Flexphraser recording

Hi all,

The Flexphraser is an amazing tool but I have searched everywhere on the net and can’t find a decent tutorial on how to record the phrases into itself or Cubase. The manual is a piece of junk. It says:

  1. Click Record FlexPhraser MIDI Output. The arrow in the Drag MIDI field starts blinking to indicate record mode.
  2. Play some notes.
  3. When you are done, click Record FlexPhraser MIDI Output again. Recording stops. In the Drag MIDI field, the arrow remains lit to indicate that a MIDI phrase can be exported.
  4. Click the Drag MIDI field and drag the phrase on a MIDI track in your host sequencer application.

I understand the procedure but nothing gets recorded and I can’t find the Drag MIDI field anywhere!! There are no setup instructions either. I have managed to get as far as recording my live triggering of the arps and other things into a track but that’s about it. I need to know how to record these phrases into that lower window. My recording into a track is full of errors because the chords are triggering wrong. I’m recording acoustic guitar, by the way. Great sample!

I’m in the Edit > Sound window. The bottom half of the window is unavailable. Why does Steinberg put out such amazing tools but insist that you be a seasoned recording engineer to understand it all??? The documentation is absolutely terrible and useless!!!

Thanks…
EDIT
I just made that lower window available by clicking User. I guess I don’t even use that window since I have no user arps? Perhaps I’m recording correctly, except I don’t see where they get this “drag and drop” things from.

Update
I played around with this poorly documented tool. I found the Drag MIDI field, something that would have remained totally hidden until the tooltips were turned on. To be fair, they mention this in Step 3 but it is not entirely clear, mostly because the icon (like all of them) is very tiny and the whole GUI uses a light grey on black color scheme - probably the worst way to design a GUI. It is the little tiny MIDI plug icon with an arrow facing in the 10:00 position. Here is a revised set of instructions:

  1. Click Record FlexPhraser MIDI Output. The arrow in the Drag MIDI field starts blinking to indicate record mode.
  2. Play some notes.
  3. After you are finished, click Record FlexPhraser MIDI Output again. The recording stops. In the Drag MIDI icon***** , the arrow remains lit to indicate that a MIDI phrase can be exported.
  4. Drag the phrase on to a MIDI track in your host sequencer by clicking and dragging the Drag MIDI icon to the target MIDI track.
  5. To play back the recorded sequence in the MIDI track, turn off the Arpeggiator.
    *****The word field is incorrect. Fields are used in databases, not GUIs!!

I was recently asked by Steinberg to fill out a survey on their documentation. I am a technical writer and technical writing instructor at Humber College, Toronto. My comment was that the manual is nicely laid out with plenty of useful screenshots, however, the target audience is “expert.” The writer(s) have completely ignored the novice and intermediate audiences. Just because the professional studios often choose Cubase doesn’t mean a lot of other less-seasoned users aren’t going to buy it. Information that is either difficult to retrieve, simply not there, or is incomplete - is totally useless. Literally millions of dollars have been lost in sales due to poor documentation!

When we need to watch a YouTube video produced by the one person out of thousands who managed to actually figure out how to do something that was poorly documented or not documented at all, it means Steinberg needs to revisit their documentation practices. I’ve written for several companies who used their engineers and secretaries as “documentation experts.” That NEVER worked!!

My only hope is that Steinberg reads these forums.