Creating a chord from a midi note

Finally I got Cubase 6 installed and haven’t been playing around with it yesterday and all day today so far :slight_smile: Have to say it’s rock solid!! Not one issue in any project I opened thus far…

Question: Is there a way to select a midi note and create a chord from it?
I was messing around with a midi piano part I wrote and thought I’d draw the chords notes for the chorus to save me some time. Then I thought, surely there is a way to create a chord from the note thinking I could right click/insert/full chord/major 7th and done… But no. Then had a go at the logical editor and it doesn’t seem to do it either.

I don’t think the chorder plugin does this simply either… is it possible any other way?

Well, not simply, but you can set things up in advance. I suppose it’s worth the time investment if you use it a lot.

Check out this article from Sound on Sound, talks about this.

On second thought, you can use the logical editor to add notes to a chord, and with key commands and macros it can be a one keystroke affair, potentially.

So, I attached several Logical Editor presets that will add an interval to the selected note.

Add dim. 5th up
Add maj 3rd up
Add minor 3rd up
Add minor 7th up
Add perfect 5th up

Once these are moved to your Logical Editor preset folder they will appear in the Key Commands dialog.

This code snippet is meant to be inserted into the macros section of the Key Commands.xml file, just be careful you follow the xml formatting and nesting in there. Or to avoid fiddling in there, simply create the macro in the Key Commands dialog, then create a key command for it.

      <item>
         <string name="Name" value="Create Chord"/>
         <list name="Commands" type="list">
            <item>
               <string name="Category" value="Process Logical Preset"/>
               <string name="Name" value="Add minor 7th up"/>
            </item>
            <item>
               <string name="Category" value="Navigate"/>
               <string name="Name" value="Left"/>
            </item>
            <item>
               <string name="Category" value="Process Logical Preset"/>
               <string name="Name" value="Add dim. 5th up"/>
            </item>
         </list>
      </item>

The included macro does the following:

Add a note a minor 7th up
navigate left (to reselect starting note)
Add a note a diminished 5th up

The result in this case is a dominant 7th chord (without the fifth)

That was fun! Now someone will tell me that this function has been in Cubase since Cubase ran on the Gutenberg Press.
Add Intervals.zip (5.35 KB)

1 Like

SteveInChicago,
Just wanted to thank you for your extraordinary and helpful replay to the original poster. Hate to see no replay to your effort.

Thanks for the props. Now that file attachments are possible we can start sharing stuff like this. Hope others get into it too.

Steve, wow!! :stuck_out_tongue: That is fantastic, thank you so much for taking the time to do that!! I’m going to do this later today while I’m in set up mode :smiley:

Maybe version 6.1 will add this as a new feature :wink:

There’s also a MIDI plug in / effect called “Chorder”.

Check out page 61 in the PDF document called “Plug In Reference”. you can find it under the help menu.

Hope this helps!

WPH

Yes, the OP mentioned it in his post. That plugin does what it says, but is maybe overkill for simply building chords. I think it’s designed for live playing.

Plus, in order to have the actual notes in the project instead of having the note-on trigger other notes in the chord you have to use merge midi in loop. My idea comes from a notation or key edit kind of mindset.

Steve