MIDI: EXTREME NEWBIE ALERT: Please help the poor lost newbie

[retroboy]

Okay, never one to be afraid of sounding stupid and silly, here goes.
I record lots of stuff at home through my Mac into Cubase. I generally record audio through my line in and everything is huny dory!

I decided to buy myself a midi keyboard (a Keystation 49e to be precise) becaue I wanted to add a bit of interest to my recordings.

Now I understand the concept of midi input devices. I've read the whole Introduction to Midi articles. The thing is, I don't know how to make my keyboard play the vst instruments on the screen! How do I assign the keys on my keyboard to play the keys on a virtual piano for example? I know it must be simple! What am I missing? Will I ever figure it out? Will someone help me? Or am I really just THAT stoopid?

stupiddave

 

[guttadaj]

I'm not sure how things work in Cubase, but I'll tell ya how I do it in Sonar and hopefully things will be similar. I set up an Audio Track and patch in a virtual instrument as an effect. Then I set the output of my MIDI track onto which I'm going to record using the keyboard to that audio track. So you get the MIDI track with just its MIDI information and are specifying an audio track with the virtual instrument as that track's output.

HTH
-Jeff