Song-building tricks in Cubase

Steinberg’s Cubase can rightly be thought of as the founding father of the linear timeline DAW. The first version appeared on the Atari ST way back in 1989, ushering in the standard blockson-a-timeline song arrangement approach so familiar to us all today. So, you’d expect all the necessary tools for flinging songs together in the traditional way of cutting, pasting and moving blocks of audio and MIDI data around the screen. However, there’s an additional trick up Cubase’s sleeve when it comes to trying out new arrangement ideas, and it harks back to the numerical, pattern-based methods employed by its erstwhile rival, Emagic Creator (the ancestor of Logic Pro X). Combining the best of both approaches, Cubase’s Arranger Track enables you to define regions of your song as named Arranger sections that can then be strung together into a list of events. You can swap regions around any way you like, and once the Arranger Track is activated, the program will play them back in the assigned order. Ideas can be saved and compared quickly and easily to determine whether or not that extra four-bar tag works coming out of the second chorus into the bridge, for example.