I bought Cubase PRO 11 and I’m trying to find out what is the best way to edit multiple aticulations. I know how to do it with keyswitches, but what is the best workflow with the single/split patches (old-skool style)?
For example, if I want to make a two bar melody with several kontakt articulations. What is the best way to edit them like a one whole melody? What is your workflow?
Does anyone know any good video about this? I found only keyswitching videos…
Not sure I follow exactly what you mean here. But if you mean using multiple Instruments where each one is a single articulation, then one approach is to use different MIDI Channels. Put all the notes playing Articulation A on Channel 1, B on 2, etc. If you do this make sure to set the Channel on the Track to “Any” So it plays the MIDI Notes on the Note’s Channel. In the Key Editor you can set the Colors to indicate Channel Number instead of the default Velocity.
Ok, I load 4 invidual patches in Kontakt and assign them to MIDI tracks 1,2,3 and 4. Then I add 4 MIDI tracks in Cubase and assign them to those Kontakt patches (1,2,3 and 4). But then what?
If I want to make a melody with all of these invidual patches, what is the best way to edit them in key editor? How do you do it? It’s total madness to edit four invidual MIDI tracks invidually to get one melody. There must be some better way.
Thanks for the answer. How do you change the colors in key editor from default velocity to channel number? And please, could you give me more example, I didn’t quite get it yet. Please, could you give me an example how you would make and edit the trumpet melody which I described earlier. Thanks.
Well you can open the four (or more) MIDI Parts (Cubase edits Parts on Tracks, not Tracks) in the Key Editor and freely edit between them. So it is not necessarily a lot more work. While this probably isn’t the best approach for your example task of a single musical line playing different articulations, it works quite well for harmony part writing (especially if you want to keep each line separate from the others). It looks like this (with hopefully a more interesting harmony).
But you don’t need to have the different Channels in different Parts or on different Tracks - which is probably a better fit for your example. In the screenshot below everything is in a single MIDI Part. The first 2 notes are on Channel 1 and would play your Trumpet 1/8 articulation, the next 2 notes are on Channel 2 and would play your Trumpet 1/4 articulation, etc. As noted above it is important when doing this to set the Track’s Channel to “Any” (circled in red below) or it won’t play the different articulations. For example if you set this to 4, on playback it would convert all the notes to Channel 4 so all the notes would play the sustain articulation.
Wow! Thank you! Finally I got it. Screencaptures where so helpful, So, that’s how you can use channels, very intresting and clever. Now it works like a single line. So easy. This solved my problem!