It’s extremely easy to use and the quality is right up there with Auto-Tune and Melodyne – though it lacks the latter’s polyphonic editing modes. You can change the pitch, position, formant and volume of the separate audio ‘blobs’ without recourse to menus or modifier keys. Speaking of pitch ‘n time processing, Cubase’s VariAudio has received a significant algorithm upgrade and can really compete with third-party solutions. The choice of Time Stretching or Shifting Alignment makes it extremely useful for lining up multi-miked instruments and correcting phase issues. Although Cubase isn’t usually the first DAW you’d turn to for post-production – though there have been some improvements for those who are composing for film – it’s useful to have the facility and it works extremely well. For music uses, being able to quickly align backing vocals or percussion will really speed things up. The new Auto Alignment feature allows you to line up tracks to a reference in a similar fashion to automated ADR software such as VocALign. The bundled plug-ins have received some cosmetic improvements and are now a lot nicer to use on higher-resolution displays. The colour palletes and Add Track dialogue boxes are now ‘floating’ and so make small but important improvements in workflow, as do draggable mixer channel strips. You can now drag and drop VST effects and instruments onto tracks and grab an image of your third-party software to display when selected – those supplied with Cubase already have these. The channel strip has been revised both in appearance and ergonomics and there are some changes in the appearance of windows and dialogue boxes, most of which won’t faze experience Cubasists one bit.

It’s a doddle to use and makes the production and managing of different mixes easier, which is extremely important for today’s ‘just in time’ production workflow.Ĭurrently, snapshots don’t save plug-in automation – which could limit their use if you commonly automate these functions – but I hope Steinberg add this feature soon. You can add production notes to these snapshots and decide which parts of a mix (EQ, levels, individual tracks etc.) to recall.

MixConsole snapshots save the current state of the mixing console for instant recall. Cubase 10 kind of reflects back to this idea, but in a more sophisticated form. My first automated mixing system didn’t have any detailed control over level changes – the SSL 4000 E being a tad out of my budget! Instead, you could take ‘snapshots’ of the state of the mixer and recall these, one by one, using MIDI timecode information as the song progressed. For those wanting to dip their feet into the Cubase pond, there’s also a trial version available from the Steinberg website. Version 10 is more of an evolution of Cubase rather than offering any radical change, though there are some important new features and workflow improvements in the update.

Cubase review