I recently restarted writing music on my computer. It’s an awesome way to keep oneself entertained while feeling productive.
To produce said music, I use a digital audio workstation called Cubase 5 (As you’ve probably guessed). The other week, while finishing one of my songs (shameless plug: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFAtvlGBUqk&feature=c4-overview&list=UUom7ICBhRKQkehzf66BL32Q), I found myself wanting a crescendo on one of my instruments. Unfortunately, it had been a long time since I had last used Cubase, and didn’t remember how this was done.

I googled  my problem and was unable to find a clear answer, so, after a bit of trial and error, I finally remembered how to do a crescendo in Cubase.

Firstly, open the track that you want to turn into a crescendo. In the bottom left corner, you should see a drop-down menu which is currently set to “velocity”:

What you want to do next is click on the small arrow next to velocity and select CC 7 Main Volume:

Great! Now that this is done, select the Line Tool from the Cubase toolbar:

Finally, using this tool, draw an upwards line in the main volume grid. The starting height of the line is the initial volume of the instrument and the end height is the final volume. In this case, we go from a volume of 0 to the maximum volume (127):

And when we release the mouse button:

That’s it! You now have a nice, smooth crescendo for your tune!

Thanks for reading!
-Icosebyte