Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Dial and Cubase Pro 9 – could that work?”.
Hello, I’m Robin Vincent, and this is just a very quick video about the surface dial I was inspired by this video. I saw of someone using sonar with it and how they’re able to control things and move things about, and I wondered well. Maybe it was more possible than I thought it was it’s like another one of these things that is dripping with potential, if only it could be harnessed for audio production software. So I had a go.
Here’S a quick look in Cubase and I can actually get to do some interesting things. Let me bring you in to show you Cubase dile. What you do is in Wheel settings which is here you can create a tool for a specific app.
So you choose the app here. It gives you a big list of all the apps that you can’t use, because none of your doors are actually appear in that list, but you can then browse and find the executable and stick that in here then like for Cubase. Here you can customize it and add different tools to that app. The idea, I think, is then, when you run their app the wheel automatically selects that bunch of tools which is really very cool when it works, because it doesn’t work with Studio One I found so far.
Am I looking, but what I’ve got set up for Cubase here is a transport control. It’S a very simple, simplified interface, exactly the sort of place you actually want something more complex and more comprehensive. They just give you very basic stuff. You’Ve got rotate right trigger on rotate left.
Why that’s different, I’m not sure and click shortcut, which is when you push down on the dial the choices you get are not great, you get. You know the standard stuff, the standard, bits and pieces function, keys and whatnot, and then letters and numbers, but there’s no number pad, which is something that seems to be quite important in doors, are a lot of people or rather a lot of keyboard. Commands are bound to the numeric pad and that’s not present here. So it’s kind of a bit too basics to base.
I mean simple things like I can’t copy and paste. You know one tool to another tool and then change it a little bit. I have to go through and do everything again, which is more of a problem with the modern UI than it is with this particular application. However, I’ve got this set up. I found that some of the shortcuts just don’t work so I’ve stuck with remapping things in Cubase to be as simple as humanly possible, so I’m not using any modifiers not to say that it doesn’t work. It just is inconsistent. It sometimes works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
It does work on some things, other things it does not. However, without getting bogged down in all of that, I’ve created three tools: a transport one, a zoom one and a parameters, one and let’s see how they fare. So what you do you push down on your little dial and you menu comes up. You can, of course, if you so wish, put this on the screen, and then it comes here, but why on earth would you do that? Why you do that? On the surface Pro, do it on the surface to do sure, push down and hold, and then you’ve got your three tools here, one two three around the outside of this: it tells you what it is labeled in the middle, beautiful, elegant, wonderful.
I love all of that, so the number one transport select it with a tap. I now should have transport control. Yes, I do. This has become hopefully a jog wheel. Yes, it has. I cannot get that to work with fast forward forward, any other form of shuttling backwards and forwards.
I cannot get it to work with with jog, it does work, but it’s laborious in order to move the whole bar. I’Ve got to turn it about five times. You can’t hold it a little way and it will carry on going like you would with a real jog wheel. There doesn’t seem to be any way to change the resolution of that, but there you are, that does kind of work.
Let’S go to the next. One number two zoom: this is very simple turn the knob it zooms in see that’s brilliant. That works completely. Well, that’s completely fun like that and if I hit shift, I can also go up and down which is similarly awesome.
That’S the sort of thing! That’S how you want it to work and I’ve left the click to play. This is the slightly weirder one, because in the sonar video I saw the guy moving fader up and down. I thought what I have to be able to do that. I have to be able to do that.
That’S that has to be possible, so I’ve tried very hard to make this work and there is a keyboard command in Cubase for primary and secondary parameter adjust. Now, if I bring up the mixer, I can demonstrate this on our fader here. For instance, I’ve bound those the increasing decrease to Y and V for completely random reasons, and I could press that and it goes down, and I can press that and it goes up.
That’S nice. Now I combined that to the dial and I can put that up and I can put that down yeah, but again it’s it’s pretty laborious. If this fader is down because of the exponential nature of the faders in Cubase, I have to do about 50.
Turns in order to start bringing it up again look 20 starting to come. Then it goes up. Okay, so you’ve got some good leverage in there, but once you get down the bottom of lucky you’re trying to bring this down to nothing, you get down to about minus 60 80 miles 100 and then it starts to struggle and this primary parameter that it talks About seems to only ever be The Fader. I can’t get it to do anything else. I can open up a plugin and tap it in things. I cannot get it to be moved.
I can have a look at the EQ, for instance, I get any of that to me I say I can select them, but nothing. Nothing actually happens panning. No, it doesn’t do that either it sticks again to the fader, but at least you can draw in automation right. Well, yes, and no, because if you close the fader, it no longer works. I can’t make it happen over here on the channel fader, but if I bring up the editor for the channel, it’s like that. Ah that then works.
That’S interesting! If I can have this while doing the automation for this – yes, okay, so you can draw in automation, but you have to have this in focus in order to do it. Well, no keyword, everything else. There you go. I hope that was.
That was helpful. I’M not sure how helpful it is because, ultimately, it’s sort of exactly as I expected it to be, which is what a great device, what a wonderful thing that doesn’t quite work right in our situation as these always the way it’s like with a digital pen. It’S great it’s awesome, it can do some stuff, but it really needs a toolbar and it needs other aspects to make it work properly. Within an audio application. The dial is the same mapping. Keyboard shortcuts is just problematic because the editor isn’t comprehensive enough. If, for instance, you want to map something, like reason, reason has lots of bindings which are more or less fixed, and if you can’t access them in their editor, then you can’t address them and you can’t use it. Ultimately.
What we need is an app which allows this to map to MIDI. We just wanted to generate MIDI if it would throw out a MIDI controller, just one well one that way, and one that way, maybe and one when you press it. That would be great. We could interpret that we could learn it map it to anything in any piece of software and it would just work, but as it stands, even though it’s elegant and clever, it is not clever enough to to be really of any workflow use.
You can use it. You can make a few things happen. I mean I quite like the zooming in and out. If I did that a lot, I could see that would be useful, but in most cases there’s actually easier ways to do. What you’re trying to do with the dial, but testing is ongoing. Research is ongoing, they’ll keep looking at it, keep fudging away and seeing what we can find inside and if I find out any more I’ll get back to you in the meantime, go make some tunes.
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