** Review / 1 page / 710 words **

The Fast Guide to Cubase

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Neil Martin reckons you can speed up your sequencing with the help of the most elegant Cubase companion yet published.
  
I don't much like computer program manuals and I suspect I'm not alone. If manuals were written in a concise, engrossing and entertaining style and they could always be opened to the required page and offer useful advice without wading through acres of trivia then just maybe my attitude would be different but it was considerable scepticism I opened my copy of Simon Millward's 'The Fast Guide to Cubase.'
I was impressed with the bright cover design, the good quality white paper (130 pages) and excellent print quality but it wasn't long before 'Oh dear, not another overview' flitted across my mind as I began to read the introduction. I was surprised to find the lightweight, readable style held my interest. I wasn't too sure about the 'Cubase Universe', as Simon describes it, but the way it clarifies the internal structure of the Cubase system prevailed over my initial dubiety. This book is not primarily intended to be read from cover to cover but, for someone with a working knowledge of Cubase, the experience of doing so is both lucid and fascinating.

The book's layout has obviously received a great deal of attention. All paragraphs have a bold header identifying their subject matter and they are separated by enough white space to ensure pages do not appear cluttered. Almost every page has one or more hint/tip boxout with all the most useful hints and tips presented in this way so finding them again at a later date is a simple matter. 
There are plenty of clearly labelled screenshots, all of which are relevant to the text. Die hard atari enthusiasts (in other words, readers of this magazine!) will notice that the screen grabs are mostly not from the atari version of Cubase. The book caters for a generic version of Cubase without troubling us with platform specific differences. It was written using the atari version as its main reference and, in fact, all of the grabs were originally submitted to the Publisher in atari format. 
The Fast Guide to Cubase is smartly organised into chapters (see Chapter Titles), each dealing with a different part of the 'Cubase Universe'. Somehow Simon manages to mention a huge number of short-cuts without resorting to lots of lists (my pet hate, as far a manuals go). He also describes many useful techniques for dealing quickly and easily with recording and editing.

With the help of this book, a complete novice to music sequencing could be using Cubase at an acceptable level of competence within less than an hour. But don't think of it as a beginners' guide because that is far from the truth - even "power users" will find useful titbits and may perhaps be enlightened a little with regard to some of the more obscure parts of the Cubase system.    
The Fast Guide to Cubase tries to be a quick reference guide as well as a user companion and, surprisingly, it succeeds admirably. It has a concise index to complement its chapter and page layouts. I am that impressed by its structure that I think the book would fall open at whatever page I needed next, but for the lack of a spiral binding! In short, unless you are one of those few magicians who can use Cubase fluently without the help of any documentation whatsoever, you are likely to find The Fast Guide to Cubase indispensable.

** Boxout **
Chapter Titles
** bulleted list **
* Arrange Window
* Key Edit
* List Edit
* Drum Edit
* Control Functions
* Score Edit
* Logical Edit
** End of boxout **

** Product box **
Product name: The Fast Guide to Cubase
Publisher: PC publishing
Contact: Sound on Sound Publications, Ltd.
Telephone: +44 (0)1954 789888
URL: http://www.pc-pubs.demon.co.uk/
Price: £10.95
Pros: Excellent index and layout, useful for beginners but  plenty of tips for "power users", a good read and reference work, easy to navigate.
Cons: A book this size can't cover everything, I would have preferred a spiral binder
Score: 90%
** End of boxout **

** CUTPASTE.GIF **
Illustrations like this one make The Fast Guide to Cubase the slickest computer "program guide" I've seen - ever!