JEFF LAITY

This is a tech article for composers who use Cubase 8 and Lemur. It explains how to set up the Lemur iPad app to show or hide groups of tracks in your template. With hundreds of tracks in a template, this makes it faster and easier to find what you’re looking for. Probably not for beginners.

If you don’t have an iPad running Lemur, you can also do this trick using keyboard shortcuts as I’ll explain below.

1. Arrange your tracks into folders if you haven’t already. Woodwinds, Choir, etc.

2. We need to write a pair of scripts in Cubase’s Project Logical editor. The first script shows folders with “Choir” or whatever in their name.

3. The second script hides folders which do not have “Choir” in their name.

Repeat this for all of your folders.

4. We don’t want to have to press two buttons every time, so we need these two scripts to fire in sequence. We’re going to do this with a Macro in Key Commands. Open up Key Commands and press the “Show Macros” button.

Create a new macro, “Show Choir.” In the Commands above, find “Process Project Logical Editor” and then select the “Show Choir” Project Logical Preset we just created. Repeat for all of your folders.

5. Go back to the Project Logical Editor. Select the “Hide Non-Choir Folders” script. At the bottom of the window, choose the macro that you just created. (You can see that I did this already in the screenshot below step 3.) Now when you Hide non-choir folders, it will automatically show the choir folder.

6. Now we need to trigger these. You can create keyboard shortcuts to do this, and this is a good idea to test before you get too deep into Lemur editing. Open Key Commands and find your “Hide Choir” script in the “Process Project Logical Editor” folder. Choose a shortcut for your first set and repeat for the others.

7. Create a Lemur set in the Lemur editor. Create buttons for each of your track folders above. The best way I’ve found to send a command from Lemur to Cubase is using NRPNs (non-registered parameters in MIDI). The NRPN message will go to Cubase, it will go through a generic control surface that we’ll create, and that will trigger the Project Logical Editor script. (You need a way to physically get MIDI messages from the Lemur to your computer, I use the iConnectMIDI 2+ for this.)

Below you’ll see my buttons in Lemur, and the action for one of them is below that. The first number (84) is the only part of the SendAction() that changes for each button, everything else stays the same. Make sure you don’t use that first number twice or it won’t work. You can see I have text notes reminding me which numbers are in use for each group of buttons during development.

8. Next, open Cubase’s Device Setup, and under Remote Devices create a Generic Remote. For each Lemur button, make a line with the Add button.

We’re assigning a button to trigger the “hide non-choir folder” Project Logical Preset (which then automatically triggers the “Show Choir Folder” Project Logical Preset through a macro.)

To do this, set the controller top row to:
[your label], Cntl-NRPN, 1, [the NRPN number you chose above, like 84], 127, R,,,

And bottom row to:
[label should automatically repeat here], Command, Channel & Track Visibility, Visibility Configuration [the name of your script, like “Hide non-choir folder”]

Questions? Leave a commment below or use the contact me link.