Steinberg Cubase Essential Recording Software (Mac and Windows)

With an easy, intuitive approach to composing, recording, editing and mixing, Cubase Essential 5 is your gateway to the world of Cubase. Cubase Essential 5 shines with the same user interface and award-winning audio engine as the Steinberg Cubase 5 advanced music production system used by countless professionals around the globe. So whether you're composing songs at home, recording your band in the rehearsal room or remixing the latest hip-hop and dance tracks on a laptop while on the move: Cubase Essential 5 combines premium virtual instruments, outstanding audio and MIDI VST effects with a vast range of proven editing and sequencing tools while being extremely easy to use.

New Features in Cubase Essential 5
Cubase Essential 5 adds even more creative possibilities and new technologies to the entry-level version of the Cubase family, perfect for musicians and home studios. The latest incarnation of Cubase Essential includes enhancements like the new PitchCorrect plug-in to automatically correct vocal intonation, Beat Designer to produce beats and rhythms in next to no time, over 700 instruments and sounds to kick-start your projects as well as many other exciting innovations.

On-the-fly Pitch Correction
The new PitchCorrect VST3 plug-in brings easy and automatic intonation control and scale correction of vocal and monophonic instrument recordings to Cubase Essential 5.

PitchCorrect is based on the acclaimed Yamaha Pitch Fix technology and constantly detects the pitch of the… read more input material and immediately corrects it to match to the closest pitch of a user-specified scale, including minor, major, chromatic and custom scales. Various parameters, like the Retune and Tolerance control, help adapting the retune rate to almost any performance style for very natural-sounding pitch correction.

The real-time optimized PitchCorrect pitch detection and correction engine compensates poor intonation without noticeable artifacts and preserves the sonic audio quality of the original performance.

The pitch of individual notes can be controlled interactively from a MIDI keyboard in real time. Apart from cosmetic corrections, the independent controls for formant shift, pitch-correction, detection and detune also give plenty of room for creative use - and abuse - of audio material!

Designer Beats and Grooves
Beat Designer is the hot new beat construction plug-in that really allows getting hands-on with beats for step programming and designing drum patterns in an easy yet powerful way!

Beat Designer supports up to 64 steps per pattern and covers everything needed to create breathtaking beats and pumping grooves, including customizable resolution and time signature as well as support for flam hits and rolls. Each individual element in a beat has its own volume setting, allowing full control of the dynamics of any groove.

Getting interactive with different grooves and variations has never been easier: in the twinkling of an eye Beat Designer organizes several patterns in customizable banks and can trigger each of them in real time, all synced to Cubase with a MIDI keyboard. These banks can be previewed with the corresponding drum kit directly from MediaBay!

Beat Designer includes dozens of beats in various styles to get the user going right away - and so much control, ease of use and functionality that one keeps coming back for more.

More Sounds for More Music
Cubase Essential 5 comes with a new exceptional polyphonic subtractive synthesizer, 240 additional premium instrument sounds for HALion ONE and a new autopanning effect.

A prologue to epic sound
Prologue is the exceptional rich-sounding virtual analog synthesizer with incredible sound shaping capabilities, based on renowned synthesizer technology by VirSyn. Its multi-mode variable resonance filters, powerful modulation capabilities and excellent onboard effects make it a natural need to musicians and sound programmers looking for uncompromised sound quality and features packaged into a clean and intuitive interface.

Prologue provides full editing capabilities with access to its three oscillators, powerful multi-mode filter, four envelopes, two LFOs, a powerful modulation matrix, and onboard effects. And because Prologue is polyphonic with up to 128 voices, you will (probably) never run out of creative space.

The included library features 330 designed sounds with that unique Prologue character - from cutting leads to earthshaking basses and ultra-expressive pads.

- Virtual analog synthesizer with hybrid analog and digital waveforms
- 3 oscillators
- Multi-mode variable resonance filter
- ADSR envelope generators, 2 LFOs
- Powerful modulation matrix
- Onboard effects (Distortion, Delay, Phaser, Flanger, Chorus)

HALion ONE expanded
Cubase Essential 5 adds almost 230 premium sounding instrument sounds for HALion ONE, including the entire HALion ONE Studio Set previously found in Cubase 5 and Cubase Studio 5 only. These ready-to-play sounds cover a massive selection of new drums, basses, leads, guitars, strings and pads and a wide variety of keyboard sounds that are aimed at keyboard players, producers and DJs creating slick hip-hop and R'n'B tracks, but also gnarly rock tunes.

Produced by the top sound developers in the business and containing many of the best waveforms from Yamaha's highly acclaimed Motif Series synthesizers, this extremely versatile sound set offer the most complete range of sounds with a stunning breadth of sonic palette, while being optimized for lightning-fast preset switching and low memory consumption.

Whether it's about songwriting, producing, or arranging: the Studio Set has sounds that transcend across all styles of music united under the proven and intuitive HALion ONE interface that is easy to use right out of the box.

Autopan
This creative new VST3 effect is the ideal way of using the stereo field imaginatively in songs and compositions, letting the user try out the included presets and play around on Rhodes-style e-pianos or even slamming guitars for the coolest licks. The stereo effects processor Autopan is an automatic panner with adjustable width, rate, tempo sync as well as a two-waveform LFO.

Enhanced MIDI
Featuring numerous enhanced MIDI features, Cubase Essential 5 now includes MIDI loop support, redesigned MIDI effect plug-ins and improved MIDI automation.

Smoother Workflow
Cubase Essential 5 also comes with a range of additional new ways of working faster, with added performance and redesigned and enhanced features. read less