No problem. I do this quite often actually. I.E. With something like East West Opus Orchestra. If I want a phrase to ‘get louder’ as notes go higher, and ‘get softer’ as they go lower…
The first question to ask, is do you want it to happen to everything on the track? Just for a few bars? Etc…
So step one is ‘selecting events’ that can ‘potentially’ be edited by the logic at hand. At times you might want to build the limits into the condition of editor itself. At others, you might just select a bunch of stuff manually, and process from that. Etc.
For a simple version, lets just set up an entire track. I’ve grabbed a general MIDI music file for Appalachian Spring off the internet and imported it into Cubase.
I’ll set up an instance of Opus and load up a violin sound. Since this imported MIDI file is set to use Channel 5 for the Violin I’ll run with that in Opus as well.
To prepare this for my Opus Instrument, the first thing I want to do is strip out the General MIDI Program Changes between arco/pizzicato and replace them with the proper key-switches for the Opus Violin.
So I’ll do two passes…
One to locate all the PC 49 events and covert them to MIDI Note C0 (Note that I do need to subtract one…for some odd reason the Editor numbers Program Changes from 1 to 128, while the Logical Editor does it from 0 to 127);
I’ll run another one to take care of the pizzicato transformation from PC 45 to a C#1 key-switch.
Now I’ll draw CC11 events with the same value as each note-number at the same position as the note_on event. (simulate getting louder with higher notes, and lower with lower notes).
Since I’m going to process this entire track I’ll do the selection process manually with my mouse by right clicking the track and choosing “Select All Events”.
Logical Editor Functions (steinberg.help)
Then run a Logical Editor that looks like this:
Note, if I wanted, I could instead make CC11 events that copy over the ‘key velocity’ rather than the note value. Such a Logical Editor would look more like this:
Now imagine that I’ve done something similar to all of the other instruments, but I find this Violin to be a bit ‘too loud’ in context in the higher registers. I could use this logical editor again to find all the CC11 events and scale them down a bit (subtract 20 from all selected CC11 events, value 2).
Now I imagine I want to accent the first beat of every bar a bit by giving CC11 a little bump. So I’ll do this to every CC11 event in a bar range (within a few frames of beat one of each bar).
And so forth…
Thus far I end up with something like this already roughed in…and I’m ready to use my mouse in the key editor to get into more precision and detail from here.
Note, sometimes you might only want to work with smaller portions of a track. You might use the scissor tool to temporally slice events in Project view and limit the logic to that portion of the track (you can always glue it back together later if that’s conductive to the work flow).
You can also run ‘multiple passes’ with these Logic Editors. One time to select a given range of events, another time to process subsets of ‘selected events’, and so forth.
Don’t forget that you can save these things as user presets, and bind them together in a sequence using macros, assign them to key-combos, or even bind remote controls to them!