I know Cubase is supposed to be the best for midi, but I just find it to be horribly frustrating. And this is after watching a whole bunch of Groove3 videos on the subject.
Okay, so I know you have to “activate” the midi track before you can put midi into it. So I have a number of tracks and add a new instrument track. It is not letting me highlight the track for some reason. Okay, no problem, I will drag the chord track down. I select all. I try copy paste. Chords are there. But I can’t open the midi to edit. I instead get the chord assistant when hitting enter on the instrument.
Okay undo copy/paste. Try select all drag and drop. Chords are there. Select new instrument track. Click on midi. Get the chord assistant again. I swear editing midi in Cubase is the most complicated thing I have ever done. Okay, not really. But I am so close to going back to Sonar, it is that frustrating to work with. There’s no drag and drop option either. How is this the best?
If you’re trying to copy chords? You have to select the chords only, after press the window key and drag the chords to a midi or instrument track for editing.
Sorry, I get so frustrated I can’t articulate well.
I created a new instrument track. It is not letting me highlight it or add events. It is weird because this is the 4th instrument track I’ve added, and I was able to copy paste the chord track to the others and edit the midi.
I just want to know why there are weird lines on the track and why I can’t edit it.
I am away from my computer right now but I did find something that said the. Midi edit may be open already behind the main arranger window. I will check tomorrow thanks.
So I got back on this morning to get some screen shots. I had deleted the instrument that wasn’t working (and re-added/deleted a few times) yesterday. Or I didn’t save it since it wasn’t working.
And lo and behold, it works fine today. GRRRRR.
I did restart the computer yesterday and the problem continued to happen. But today it is fine.
Okay, something just occurred to me and I tried it out. it is the lanes/layers. This time I added the instrument, left it where it was and copied the chord track to the midi area in the project window. Nothing else. Everything is working well. Some how when I did it yesterday, I basically created a layer/empty midi event, then added the chord track on top.
Instead of replacing the nothing that was there with the chord midi, it added another layer that I couldn’t access from the main track. I’ve figured it out because I managed to recreate it.
open an instrument, take the pencil and draw in the track. Then copy the chords from the Chord Track into the same area. You get a bunch of \\\ lines going through the area showing the midi chords. Even when you expand the lanes it still shows. But if you drag the top layer (midi chords) down to a new lane, they are now both able to be edited.
Actually, that is not true. You can edit the chord track midi, but the empty part brings up the Chord Assistant. Which doesn’t actually do anything - at least not to that track.
I am sure this is useful for something. And? I wonder if recreating the same instrument over and over was causing the problems? Does Cubase remember and save it? Restarting the computer may not have shut it off long enough to clear out the RAM properly, but shutting off over night did?
Thank you. Now that I’ve figured out what I did, I will know what to do if I do it again (which is unfortunately likely)
