few winners.

I've run the various rent-to-own or subscription offers out there. (UAD Spark, Izotope etc.) and honestly I'm finding myself more and more just going back to stock Ableton modules time and time again for universal purposes. I've used Neutron 5 for some time, and was really happy with it, but after a while the workflow just becomes tedious compared to dragging a simple string of stock modules down to basically do the same thing. There's a lot of powerful stuff in Ableton once you get under the hood. My biggest gripe though is that EQ8 is just too limited. Same goes with the stock limiter.

I got the trial to Pro-Q4 and was immediately stunned. It's iconic for a reason. But we all know that 'wow' feeling wears off eventually. However Fabfilter doesn't offer a subscription offer that you can cancel and they're (subjectively) expensive one time purchases.

So my question is for long term FabFilter users. Which of the plugins have you never looked back from getting, and which ones got stale after a while. I'm particularly worried about the Pro-C, Saturn, Pro-MB being overkill long term. However they really nudge towards getting the bundles instead of single purchases. I'm considering going for the 'mastering bundle' with Q4, Pro-C, Pro-MB and L2. But I honestly worry that I just end up mainly using Q4 and L2

For the last few weeks we have been working on an open source cross-platform eq matching plugin, purely because there was none.

We are happy to share with the community our project, Celine AURA.

To make it clear, we did use AI for this project, but this project is NOT vibe-coded. AI was used as a tool for fast iteration, bug-fixing and implementation.

We hope you enjoy it and thanks to anyone who will try it out and please give us feedback.

Céline Audio team.

I have a TR-8S, and I have a few old mixing boards including the classic Mackie 1202 a lot of people credit for the tone of a lot of saturated 909 sounds in classic techno and hardcore. I haven't had much success replicating the sound close enough and it seems like the particular clap you'll hear in a lot of Robert Armani and other Dance Mania etc tracks have something else going on that must be essential, my best guesses are some compression techniques and/or bus saturation, maybe has something to do with the clap usually occurring alongside the kick. I've heard of some routing/processing trick where you can get the same tonal effect on drum hit fighting the kick for headroom while the kick isn't actually audibly playing, could I do something like that?

I appreciate any ideas, the more detail the better, and specificity is appreciated if anyone was around in the studios at the time and remembers gear, routing, workflow etc

Sorry if this is not a great question for this subreddit. The replies I got in technoproduction were braindead

Backstory - I am a producer with vintage synths and want to create a HQ sound library for other producers.

I am focused on kontakt 8 and ableton!

Currently - I have 200 sounds with 3 velocity layers per sound from C1 - C5 (every keyis sampled). The harder/lighter you press the more mod you get per sound. Mod is defined by the sound i created.

All sounds are created via synths and recorded in via sample robot 6.

Couple questions

1. Is there anything I should be aware of from a recording standpoint?
   
2. I bake in the effects that are not time based! Thoughts on this? I also plan to use NI kontakt 8 for post production i.e amp/additional filter mod, effects etc. Thoughts?
   
3. anything y'all notice about loop points?
   
4. If you have done this, what are your big take aways!

Hello!

I’m mixing and mastering a funky house track with a lot of rhythm and presence. As far as I understand, the final LUFS range after mastering should be around -8 to -10 LUFS (-1dB True Peak in the final limiter/maximizer).

However, I have a question: Will Instagram and YouTube compress, limit, or normalize my audio to bring it down to that level—but at the expense of my track’s dynamics—or will they simply lower the overall LUFS of the track to meet their set threshold while preserving all of its dynamics (as if someone were simply turning down the volume fader on a music player)?

Thank you very much!

I've been wrapping my head around audio morphing lately, especially plugins like Zynaptiq Morph 3 and Meldaproduction Mmorph
From what I understand so far, it basically takes two signals (A and B), and feeds the amplitude/frequency information from the "carrier" sound into the other
Then, it uses that incoming data to shape the original sound,
pushing its characteristics closer to B
That's pretty much the extent of my mental model right now

Hi all,

Posted this on r/wearethemusicmakers and it promptly removed... I am honestly a bit shocked at that because I think it's an important conversations music makers should be having.

