Using This Book as a Companion to Your Cubase Manual

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not going to get too caught up in details specific to particular versions of Cubase. As a result, you will definitely need to use the Cubase manual as a resource along with this book. I will also refer to Web sites and other resources that will help you gather all the information you will need in order to achieve the results you want in your Cubase studio. It will be very helpful for you to have an Internet connection (but not necessarily from your Cubase computer setup).

The Cubase manual isn’t always the best reference. The manual is written by several people, then edited and translated into other languages and released with last-minute changes very quickly. Sometimes it’s incomplete. It’s amazing that this is accomplished at all, as a 500-page book can take months to write—I know first-hand! Anyway, this is the nature of the racing technological beast, and unfortunately, we just have to accept it.

But it gets worse (and some of you may have already witnessed this). Because of rising operating costs in today’s fast-paced market, many manufacturers of audio/music products have decided to cut off or outsource their customer support. (I remember the good ol’ days when I could contact Steinberg and speak to a human being fairly easily about a technical issue I was having.) Even though Steinberg tech support has improved, sometimes you still have to wait a while on the line in order to speak to someone, and when you do, you still occasionally get the standby stock answer: “I’m sorry. We don’t support that...” followed by the name of a particular model of sound card or computer. After waiting for an hour on the phone, that’s the last thing you want to hear, especially in the middle of a recording session! The good news is there are ways to work around some of these issues, and I will go over some of them in this book. I will not refer to specific page numbers or chapters in the Cubase manual. Instead, I will give you keywords to use in your search for more information. Again, this approach is designed to help you understand the workings of your Cubase studio so that you know where to look when you need more information, regardless of the version of Cubase you have.