I am experiencing voice stealing in Cubase and don’t know how to prevent it. At various points in my composition there are up to 18 notes playing at a time on 8 different instruments. I wouldn’t expect this to occur as I am performing at well below the MM6’s spec, which says it is capable of 32 voices polyphony and 16 multitimbral parts.

Can anyone suggest what I might be missing?

Thanks,

Rud Hound.

Re: Voice stealing

It is difficult to say exactly what you may be missing but here are some thoughts:
1) Stereo sounds use 2 notes of polyphony for each note played - so calculating polyphony is made a bit more difficult.
2) When connected to a computer you must be certain that you are working with LOCAL CONTROL = OFF to prevent doubling (MIDI loop) which will reduce polyphony by at least half.

Re: Voice stealing

Dont forget the dreaded sustain pedal. Its the ultimate polyphony killer.

Re: Voice stealing

Thanks Bad Mister - I hadn’t considered the stereo issue. That’s certainly what’s getting me. Local control is all good.

I will set some of the tracks to mono and see what difference that makes. When I mix it to audio I’ll just have to make a left and right copy for the tracks I’ve made mono…

Thanks again!

rh.

Re: Voice stealing

Thanks Cygnus 64. I had already been through and removed all the sustain pedal “events” and lengthened each midi note to compensate, however was still running out of voices. The “stereo” issue Big Mister mentioned is almost certainly my problem. I’ll attack it over the weekend and see what happens.

Thanks,

rh.

Re: Voice stealing

Stereo voices will eat up poly, and if you’re using more than one stereo voice in a mix it doesn’t take long to get drop-outs. 

Take that into account and you then add the sustain pedal to a stereo voice and you start stacking up tracks on a 32 note tone generator and BAM! lights out baby.

Re: Voice stealing

just in asking....

why would you not want to move some of your tracks to Cubase as an “audio file”?

if you have an “audio/digitial interface” for your CPU, recording 2 strereo tracks and playing back all tracks would be pretty easy to do....