Hi, can anyone advise me on how to go about creating a pure sine wave in Cubase 5 that can be triggered by midi notes? a midi vst would be perfect but I'm having trouble finding one.

I'm trying to steady the low end of a bass guitar track by copying and converting to midi and cutting everything above 200hz in the midi track with the sine wave and everything below 200hz in the actual bass audio track and then blend.

I've found some sine generators but they seem to be audio plugins only and someone suggested the A1 from Cubase SX but I'm not a synth guy at all and I'm not sure how to work all the controls to get a pure clean sine wave and all the presets are heavily processed.

Thanks, any advice or even presets would be absolutely great!

A minor point... but a sine wave, by definition, has only one pitch in it. If you generate a sine wave to replace the fundamental of a bass guitar note at, say, 82Hz, there will be no other frequencies present, and your filtering at 200Hz will have no affect whatsoever!

If you want a more harmonically complex bass replacement note, you will need to use a saw, triangle or square wave, ot a sine wave. They each have different harmonic content and therefore different tonalities, and you'll need to choose whichever matches the tone of your bass guitar best.

In reality, though, you'd probably be better off replacing the entire bass part with either a new overdub bass recording, or a complete Midi-controlled bass synth (or sample) part. Trying to glue the upper ened of a real bass to a synthesised lower bass will involve a huge amount of work and is unliekly to be very convincing.

Hugh

--------------------
Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Ahhh, ok thanks! I thought it was juts a pulse. I'll have a look at some bass modules that I have. I think Trilogy may have some sort of patch that's quite clean.

Thanks for the reply!

there is a way to do what you're after in logic using plugins rather than instruments - works really well but i haven't used cubase in a while so you'll have to look for substitutes

in logic you need to route your bass track to two separate busses and switch off the output on the original audio track. On bus one add a low-pass filter to get rid of high frequencies that might confuse pitch tracking. Then put the subbass plugin (this generates a sine tone based on the pitch of your source) and set it to use just one of the tone generators, which you want to track with a 1:1 ratio (so it generates the same frequency it's tracking rather than an octave/octaves below - you can play with that later if you want). Turn the dry mix to 0 and the wet mix to 100%, and with a bit of fiddling you'll get a sine wave that is playing the same line as your bass part.

on the second bus just use a highpass filter and EQ as required (a bit of compression could help getting this how you want it too).

You now have two versions of the bass part to play around with - bus 1 for the fundamental sine of the frequency and bus 2 for the higher harmonics to give it some character from the original recording.

Obviously there's loads to play with here but that's how to get to the stage you've posted about...

the realism of the result depends how you then mix and tweak the settings, and how it sits with the other parts you have

good luck

Edited by apeshake (12/06/11 04:35 PM)