Cubase AI Control (Mackie / MCU)

Give your AI coding agent hands and eyes in your DAW. This skill is the operating manual for the open-source yoka-cubase-mcp MCP server: it tells Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and other agents when and how to use its 64 tools to read and control a live DAW session over the 30-year-old Mackie Control (MCU) protocol — not fragile UI automation, not a closed vendor API.

What you can ask your agent to do:

• Read the session — "what's playing in Cubase?", active track, transport, 8 channel strips with volume / mute / solo / VU — no screenshot, from a live state mirror.
• Control it — select tracks, switch modes, move banks, set volume in dB, play / stop, page through plugins. Every action is closed-loop verified (verified: true/false).
• Run a pre-export audit — catch rec-armed tracks, stray solos, LUFS over the streaming target before you bounce.
• Set plugin parameters by name over the MIDI Remote API — including granular FabFilter Pro-Q3 / Pro-C2 control.
• Get mastering & EQ advice — chain suggestions per genre + platform, per-role frequency advice, masking-conflict detection — from a built-in structured knowledge base that works out of the box.
• Grow your own handbook — point the server at a folder and drop in Markdown docs; the agent searches your private production knowledge base and reasons over your own conventions. A 6-doc starter library (mixing, EQ, compression, reverb, delay, saturation) is bundled.

Built-in safety: every tool is classified green (read-only) / yellow (undoable) / red (destructive), with suggest-then-confirm and plan-before-execute rules so the agent never records, saves, or fires a destructive command without your say-so.

Requires the free, open-source yoka-cubase-mcp MCP server and a DAW configured as a Mackie Control device (loopMIDI on Windows / IAC on macOS). Windows is production-tested; macOS support is experimental. Install + setup are in the repo README — this skill links straight to it.