Sound engineer Hayden Bridgen talks about his recent cover of Jess Glynne's "Rather Be" for a BBC3 documentary. The project was built exclusively in Cubase, and proved to be a success.
I use a program called Cubase to create my projects. Cubase is a digital audio workstation, or DAW. A DAW is a program or tool that is used to create music, whether it be from scratch or a simple edit. Cubase offers lots of control and loads of features, which makes it my program of choice - "it's good to dedicate to just one program, in case you get confused."
Recently I've been working on recreating the track "Rather Be" by Jess Glynne in Cubase. It's great practice because it means creative skills are not a limiting factor, instead it is your experience with the program. I used music sheets of the original to get the melody in there, and I got the chance to use other tracks to really see what Cubase could do.
To recreate a track in Cubase, the first thing you would need to do is set up your project. Don't use templates, grab an empty project from the window that pops up in Cubase. It should be on the far right, select empty. Once you have your empty project, you need to create a track. You want to create your own music rather than record, so right click on the stage and go into new track > MIDI > HaLion Synth > HaLion Sonic SE. HaLion Synth is a plugin for Cubase by Steinberg, the same people who made the program. HaLion is great to use because it comes with hundreds of instrument samples to create music with.
I use a program called Cubase to create my projects. Cubase is a digital audio workstation, or DAW. A DAW is a program or tool that is used to create music, whether it be from scratch or a simple edit. Cubase offers lots of control and loads of features, which makes it my program of choice - "it's good to dedicate to just one program, in case you get confused."
Recently I've been working on recreating the track "Rather Be" by Jess Glynne in Cubase. It's great practice because it means creative skills are not a limiting factor, instead it is your experience with the program. I used music sheets of the original to get the melody in there, and I got the chance to use other tracks to really see what Cubase could do.
To recreate a track in Cubase, the first thing you would need to do is set up your project. Don't use templates, grab an empty project from the window that pops up in Cubase. It should be on the far right, select empty. Once you have your empty project, you need to create a track. You want to create your own music rather than record, so right click on the stage and go into new track > MIDI > HaLion Synth > HaLion Sonic SE. HaLion Synth is a plugin for Cubase by Steinberg, the same people who made the program. HaLion is great to use because it comes with hundreds of instrument samples to create music with.
Now that you have your track, set the BPM. If you're working with a certain song, try using a website like https://songbpm.com to find the BPM. BPM is the exact tempo of a song. Find the transport bar, and double click on the tempo field. Now that you have the track, use the pencil tool from the toolbar at the top to start creating music. Draw a bar to add music into by clicking and dragging over your HaLion track on the stage. You can resize this later. For now click the mouse tool from the toolbar and double click the bar you created. This will bring up a new window that you can create notes on. Just use the pencil tool once again from the top toolbar and draw the notes you need. If you go back to the main window, click the track you were using, then click the small icon on the left of the stage that looks like a few keys on a keyboard. It should bring up a virtual keyboard window. From here you can choose an instrument to sample from. If you want to create a new track, follow the same steps. Create a MIDI track using HaLion Synth. Later, you can export the document using the drop down bar from the top. Be sure to select Audio Mixdown when you do.
Overall my version of Rather Be worked well. It was accurate. The melody was finished and didn't seem to be wrong. I didn't get much time to do chords, but what I got was correct. If I had more time I would have finished the chords and added a drum beat to make it sound a little more interesting. I am happy with the end result, and so were the workers at BBC3
Later Hayden mentioned that "Cubase is a powerful tool, whatever the skill level."
I was asked to make this track for a television programme about nature. The client was the people behind BBC 3. They wanted music that was upbeat and happy to use during a particularly happy scene. They were impressed, and asked for some changes, they thought there should be a drum beat but were fine with the unfinished chords as they only planned to use about 30 seconds of the song. They would now like to commission some music for some extended news pieces.
The director of the project commented, "We got exactly what we needed, and the programme was better because of it."
When the show went out I asked friends to listen and they said it sounded professional and it fit well to the documentary.
If I did the project again, I would put more time into getting the drum track done. I would also take a look at settings like reverb to really make the track into a version of its own.
This has led me to have a number of ideas for future projects, recreating a track is great practice getting used to Cubase and its many features.
Overall my version of Rather Be worked well. It was accurate. The melody was finished and didn't seem to be wrong. I didn't get much time to do chords, but what I got was correct. If I had more time I would have finished the chords and added a drum beat to make it sound a little more interesting. I am happy with the end result, and so were the workers at BBC3
Later Hayden mentioned that "Cubase is a powerful tool, whatever the skill level."
I was asked to make this track for a television programme about nature. The client was the people behind BBC 3. They wanted music that was upbeat and happy to use during a particularly happy scene. They were impressed, and asked for some changes, they thought there should be a drum beat but were fine with the unfinished chords as they only planned to use about 30 seconds of the song. They would now like to commission some music for some extended news pieces.
The director of the project commented, "We got exactly what we needed, and the programme was better because of it."
When the show went out I asked friends to listen and they said it sounded professional and it fit well to the documentary.
If I did the project again, I would put more time into getting the drum track done. I would also take a look at settings like reverb to really make the track into a version of its own.
This has led me to have a number of ideas for future projects, recreating a track is great practice getting used to Cubase and its many features.
