Making midi patterns that change based on chord track inputs

Cubase
1

Hey everyone,

I’ve got Cubase 7 and am having a hard time figuring out how to do something. I am a pianist at church and want to see if I can make things a little fancier and start playing along to some tracks, about 10 minutes worth per week. I have several awesome VSTs and sample libraries but am in an intense grad school program and don’t have the time to design the requisite tracks from scratch. I saw stuff about chord track online and thought that was what I was looking for… and so far its awesome, but I want to see if I can get a little more out of it.

Drums are easy, I just lay down premade beats from the Addictive Drums library.

Guitars are easy too, I use the pattern generators in RealGuitar/RealLPC. All I have to do is input the song’s chords and the pattern generators provide arrangements that are more than sufficient. I don’t have to worry about transposing each chord change.

But what I want to do is apply the same principles from the pattern generator in MusicLabs RealGuitar programs to other instruments that do not have a build in pattern generator, especially the bass Kontakt libraries I have. Like, for example, create a 1 measure midi segment that has 4 G quarter notes - then, somehow (through either chord track or another method) transpose that midi segment to whatever the current chord is in chord track? Kind of like how an arranger can transpose style patterns, except not in real time. Is it possible to do this?

When I have tried to use chord track with bass tracks, or any other track I’d like to be monophonic, it plays full chords. Is there a way to have chord track only send the lowest bass note to a given track?

Thanks for your help!

2

Check out the Follow Chord Track section in the manual.

I’ve even used that function to transform midi drum part into synth arpeggiations.

You can also select a bunch of chords and drag them to a MIDI/Instrument track. It will create a midi part for each chord. Glue these all together and open in the Key Ed. Then for your bass just delete everything but the lowest notes. For this last step you could automate it by using the logical editor, but that has a bit of a learning curve to get working.

Make sure to mute the Chord Track if you don’t want it to play on any monitored tracks (like the bass track you are editing).