Subtitles of the Movie

In this tutorial, I want to effect the dry mono guitar that I ensured was in tune with Melodyne. There are many excellent commercial plug-ins you can use such as GTR or Revalver that allows you to turn a dry guitar sound into a more realistic and accurate replication of the tone you require for your song. I won't go down that route here though because Cubase 5 has its own built-in amp simulation plug-in which I will use during this tutorial. Alternatively you can purchase hardware amp simulators from companies like Line 6. Just plug your guitar in, get the tone you want exactly, and just record it exactly like that. Bear in mind though you won't be able to alter the sound later in Cubase or in fact any other program. So here's the dry guitar track. I'll just open the Sample Editor by double clicking here. The reason I want to open the Sample Editor is because I want to show you the end of the guitar track. Notice how it fades away at bar 13. As discussed in a previous tutorial, it's because I don't want this A note discordantly colliding with the C sharp minor chord that starts at bar 13. More on this in a moment. I'll just close my Sample Editor for now. First I want to make the dry sound more like a guitar recorded with an amp, and so I'll go to the Tracks Insert here on the left and choose Steinberg, Distortion, Amp, Simulator. It's one of the new VST3 effects indicated by three gray stripes to the left of the name. Once chosen, the Amp Simulator interface opens. At the top of the interface are settings you can adjust to tailor the sound to your liking, and the bottom here is a diagrammatic representation of the speaker cabinet. The amp will drive with adjustable sliders to the side and bottom of the cube illustrated here. To save time, I'll choose a preset. The preset can be further adjusted with the controls just mentioned. I'll choose the Hot Country Boy preset. The preset is applied immediately. Notice the settings and illustration change to reflect this. I'll just move these to the side. I'll click Play to audition the amp simulation. Yes that will do, suitably gritty and biting. I don't want to use too much distortion because it will subsequently provide no room in terms of frequencies for the vocal tracks later. Distorted guitars, although fun to play, do tend to swamp too many overlapping frequencies in a mix that makes balancing the other instruments and vocals that much harder. OK, I'll close the Amp Simulator interface. Right, that's my guitar riff sorted for sound, but I do have a potential problem in that I only recorded the riff during the opening section. No problem you might think, just Copy and Paste it to the other sections required. Well no, I can't do this alone. Because if you remember, the tempo gently accelerates throughout the song to inject a live feel. I could record the riff live during the other sections of course, and this would be the best method. But I've purposely only recorded at the start of the song to illustrate a method to get you out of trouble if, in a real world recording session, the guitarist has long gone from the studio and you subsequently discover an error on the recorded tracks. I'll show you what I mean. Here at the start the riff plays fine. But when I Copy and Paste it to a later section and play it back, you can see the part now doesn't fit to the bar lengths as it should if it was played in time. I'll just zoom into bar 37 so you can see the discrepancy. I know it doesn't look much, but have a listen and you'll hear the timing is now too sloppy to use in this state. Have a listen. Awful. Unusable. Or so you would think. Here's how to rescue it. There are a few methods to make this work, but this is probably the quickest and works effectively on distorted guitar parts. You'll need to use Cubase's Resize tool found here. If you click this Object Selector arrow and hold the mouse button down, you get access to a couple more tools. We need to choose Sizing Applies Time Stretch. The Object Selector arrow now changes its look to indicate a new tool is now in operation. Right, I'll zoom into the end of bar 36 and the start of bar 37. The guitar part is slightly too long. So by making sure the track is highlighted, you can drag the end of the guitar part to exactly bar 37. You can do this manually, but it's probably easier to ensure your Snap tool is clicked. Now when you drag the end of the part, it automatically snaps to the start of bar 37, and Cubase's Time Stretch algorithm processes the guitar part. Wow. I'll just change back to my Object Selector tool in case I touch something by accident and time stretching occurs on something unrequired. Back to bar 27 to listen to the quality. Great stuff. Obviously in an ideal world it's better to get the track right at the recording stage. But this trick could be a session saver if things don't go as planned.