Issues With Chord Symbols Imported From Cubase's Chord Track

Dragging chord events from Cubase to Dorico mostly works well with basic triads, but not so well with extended chords.

In Cubase, we build extended chords by adding one or more tensions to one of the six triads. The best is to illustrate this with the screenshots of few examples:

The last one is Cmin Maj7. Cubase uses j7 label for major 7th.

And this is what Dorico gets when the above chords are dropped into it:

As you can see, it got only Cmin7 and Cm6 (add9) right, everything else was misinterpreted. Cmin (add11) is imported as Cmin11, Cmin (add9, add11) as Cmin9, Cmin13 as Cm7 and Cmin Maj7 as plain Cmin.


Another issue is with importing enharmonic chords . Cubase tries to automatically infer from the context whether, for example, G# is G# or Ab and it’s terribly bad at it. Luckily, it allows us to override its decision by choosing # or b manually in most cases (we unfortunately can’t have Cb, Fb, B# or E# in the Chord Track, but those are shown correctly in the Key Editor when its scale assistant is set to follow the chord track). However, Dorico always gets Cubase’s automatic decision. If Cubase wrongly decides that the chord is Ab and we change it to G#, Dorico will still get Ab even though Cubase shows G# after our change.

I am not sure if the above issues are partially or totally on the Cubase side, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt if Cubase gets more music theory aware while being made interoperable or integrated with Dorico… :slight_smile:

What works great is:

  1. Convert Chord Track to MIDI in Cubase
  2. Drag created MIDI region to Dorico (e.g. to a piano track)
  3. Select all imported notes and run Generate Chord Symbols from Selection

Hi I have found the same issues and actually worse results Using Cubase 14 and Dorico 5, When i drag chords from Cubase to Dorico (play) :
C7(b9) becomes → C7/B
Cmin7(b5) becomes → Cm7/B

Is this a known issue?. I’m doing a lot of Jazz and this becomes a bit annoying…

I guess they must have noticed the issues now when Cubase 14 has Dorico-based score editor that displays Cubase’s chord track…

That said, have you tried exporting Cubase 14 project and importing it to Dorico instead of doing drag and drop?

saving as Dorico project and reading with Dorico works ok.
Saving as Music XML and importing in Dorico als works ok.

Only issue is with the drag drop…

My work around is to save one of the track/Scores as Dorico project and then copy past from this temporary Dorico project to the main Dorico project.

it works, but is a bit of a hassle.