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The Sample Editor
4. Activate the Musical Mode button.
Your loop is warped and stretched automatically to adapt it to the project
tempo.
In the Project window, the audio event is now shown with
a note symbol and a warp symbol in the upper right corner
to indicate that time stretching has been applied.
Working with hitpoints and slices
Cubase can detect hitpoints, i. e. musically relevant posi-
tions, by analyzing onsets and melodic changes. At these
positions a type of marker is added. Hitpoints allow you to
create slices, where each slice ideally represents each in
-
dividual sound or “beat” (drum or other rhythmic record-
ings or loops work best with this feature).
Purpose and preparation
The main functions of using hitpoints are to slice up audio
to make it fit the project tempo or to create a situation that
allows the song tempo to be changed while retaining the
timing of a rhythmic audio loop.
When you have successfully detected the hitpoints for an
audio file, you can do a number of useful things:
• Change the tempo of the audio material without affecting the
pitch and audio quality.
• Use slices to replace individual sounds in a drum loop.
• Extract sounds from loops.
You can further edit these slices in the Audio Part Editor.
You can, for example:
• Remove or mute slices.
• Change the loop by reordering or replacing slices.
• Apply processing to individual slices.
• Create new files from individual slices using the “Bounce
Selection” function on the Audio menu.
• Edit slice envelopes.
Hitpoints can also be used to quantize audio material
without creating slices. For details about the quantizing
functions, see the chapter
“Quantizing MIDI and audio” on
page 89.
Which audio files can be used?
Here are some guidelines as to what type of audio files are
suited for slicing using hitpoints:
• Each individual sound should have a noticeable attack.
Slow attacks, legato playing, etc. may not produce the desired result.
• Poorly recorded audio might be difficult to slice correctly.
In these cases, try to normalize the files or to remove DC Offset.
• The recorded audio should contain as little crosstalk
signals as possible.
Crosstalk refers to the “bleeding” of a sound into a microphone placed
before another instrument during recording.
• There may be problems with sounds drowned in smear-
ing effects, like short delays.
Detecting and filtering hitpoints
Hitpoints are calculated when you activate the “Edit Hit-
points” option on the Hitpoints tab. The audio event is an-
alyzed and the hitpoints are shown as vertical lines.
Depending on the quality and type of the analyzed audio
material, you may have to fine-tune the hitpoint detection
using the Threshold slider and the Beats pop-up menu.
Furthermore you can manually add, edit, or remove hit
-
points.
• To filter out hitpoints based on their peaks in dB, use
the Threshold slider. The threshold is indicated by a hori-
zontal line.
This can be used to eliminate found hitpoints in crosstalk signals, e. g. by
keeping the louder bass drum hits and ignoring the quieter crosstalk sig
-
nals of the snare drum.