Dear Steinberg,
I just wanted to say firstly that ‘chord pad’ is really awesome but I think that it could be offer a little more.
One of the holy grails as a produce is to program realistic midi piano pieces which can be quite complex and time consuming. I think though that there is potentially a way introduce a human/live pianist feel. My suggestion simply requires borrowing and adapting the current methodology used to quantize and add swing.
A seasoned pianist will over time develop timings and inflictions that really bring a cord to life as opposed to a novice who simply just plays all notes (uniform velocity) within a chord simultaneously on the chosen division. What separates a professional are delays of milliseconds as well as variation in note velocity to add richness an interest to the playing styles.
When programming drums producers can add swing and timing variations by using quantize templates which are extremely useful and provide a rich and easily incorporated source of playing style at the finger tips. My idea is for a similar function to be added which can provide professional piano articulations to the novice.
In order to do this the Steinberg engineers could collaborate with session pianists (even celebrity ones) and record the midi data whilst they play chords. This rich, detailed and professional performance data (velocity, timing and duration) could be captured as midi information. This midi performance data could then be programmed and saved as an articulation templates e.g. ‘soulful gospel’ which could then be applied by the Cubase user to a standard ‘straight’ chord (simultaneously playing at the same division and uniform velocity) in incremental amounts such as seen in the current quantize function. The template would adjust midi velocity, timing and duration and could be categorized by styles such as Gospel, Jazz, and Country etc.
I think the above could really open up the chord pad function by bringing realism to the user.
In addition and building on the current ‘chord pad’ functionality perhaps categories of chord styles could be added. For example as a produce I may want to write a country and western song and it would be really helpful to have access to a list of detailed chords/phrasing from that genre.
Also unusual keys such as Aeolian categories should be available.
Passing note ideas would also be a great secret weapon to have.
I hope the above makes sense and potentially is incorporated in an update.
Thanks
T