I recently bought Cubase Elements and now trying to leverage Chord Track feature to compensate for my not so good music theory skills.
I inserted a chord track into one of my experimental projects (trying to duplicate an existing song for learning purposes and also to create a karaoke version of the song) and then inserted a new Halion synth pad track and set the chord track to control the synth track.
Then I switched to the chord pad. What’s confusing is that I have to click on the synth track to make the pads work. If I click on the chord track itself, I see this:
I imagined that the supposed workflow is that I create chords on the chord track and then the chord track pushes the notes to other tracks. But now it seems I have to enable recording to hear the chords on a track, which is somehow counterintuitive - I imagined that the record button is for recording from external sources - audio, midi keyboards etc., not for internal Cubase track wiring (especially considering that I had already set the chord track to control the synth pad track).
At first, Cubase generated chords with additional base notes but I wanted to start with basic triads, so with some fiddling around I found that I can switch to Basic Player mode.
Then I started dragging the chords to the chord track and fiddling with them and found a few issues. I must be doing something wrong.
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After dragging the C major chord to the chord track, it sounds in lower octave, not the same as when I click the C pad in the chord pads area. How do I set the octave of a chord?
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I drag a C major, then open its editor, then click on C inside it … and the notes get shifted around! It’s still the same C maj chord, but modified. How do I stop Cubase from doing that “automagically”? Is it the adaptive voicing feature? Then what is it adapting to?
https://i.imgur.com/9K4V5VB.gifv
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It seems, the chords generate only noteOn events and no noteOff - my synth pad continues the last chord forever. Is there any way to tell the chord track how long should the last chord be?
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How do I correctly slave all my other instruments to the chord track? For example, how to create a quick&dirty arrangement by telling the synth pad track to always follow the main notes of the chord, the base track to follow the bottom note of the chord and the lead track to follow the top note of the chord track?