RRP £36.95 Lowest New Price £35.58

Music Sales Ltd Number of pages: 808 Format: Illustrated, Language: English (Original Language) Language: English (Unknown) Language: English (Published)

RRP: £36.95
Good reference book but why is there a need for it?
Review date: 2003-04-05 Rating: 8 out of 10

As Cubase SX ships (at least my upgrade version from Cubase 5.0 does) with minimal printed documentation this book is a useful extensive reference book. I'm reluctant to overpraise it for 2 reasons though. Firstly, something like this should really come with the program, PDF online manuals have their place but are nowhere as useful as a big thick book. And this is a reassuringly thick book. Secondly, although there is a short tutorial at the front the main content of this book is descriptions of each window and edit menu etc. And even allowing for the fact that it is described as a reference book some comparisons of different ways of doing the same task or even indications why you should carry out certain tasks would have been helpful. But maybe that's in another Steinberg Press Book I can hear the cynic in me say.

Given the above you therefore probably also need a more tutorial based book to complement this one. Simon Millward's Fast Guide to Cubase was excellent both in terms of how and why to do things but I've not yet purchased his Fast Guide To Cubase SX so can't give any pointers. There also seem to be a number of other SX guides available so there's enough material available to compensate for the lack of decent manuals but really why should we have to fork out for books in the first place?

Having said all that this, as you expect coming from Steinberg Press, contains reasonably thorough descriptions of every function with for instance chapters covering the project window, folder tracks, the mixer, vst instruments, automation, the new audio processing facilities, midi editing, logical editing, rewire etc. It also comes with a CD-Rom which contains a demo version of Cubase SX and some demo songs.