Steinberg Studio Case review

We gave Steinberg Cubase SX2 a five-star review in What's New, February 2004, for its incredible sophistication and versatility in production of any style of music.

SX2 does have its downsides, though. Its blank canvas approach and lack of built-in sounds make it daunting for new users and, at £450, it's not cheap.

With this in mind, Studio Case would seem to be the Holy Grail of music production software. It loses some of SX2's advanced functions, but adds a barrage of software synthesisers to kick-start your compositions and comes at a fraction of the price.

The features omitted in Cubase SE, the version included here, are the ones most users won't miss. Surround mixing and macro support are gone, and tracks and plug-ins are limited to what are still very generous numbers: 48 stereo audio tracks, five insert effects and 16 virtual instruments. Audio resolutions up to 24-bit, 96KHz are still supported, and the bulk of editing tools that make SX2 so powerful are fully intact. The one caveat is that Cubase SE is based on version 1 of Cubase SX, so the latest developments such as full latency compensation and stacked recording are also omitted.

Sadly, Cubase SE's interface doesn't attempt to cater for its less experienced target audience. Knowledge of common studio principles would help the user but it isn't disseminated here. More frustrating still is that many features need to be activated in more than one part of the interface to work. This is a by-product of Cubase's flexibility, but it'll have new users tearing their hair out. Some of the cryptically labelled buttons reveal their use if you hover the mouse over them, but many don't.

The five software synthesisers bundled in the package are cut-down versions of Steinberg's retail products, the full versions of which cost between £130 and £250 each. As such, it's not surprising that quality is high, but the editing options and sound palettes have been restricted. Virtual Guitarist SE is perhaps the most limited. It adds instant guitar to your tracks, but with only a handful of styles the novelty soon wears off.

The other four are much more rewarding. Groove Agent SE is a drum machine with a decent range of high-quality sounds and a novel style control ranging from 50s jazz to contemporary R'n'B. The Grand SE is a beautiful-sounding virtual grand piano. D'Cota SE is an analogue synth emulator that's great for gut-wrenching basses, ethereal pads and more. Finally, HALion SE is a software sampler that provides lots of bread-and-butter sounds, thanks to its 700MB library of samples.

Studio Case has a steep learning curve, but still adds up to a superb starter kit for serious music production. The synths cover all the bases, and can be edited and mixed alongside live recordings using Cubase's unbeatable production tools. It realistically requires a MIDI keyboard and a sound card with ASIO support to be able to use the synths to full effect - and a lot of patience to learn the software - but even with these added expenses Studio Case is an unbeatable bargain.