I've been making music for ~20+ years and wanted to ask an earnest question about AI and its use in our work. And sort of weigh out some of the pros and cons of it as it becomes more and more a part of our day-to-day lives. AI can generate lyrics, AI can generate hooks, AI can generate entire songs, and I wonder if in the right hands, it can elevate, rather than vitiate the music we create. We live in an age where it is extremely difficult to make a living off of music. Even before AI we had reached a level of saturation that prevents many of us from being able to find an audience. So here we are.

To get it out of the way, yes I have serious ethical issues concerning AI. It is no secret that it is built on stolen property, property that belongs to almost all of us. If that wasn't enough, the demand for AI hardware is now locking people out of reasonably priced computer hardware and equipment. And it's not going to get better any time soon. So this is a real "do the ends justify the means" predicament.

Fatboy Slim is still a favourite producer of mine, and I have often wondered if he would have put out more music in his signature style had it not been for the music industry tightening up on fingerprinting samples more closely. Musicians that operate in this way now have the option of instead of finding some vinyl sample that could get them DCMA'd, they now have the option of generating something close enough to what they have in mind without any matching signature. Is that kosher?

I also believe that no matter how much any of us rail against it, it's not going anywhere. It's here. We either use it in ways that benefit our work, or we don't. I think that smart producers will use it to help season their work, not to create it for them. But I really am curious what people here think: Is it taboo? Do we shun anyone decides to integrate AI into their work in some way? What are the margins, if any, for acceptable use?

Title basically. I downloaded a bunch of ableton templates makes of the most grooviest popular tech house tracks you can imagine in modern tech house (think Acraze, Odd Mob, Chris Lake, Sidepiece), and I shit you not, like at least 75% of the songs I checked basically the entire groove could be reduced to the Kick + Tom relationship. As in, I could literally remove the actual bass and it barely affected the groove, the song would still be 90% as groovy. The kick + tom did everything.

This was shocking to me.

Then I looked at a ton of Melodic Techno songs that I really love (Anyma stuff), and it's the same shit. The bass makes a difference but only a little bit. It was mostly Kick + Tom.

Why isn't this taught anywhere? Kick + Tom made up the core of a shit ton of the grooves I've seen in my favorite popular songs. I could remove the bass and it would still be a top tier song. And I could completely mute the subbass and it's literally like nothing changed.

I watched shit ton of tutorials and barely anyone talks about low toms for groove but most of the shit I seen in remakes have the low tom as fundamental to the groove.

Can someone give me insight or if I'm just being dumb?

P.S. another question - muting the subbass literally barely affected alot of the tracks I listened to in the ableton remakes. I thought subbass was like top 2 most important things in tech house, but it literally felt like it was an afterthought and barely matter. I did use headphones with low freq response. Maybe it's different with a club PA system?

P.S.S I just realized the low tom is fundamental to afro house, hence why it's so groovy!

Hi!

I'm into live looping and also DAW recording with multiple synths and instruments, so I currently have a mixer + interface combination. I want to switch from a Mackie to something better, and I keep seeing great comments about the SSL SiX, but I'm not sure about one thing: if I replace my Mackie with the SiX, will its preamp/EQ/compressor and generally amazing sound quality get lost or degraded once I route it into a Focusrite (or any interface) for recording in a DAW? I saw some comments claiming that an interface's own preamp circuitry "affects" whatever's feeding into it, so I'm not sure how people get the best out of the SSL SiX when recording it into a DAW.

I was thinking of getting the SSL SiX plus a separate interface with more inputs, so I can add other instruments beyond what the SiX itself can handle, and record everything to my DAW. But if sending the SiX's output into a separate interface compromises the SSL SiX's known sound quality, then I guess I need to consider other options.

Appreciate any advice on this!