Cubasis and a portable keyboard

Jonsey

New member
Hi
I'm new to all this. years ago, I used to teach music and I had to set up a composing class on a minimal budget using standard low office PCs. I decided to use General midi portable keyboards and cubasis as my recording tool and it worked seamlessly,

I have a son who would like to get in to allo ts but he's only 12. I have a copy of cubasis and have acquired a Casio ctk6000 which has a USB interface. It says plug it in and it all works find. However, I want to use the onboard sounds of the Casio keyboard and be able to choose th e sounds from cubasis and sequence them like I did years ago. I have 2 vista PCs now, one 32 bit and one 64 bit. Is there anyway I can do what I did years ago now on no budget?

It would be nice to use sounds other than GM and use Cubasis to choose and change the the sounds of the keyboard, but if this would not be possible, then gm would be a start for him to get interested. It was so simple years ago, can this be recreated now, with a relatively new keyboard and ancient sequencer, which I think is perfect to start? The PCs are low in processor power, which is why using onbaord sounds appeals. Can it be done? I have failed....did the local off setting on the keyboard, and midi input signals are getting through but no GM names on cubasis. Someone told me to get patch names..... Sounds hard!
 
I think you should be able to do this. Note that I'm not a Cubasis user, so I can't speak from experience with respect to Cubasis. From what I've read on the internet it looks like Cubasis doesn't support patch names for external instruments, but you can select the CTK6000's patches (or tones as Casio calls them) manually using their Bank and Program numbers.

Just to clarify, are you using Cubasis on an iPad, or Cubase on a PC? If you're using Cubase, I've read that Cubase uses patch name scripts, and that Steinberg has a free program called Scriptmaker that you can use to create your own patch name scripts. But from what I've read, I gather that Cubasis for the iPad doesn't support patch name scripts.

If you want to consider switching to another DAW, Cakewalk's DAWs (Sonar and Music Creator) use instrument files to define an instrument's available patches, and I found an INS file for the Casio CTK6000:

View attachment Casio_CTK6000_WK6500.ins.txt

You'll need to rename the attached file to remove the .TXT extension, because I couldn't upload it with the .INS extension.

Some DAWs can use Cakewalk instrument files, while other DAWs use their own formats.
 
Cubasis running on a newish computer surprises me, it's ancient now, but I'm surprised that if it runs you can't control it.

You say it works fine, meaning that cubasis recognises it and can record the midi data? If so, then the USB link is working,and I'm also assuming it responds to pressing play.

So, does the keyboard respond to changes to the program in the inspector window? Can you go up and down the channels. Cubasis doesn't have the modern midi manager that lets you set up a profile for that instrument, so it's unlikely that you will get acoustic bass appearing in the inspector and have it send a programme 33 message, but you could remember them.

I'm not sure that keyboard is GM multi-timbral on it's midi in? Can it actually be used as a GM sound source? I don't remember, do you have a manual that says it can do this?

If you set a track in cubasis to midi channel I and another to 2, with a different program selected in the inspector for each one, what happens?

You need to let us know what you have tried already. Cubasis is elderly but was quite competent. If you remember how it worked, I'd suggest staying with it. If you buy many of the popular budget end interfaces to enable recording audio, they come with cubase LE or similar, which is a big improvement, and some have halion se which has a pretty good GM synth set plus more.
 
The CTK-6000 is multi-timbral. It has 32 "parts"-- parts A01-A16 are for playing "live," and parts B01-B16 are for playing incoming MIDI data and other MIDI playback, as shown on page E-39 of the User's Guide.

It includes all 128 GM1 programs (Bank 0) plus drum kit.
 
in this case, if Cubasis can play the keyboard, then the inspector should work fine - are you sure it doesn't change the programs?
 
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