🎹 O Mere Dil Ke Chain - Instrumental Cover on Cubasis & SynthMaster One

MobileMusic

This is a very old song (with a cool melody) lying in my projects folder for 2 years and I just wanted to get it out of the way for other projects:

Cheers!

Shekar

LinearLineman

Very nice, Shekar. I wish I had your sensitivity for playing this type of stuff. How are you playing the lead and what instrument is it?

MobileMusic

For the lead instrument, I modified "545-LED Soar With Me ARK" preset in SynthMaster One to make it a bit louder, more expressive, etc and saved it as my own preset. I'm still looking for some killer Sax and Flute presets (for male/female voices) or try to design them myself.

I used Cubasis soft keyboard to record performance and edited MIDI notes to render them accurately. At times, I used to use Roland JD-Xi plugged into my old Air 2 but haven't tried that yet on my new iPad Pro 2018 with USB-C only. As you are aware, SM1 offers Legato/Mono and Glide for expressive playing. And Cubasis offers many great features and a cool MIDI editor to polish our work to perfection (like an animated movie ).

Also, you could record at a lower tempo comfortably and reset the tempo back later. For this to work correctly, you need to assign the project's Tempo for the backing audio track and set its Stretch to Auto in Cubasis so it gets stretched correctly on project tempo changes. To analyze note frequencies/vibratos from the audio track, you could scrub it using the playhead.

As a side note, I've created a Snapshot project in Cubasis as my template with Piano, SM1 LED Soar With Me ARK, two Audio tracks and set plugins like Compressor, Roomworks SE delay on the SM1 track and Waves L1 UltraMaximizer on the master track in the Mixer with "Mastering" preset along with project/global Settings to quickly get started with a project. Snapshots projects in Cubasis cannot be edited - they can only be used to spawn copies on double tapping them. The spawned copies can be renamed to match our new project name. Snapshots are similar to the stock Templates in Cubasis but unlike the templates, snapshots can be deleted:

https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=183&t=153672

As mentioned in the preset's Attributes in SM1, the original preset was designed by - http://arksun-sound.com/

LinearLineman

Thanks for so much information, Shekar. For me, if i don’t play it well it is rather a lost cause. I can edit out a wrong midi note here and there, but that is the extent of my tech skills. Curious, though, you say you cannot edit a copied Cubasis project. Not possible even to remix or change instruments?

MobileMusic

@LinearLineman said:
Thanks for so much information, Shekar. For me, if i don’t play it well it is rather a lost cause. I can edit out a wrong midi note here and there, but that is the extent of my tech skills. Curious, though, you say you cannot edit a copied Cubasis project. Not possible even to remix or change instruments?

MIDI is for editing its data which is why I like AUs. I shy away from IAA as most of IAAs give audio which is binary.

If your recording is mostly based on performance, hardware instruments plugged into iPad would give better results as opposed to using the soft keyboard of the apps. You should be able to use IAA apps as easily as AU apps.

When the currently loaded project in Cubasis is copied using the camera icon, it creates a "snapshot" which is similar to factory template but it can be deleted. Snapshots cannot be opened, renamed or edited. When you double tap on a snapshot project, it extracts a copy of the project (like a zip archive file) and loads the newly extracted project. You can rename and edit these extracted project copies and work on them like any other project (but the snapshot project file remains unchanged).

LinearLineman

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining. It reinforces my understanding. But many IAAs do make midi tracks (most of the ones I have do, but it is frustrating when an app like Thor does not.)