Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Session Ep 08 – Touch and Toolbar Creator on Surface Book”.
Hello, I’m Robin Vincent and welcome to another surface session, just a quick one. This time, I’m in the middle of starting a project in Cubase on the surface book, I want to create a new song writing with the pen and fingers to test out how well that goes. But in order to use the pen effectively, I need to create a toolbar, a toolbar for my fingers. Now I’ve talked about this before many times.
In fact that, if you are entering in to using touch and using the pen, then the keyboard is not always there, particularly with a surface book, because I don’t want to use the touchscreen in this orientation. I want to put it down here, in which case I completely lose the keyboard, and so I’m going to be making music with purely my fingers and the pen. In order to do that effectively, you need to have some kind of tool bar because you base whatever using may not necessarily have good finger access to the sorts of tools you need simple commands like copy and paste without a shortcut keyboard are actually really difficult to Do with the pen or with your fingers, trying to find things in menus to do that or trying to do the tap and hold right click. It works, but it’s not ideal, and so I found that using a toolbar is the answer now to me. In my heart mind, this is such an obvious thing that I cannot comprehend.
Why is not in Windows, to have a digital pen and to encourage the use of touch and to have not provided some kind of fingering? Toolbar is bonkers completely bonkers, but I’ve been saying this since the surface pro 3 for years now and nothing seems to change. I have heard that in the creator update, which is coming early in the new year, that there is some additional pen controls, but something to do with like an on-screen touchpad, which I don’t see the usefulness of at all. However, a toolbar that gives me simple keyboard shortcuts to use in the software is absolutely vital and it’s just crazy that it doesn’t exist. But here we are so what I’ve done. If you’re interested in this toolbar, I use a toolbar created by a guy called. I can’t remember his name, it blimp or something but anyway there’ll be a link in the description and it’s called toolbar creator and it’s a little work of genius. There are other toolbars available, there’s some radial ones and other clever bits and pieces, but most of them for my money are the too much too crazy or or too involved.
Whereas this one is simple and for me it absolutely does exactly what it is that I’m trying to do so here it is. You can’t see that I know you can’t see that I’ll do this top down in a minute, but you actually need your keyboard to do the editing of it so that you can do the proper shortcut shortcuts shortcuts shortcuts yeah. You know what I mean, so I’m going to bring the camera in and give you a quick look here is my toolbar. Do you see that I have a button? I that says move and I can move it about. I have a button on it says hide. I can hide it and bring it back up now. This is my toolbar for Cubase. It has lots of keyboard commands on there which do things in Cubase, which are either difficult or long-winded to get to via menus. So at the bottom here I’ve got cut copy, paste, duplicate, I’ve got an edit button, I’ve got add tracks, bring up the transport, bring up the VST instruments, button, bring up the mixer, bring up the media bay zoom in and out various pens to selection, zooming and Loop mode, that kind of thing so I bring out Cubase like so I mean simple things I mean I don’t need transport controls on here, not in this particular instance, because transport is fairly easy to to access, but I do have a button to bring up the Transport controls, if I lose them looser thing down here, I’ve got to zoom in I tap on that.
You can see that it’s even in and out. I can select different tools which is responding up here, which is quite hard to get with your fingers. So I can select it directly here now. None of this will seem important at this point, but when I start making music in Cubase as I’m going to in a moment, then it will become obvious.
It will become just you know the the most useful thing in the world to get your workflow moving. So how do we create this toolbar? Well, there’s a little app down in the corner here, so we can go to the options and I can show you what it’s all about. So there are all sorts of settings in here you can clone and create different toolbars with different bits of software. You can change transparency, the size of your buttons.
You know you make them huge in whatever direction, but obviously you don’t want to use up too much of your screen goes back to where they were there’s all sorts of options about where the screen where the toolbar goes. When you reorient the screen, you know very important: there’s ability whether it’s always there, whether it’s hidden behind things, whether you bring it up with something else and then the actual customization itself. So you select the button you wish to edit. So let’s go for this one, which is the mixer button here I can change the text to be whatever I want it to be over here.
I’Ve gone access to you, know, fonts and all that kind of jiggery-pokery. But for my money, I’m just keeping it incredibly simple: you can put graphics in their icons, bits and pieces like that and then down here you’ve got the actual hotkey, so you just tap in there hit the hotkey you want it to be. So, in this case it’s f3 there 3 button and it’s done and so to bring up the mixer.
I just hit that button and the mixer comes up. Can you see that pressure over here a little bit the mix is up? The mix is away. It mixes up the mixers away, but also you can completely redesign the layout of this, whether you want it to be in one line like this or you can wipe it down and across or a big block.
You can change different sizes of different buttons to different things. It’S very very powerful and I use it in a very simple and gentle way, so just to give you an example of how to use it in Cubase, let’s bring up a project like so I can use the buttons here to zoom in to zoom out. I would probably have it at the side of the screen and then use my thumb to see that I open up the media bay open up the mixer. I have not the VST instruments, transport controls on and off. I can add tracks if I select something like and then edit it not source letting a load of stuff. I can then select some notes.
I can copy those paste them somewhere else and I can undo as well that that I know, let’s see that doesn’t seem to be working. Don’T know where that is. Let’S have a quick look and do okay. I’Ve got that as a as a ctrl z option, which is what it should be. However, I’ve just found that the modifier keys in toolbar creator at the moment had given me some trouble. I don’t know why that is I’ll. Look into that. So I’m going to change that for a different key command.
So I need to find undo just can’t be assigned to control. Is that if I could assign it to an individual command like this, but after their press, okay and then go back to here and make that that instead, I can then do undo so I go back into what it was. I was editing most made it button. There we go, I can do something duplicate it and undo it copy paste undo.
Similarly, in here I can take a selection tool, pencil tool. Let’S take a split tool. I can split that up.
Take my select tool, move things around like so and do undo undo. Are you getting the hang of why this is helpful is in the way I can hide it like so bring it back up, move it over here over here. I can have it in a long one running along the bottom, rather than one down the side like this to me, zoom out just the simple action of undo, I would have to go to edit undo move and then never guarantee that I’m actually tapping on it.
As I can just do it here quickly, I think I’ve laid with that enough, so yeah toolbar crater, I’m very shortly now gon na start making a piece of music in Cubase, where I’m just gon na be using the screen and the pen I’ll have it laid Down because I just can’t be doing with all this bounce – it’s just maddening – I cannot cope with that. So I’m going to put the screen down, use, touch and pen only to create the music and I’ll be using. I imagine this little toolbar a lot. You can create it for any piece of software does naturally music software.
It could be anything you like and, as I’ve repeatedly said, I don’t understand why it’s not a standard function of a pen driven or touch driven operating system. You can see how absolutely useful is so yeah, that’s that and in the meantime, why don’t you watch me make a tune in the next article? .