How to ad note at a given interval to a chord by keybind?

Hello,

How am I able to harmonize or add notes above or below a given note in the midi editor? I am looking for something like in Finale where if I hit 3, it adds a note a third above, or if I hit shift-3, it adds a third below.

While this might not be the only, or best method, it came to mind and I tested it. It worked. The idea is to use the MIDI Logic Editor to build a preset, and then bind that preset to a key-combo.

If you’ve not explored the power and flexibility of the Logical Editors, I highly encourage you read up on them in the manual and start practicing today. These editors will save you all kinds of time and effort in automating things or batch processing MIDI events. You get ‘logic editors’ at the MIDI event level, as well as on an application ‘project level’.

Use the MIDI Logic Editor to insert your desired interval. You’ll repeat this for any intervals of which you’d like to create a Logic Editor preset.

  1. At the top of the Main Project window, choose select the Menu option “MIDI/Logic Editor”.

  2. Build a simple script here to insert your desired interval.

Here you can see an example where I’ve made one that adds an interval of a major 3rd (4 half steps) above the ‘selected’ note. Note that I did need to click on the function tab and change it from ‘Transform’ to ‘Insert’.

Please note that you can get MUCH more involved with your Logic Editor presets. I.E. You could make the thing build entire chords, with any voicings you like. You could even make it do glissando style attacks to the chord and more. Practice with the logic editor is the secret spice of doing things MIDI in Cubase :slight_smile:

  1. Store this as a preset so you can use it again later.

If you like, test your new preset by clicking on a note in any of your MIDI editors and selecting the preset from the Main Project Window Menu “MIDI/Logical Editor Presets”.

  1. Continue building Logic Editor presets for any other intervals you wish to create and name them in your preferred way. I.E. Add Minor 2nd Above, Add Minor 2nd Below, Add Maj 2nd Above, Add Minor 3rd Above, and so on.

  2. Quit Cubase and restart it. This is necessary before we can start binding keys. Next time Cubase starts it will have a fresh list of presets in the “Key Commands…” dialog that we can bind to key combos/macros.

Next, you will bind key-combos to the Logic Editor presets that you’ve just made.

  1. In the main project window choose the “File/Key Commands…”.

  2. Under the “Process Logical Preset” tab, find your preset(s) and assign an unused key-combo of your choosing.

You can test different key combos until you find one that is not already in use by clicking the box under ‘type in key’ and trying various combos. Once you’ve found one that is empty, you can click the ‘assign’ button.

  1. Once you are done binding keys to your Logic Editor Presets click “OK”.

In my case below I’ve managed to bind my “Add Maj 3rd Above” preset to a previously unassigned key-combo of ctrl+shift+1.

At this point, you should find that if you click on a single note (or otherwise select it) in any of your MIDI editors, and then press the key-combo for your desired interval, it should insert the new note with duplicate timing/duration/velocity into the part.

Now that we’ve looked at the ‘basics’ in creating a Logic Editor preset, and binding a key-combo to something, it’s a good time to read the manual for in-depth possibilities. I.E. You can have different key-combo sets and swap between them. You can create ‘macros’ that can run ‘multiple commands’ in a sequence, and so on. We might even learn that there is a way to update the presets in this thing without restarting Cubase (Maybe the reset button does it? I’ll need to look that up before pressing it as I don’t want to risk lose all my bindings here).

It also might possible to bind these presets to MIDI events using a Generic Remote Map. I.E. You could reserve certain CC events, or reserve a channel’s note-on/off events to enter these sorts of things using your MIDI Keyboard, MPC Pads, etc…

If you’re interested in learning how to bind Cubase commands to MIDI events via Remote Maps let me know and I’ll try to help you get started in that realm of Cubase. I personally use the MPC pads on my MPK261 to do all sorts of nifty tricks in the Cubase score editor (for quick and easy ‘step input’ directly from my MPK261).

Hopefully this has been helpful. Good luck, and happy sequencing :slight_smile:

Thank you so much! I have been attempting to dive into regularly using the logical editor. I would definitely be interested in your offer! This has helped a ton.

Pete,

Here are a couple of threads that might get some gears grinding in your head on how to control Cubase ‘remotely’. In this case I’m attempting to help Akai MPK2 users specifically; however, the concepts of building the map(s) in Cubase are fairly universal for most MIDI controllers out there. The main point is…you can bind pretty much any command in Cubase to MIDI events :slight_smile:

http://community.akaipro.com/akai_professional/topics/mpk49-mapping-to-cubase-elements-7

Here is a video on making remote maps. It’s an older version Cubase in the vid, but current versions haven’t changed much if any.

Here is another thread (in which I refer to the link above as well). It branches out into some other ‘remote control related’ topics as well.

Here’s one that tosses up some examples on using the MIDI Logic Editor…