The Draw Tool

Also located in the group of tool buttons is a button showing a small pencil. This is the Draw tool. Its main purpose is to create an object that doesn’t already exist in your song.

After clicking on the Draw Tool button, you will notice that the button turns blue and what once was the OST has now changed into a small pencil icon pointer. To create a note or part, you use the pencil pointer to target a location on the note/part display and click the left mouse button.

Once you’ve created a new note, you can use the same pencil icon to lengthen it the same way you lengthened the note with the OST. With the pencil, however, you won’t get a double-sided arrow because you can go in only one direction, which is to the right.

When using the Draw tool in the Key Editor, you can create music one note at a time instead of using a MIDI keyboard controller. This might seem a little tedious for a keyboard player, but the results of the Draw tool are the same as a MIDI keyboard’s. This means that as long as you have an ear for music, you don’t need the skills of a keyboard player to create music in Cubase.

Since this chapter concentrates on editing and the Draw tool’s main purpose is to create, I will not go into details on the many ways you can use the Draw tool. It can, however, come in quite handy during the edit process, and it’s important to understand its uses.