A client’s Steinberg UR242 wouldn’t record into Cubase on his Windows PC, and its mixer software greyed out once Cubase was using it, but both came down to settings in Cubase’s Studio Setup that are easy to miss.
He wanted to record his voice and piano. Before the session he’d installed the UR242 and its mixer software, and on its own that side was working well. He could hear his vocals and piano in his headphones, add EQ, compression and effects either as a monitor effect or as an insert, and he was happy with the sound he was getting. The trouble came when he opened Cubase. He could still hear himself through the direct monitoring, but he couldn’t get his voice and piano recording into Cubase, and he couldn’t get the direct monitoring working with Cubase the way it worked with the mixer. He was naturally frustrated, so he booked a session for me to look at it with him.
Choosing the Steinberg driver
A YouTube video had told him to go to Studio Setup, and he had. All he could see there were the settings for the Generic Low Latency driver, with nothing that let him choose the Yamaha Steinberg USB driver instead. The choice of driver is made one step back, on the left-hand side of the same window.
- Studio Setup, left-hand panel: clicked Audio System.
- ASIO driver changed from Generic Low Latency to the Yamaha Steinberg USB driver.
When he did that, the audio configuration changed and the UR242’s input channels were there to record on. He’d been expecting it to be more complicated than it was. He’d just missed that the driver has to be changed under Audio System first, because the Generic Low Latency settings he’d been looking at on the right don’t let you change which driver is selected.
Why the mixer greyed out
With Cubase using the UR242 as its main audio device, the mixer software greyed out. Before that he’d been able to adjust his monitor settings and input levels in it, and now he couldn’t change anything. I read through the UR242 manual online to see how it’s meant to work with Cubase, and saw that it uses Cubase’s own direct monitoring feature. So we went back into Studio Setup, to the Yamaha Steinberg USB driver’s page, and turned Direct Monitoring on.
Cubase can then use the UR242’s DSP direct monitoring itself, with the controls in a Hardware strip at the top of the MixConsole.
The mixer software stayed greyed out, but the features he wanted, such as the reverb and EQ, were now available inside Cubase. All the settings and parameters he’d been using were the same ones, so what he had to learn was a new view of them and a different workflow.
Finding the controls in the MixConsole
In the MixConsole, a new strip had appeared at the top, above the inserts and sends. Expanding this Hardware strip gave us all of the UR242’s direct monitoring options.
- Reverb levels: at the bottom.
- Monitoring effects: in the middle section.
- Effects mode: bypassed, applied as a monitor effect, or applied as an insert effect. I showed him how to switch between them.
It’s a useful feature of the UR, because the settings are controlled from within Cubase and you get zero-latency DSP monitoring with one button. It is a bit more complicated to find your way around, though, especially if you’re used to the mixer’s own window and then find it disabled, with the same settings somewhere else in Cubase.
By the end of the session everything was working. He’d installed everything correctly in the first place, and the session was more about demystifying hidden settings in Cubase so the software would do what he wanted.
When Cubase’s Studio Setup only shows the Generic Low Latency driver’s settings, click Audio System on the left to pick your interface’s driver.
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