Bass Instruments in Score Cubase 15 are an octave too high

[Jon_Till]

The info line shows for example middle C pitch bass notes as C2 not C3. i have tried to correct this but failed!

[fese]

This is an old topic:

Ability to modify middle c definition from C3 to C4?

When MIDI became a thing, there were two schools, Yamaha with C3, Roland with C4. Cubase’s Middle C has always been C3, as are most of the old school sample libraries and synths. MIDI instruments have almost always hovered around C3, Roland was always the odd one ‘back in the day’ with it at C4. Can’t recall where the middle was on my Juno 106 though. Logic lets you switch between the two, but Cubase was always C3, which matches up with all my hardware here (except my Roland XV3080 haha)… It’s …

People have requested it a lot, but it is not possible to change.

[Jon_Till]

I understand, but Cubase is inconsistent because it puts a piano bass line in the right octave.

[popitup]

Before Cubase 14, the Score Editor had a “Display Transpose”, where you could change the octave display without actually changing the pitch. Then the Score Editor changed over by incorporating Steinberg’s Dorico editor into Cubase. Apparently, one way to “display transpose” an octave for an instrument is to create an expression map, which maps down one octave. Others here have described this method, however, I’ve never been able to get that to work on my system. (If you figure it out, please let me know)

[mducharme]

It should work for everybody, chances are that you’re just doing something slightly incorrectly. I would generally recommend expression maps to fix this, it takes only a few seconds to make the correct map once you know how.

[popitup]

Seems you can create an expression map to “play” sounds an octave lower, I got that far . . . but what doesn’t seem possible right now is to merely “display” the sounds in their correct octave in the score editor . . . ie, a bass guitar plays correctly, but displays way on top of the staff in the score editor.

[mducharme]

Hi,

So what you do is you transpose the notes themselves (shift them by an octave up or down) until the score looks correct but they sound in the wrong octave, and then you use the expression map to transpose the sound back to the correct octave. You can set the expression map to transpose by +12 or +24 or -12 or -24 or whatever depending on how many octaves you need and in what direction.