Cubase 7 Announced

Steinberg has announced the latest update to its hugely popular Cubase DAW.

While all the focus is on Ableton Live 9 and Apple’s long-awaited update to Logic Pro, Steinberg has snuck in the back door and announced a major update to its flagship Cubase DAW. Having made its debut on the Atari ST way back in 1989, Cubase has become a mainstay of electronic music production, still favoured by plenty of dance music producers despite the arrival of numerous pretenders to the throne.

The most significant part of the update focuses heavily on Cubase’s mixing features. In addition to a new MixConsole with full-screen mode and a number of features aimed at smoothing out workflow, Cubase 7 introduces a feature which we’ve been expecting more developers to adopt – integrated channel strips for every channel. These automatically include four-band EQ, three choices of compressor, a transient shaper, valve/tape simulation, limiting and loudness maximisation without the need to add plugins to the channel.

Elsewhere, the Chord Track from older versions of Cubase returns, albeit in a much updated form. The software claims to analyse the harmonic structure of MIDI and audio tracks and automatically adjust them to match changes in the chord track.

There’s also an interesting new Chord Assistant feature for writing chord progressions. Of course, you can also expect the usual updates to sample, loop and preset libraries plus a few new plugins, the most interesting of which is the inclusion of Voxengo’s CurveEQ linear phase mastering equaliser.

Cubase 7 and Cubase Artist 7 are available from December 5th, priced at €599 and €299 respectively.

Full review soon. Check out the screengrabs below for more clues as to what’s in store (click to enlarge).