Using Two Output Busses in Cubase Pro 13

Why do I have one output bus routing directly into a second one? Well, there are quite a few good reasons...

About me:

My name is Anthony Chisnall. I'm a musician & songwriter.

My channel is these things:

1. A place to share my music - both songs and instrumental pieces. Much of the music I write features in...
2. Tutorial videos about music composition and production
3. An outlet for me to discuss all things musical - including technical break-downs of software and tools that I use, as well as more wide-ranging discussions of topics that interest me.

I play the guitar (electric, acoustic, and bass), and record all of my own synth-based sounds myself too, but I can't sing very well (huge understatement!), and so my wife, Pauline, who has a lovely singing voice, has come to my rescue. You'll hear her on all of my songs.

All of my music is written in Steinberg's Cubase (currently Cubase 12).

I try very hard to make my videos PRACTICAL and no-nonsense - if I don't use a feature, I'm not going to waste your time trying to sound like an expert on it! This is the stuff I use day-to-day, so I think that's also what you'd like to hear me talking about.

Thanks to:

[chrisjswanson]

This is a great channel. I found it looking for cubase tutorials a year or so back, and ended up watching a lot more videos than I'd planned on. The content is actually relevant to real things, not just fancy tricks presented in isolation that dominate many other music channels. It's great that you take your time and work through everything, explain why you're doing things, and that you're clearly doing it your own way and simply sharing it with the world. The best part may be how much you obviously love what you're doing; the care and authenticity shine through.

[jimphilogene]

I think you should start using the control room.

[RPPA-C]

Perfect !! appreciate the rundown !

Now...when creating new tracks is there a setting or shortcut to have all new tracks automatically be routed to the master bus and not the stereo out ?

[JohnR]

That looks like a very good approach. I was doing that a while back but forgot about it. Guess I need to make a template.
Q: Do you use the control room and if so, how does it interact with this system?

[marcom.]

Well, essentially you can do so in any DAW, nothing Cubase specific so far. But your terms are misleading here. What you call the "Master Bus" is acually the "Mix Sum Bus", and the "Stereo Out" is the real master bus (for mastering). In the Reason DAW for example the master bus is always existent in the SSL Console and the last bus before the signal is routed to the audio interface or file.

[AlexLapugean]

It's not a bad approach, you essentially have a "Mix" bus and a "Master" bus if we are getting technical. But there are quite a few misconceptions here:
1. "Internationa standard of having to deliver at -14 LUFS"? Completely wrong. You are NOT required to deliver at that loudness level. That is the level that the music will eventually be normalized at, but you actually never want to be below that, or even at that level, you ALWAYS want to have streaming services turning your music down, never up. At exactly -14, maybe it's not turned up, but a) not all streaming services normalize at the same levels, b) nobody guarantees that normalization level will remain the same forever and c) not everyone has loudness normalization activated.
You should always make the song as loud as possible while keeping good apparent dynamics. The level depends on genre, but unless you are making cinematic music, it you are higher than about -10LUFS ... you either have the music too dynamic, or have a bad mix with a poor crest factor and you cannot do it without crushing it with excessive limiting.
2. "Stereo Out" processing (mastering) has nothing to do with the song"? Getting music up to comercial levels always changes the music. It's not just a volume increase. You use compression, clipping, limiting, all of them change the sound in some way, not to mention that mastering also can involve other processing, like EQ, saturation, stereo widening etc. You can basically ruin a good mix with bad mastering, it is actually a common feedback given by mastering engineers to beginners mastering their own music, that they usually like the "mix" bounce much better that the "mastered" version.