One of the things that we want to achieve in our home studios is to do more and faster. Working in the digital domain, using our DAW ,we often do too many moves for one procedure. For example if we are recording midi or audio we have to move our mouse to press the rec button on our transport and after that we will do the same move to stop recording.
There are key shortcuts that we create on our keyboard so we can work more efficient and more productive. Key shortcuts are the most importan and more useful functions all organized on your keybord ,so you can work without touching your mouse ,at least for a long time.It has to do with practice and you will get used to this way of working with key shortcuts. You don’t have to memorize all of them and I don’t think you will need all of them.
Every DAW has its own key shortcuts ,but they are all similar. There are some presets ,so you can write them down on a piece of paper ,until you start memorizing them. Threre are some basic functions like these on the transport panel ,that it has to do with play ,stop,and record. All these functions there are in the numeric pad ,instead of using your mouse.
In Cubase for Play is the key Enter and to stop is the key 0.To record you press the * key. The little dot ,which is between the 0 and Enter ,brings the cursor back to bar 0,at the beginning of the project. The + key moves the cursor forward and the – key,moves the cursor backwards. If you have set the left locator to a specific bar and the right one to another bar then you can easily move on these two locators using the keys 1 and 2.
Also you can create your own key shortcuts ,from the File menu ,choosing the submenu Key commands and in this window you can add shortcuts that help you work more productive in your projects.
As you can see in the picture below ,I have created some key shortcuts ,regarding the creation of tracks ,midi,audio,fx channels and groups also.You can modify them to your needs and what makes you work more efficient.
