Better Project Colours in Cubase

Cubase has some neutral, default colours already set up, but I find them a bit dull because personally, I like bright and bold colours on the screen as it makes it much easier to focus on various things. Most importantly the colours must have a good contrast to the darker shade of waveforms and midi notes, so a colour like navy blue won't work very well, but a nice turquoise blue will. Track colours might not bother most people so if you're one of them I guess this blog post is not for you.

I create a few different variations of light blues, turquoise's, pink's, purple's orange and more bright colours, as well as the pastel shades of those colours. I like using similar shades because I may shade groups of channels in similar colours, or sometimes contrasting colours if I need to.

To get started, click the arrow on the colourize tool at the top of the cubase window.

Next, click the arrow to the right of "set up colours".

You can click on "Options > Append new colour". Cubase will add a new colour block, default to white and named "New colour".

 

Click on the new colour to open the colour picker and go ahead and pick your desired colour.

You can click on the default name cubase assigns to the new colour and you can rename the colour to something more suitable. I never did that before, but when colours are very similar and you want several tracks to have the same colour it can be difficult to find that particular colour.

 

VERY IMPORTANT STEP: Once you have picked all your desired colours, you must click "options > Save current set as Program Defaults". If you don't save it and exit the project colours dialogue box, you will lose the new names you have just typed in. You will also lose the new colours in a new project. Ideally, you want these colours to be the default in your project template. Finally, save the project.

My final colour palette has 54 colours, obviously more than enough but I love having more choice.

Now, all your new projects will start with your customized project colours.

Just 1 final thing to take note of, in the colour picker options menu, you can just increase or decrease the intensity of the default colours. So if you don't need to add more, this could be a better option if you just want to brighten up the defaults a bit.

Now, once you've done all this, you can start some more important things like producing some music haha!!