Shortly after I started learning MIDI programming about three years ago, I learned about the feature called “chase”. Back then I was using Logic Pro X, where it seems to be disabled by default.
But as far as I know, and for what I can tell in the Cubase help, it is rather limited to simply playing the note as it plays at the beginning, not catching up with what it would be at the specific point you started playing.
For example, many instruments have pre-recorded phrases or sounds that build up over time for as long as you keep the key pressed in the MIDI keyboard. One example is Benjamin Wallfisch Stringscapes, many of Sonuscore libraries, Symphobia and tons more. They build over time from the moment the note starts and if you want the full sequence, it has to be a rather long note over several bars. But, if you start playing several bars after the note started, it won’t give you the same as if you had been playing it since the beginning of the MIDI note. It’s going to start that sequence from the beginning of the sequence, or whatever it’s called.
Even if it’s not one of those, let’s say you pressed B2 for a specific drum, and you keep pressing it so the drum dies on its own rather than quickly. Well, if you are on the key editor and you have the playhead around the middle of that note, when you press the spacebar, it’s going to play the drum hit as if the playhead passed by the beginning of the note.
I hope I was able to convey this in a way that you can all understand. I think there’s no way to achieve what I want, but I wanted to be sure. To try to bring it down to a basic point, if chase is disabled, a MIDI note will not play unless the playhead is before said note when you press the spacebar. With chase enabled, it plays even if the playhead is after the start of the note. But it doesn’t mean that it plays the note as it would be if the playhead had been before the start of the note. It simply plays the center of the note as if the playhead was hitting the beginning of the note.
Does that make sense?
Hi,
You are absolutely right. If the MIDI Note plays a sample with any sequence, there is no way to start the sequence from the middle. What the chase does is send the MIDI Note On (so, logically, the sequence starts from the very beginning). There is no other way.
Btw, the same behaviour applies to any sound. If you have a very long MIDI Note with a Piano sound, it might not be audible after a few bars. But, if you started the playback after a few bars, you would hear the key. Because Cubase (and other DAWs) sends MIDI Note On at the moment of the playback start.
This would be a really good feature for Steinberg to add. It would just have to calculate what that note would sound like if it had been played from the beginning up to the point where the playhead is currently at. It would have to do that for every track that has a long note at the current place, but, any decent computer these days should be able to do that without breaking a sweat, unless it’s a project with hundreds of tracks like that, which I doubt would be the case normally.
I don’t know if any DAW in the market has what I mentioned, but if not, Steinberg could get ahead of every other company in the market and gain some market share.
Hi,
As I explained, this is not possible. You cannot playback the sample of the “black-box” instrument from another part, but only from the very start.
Well, it may not be possible now, but it’s not impossible if they put their minds to it. Here’s how I see it.
When you do a mixdown for example, Cubase exports all the tracks merged to just two tracks, or 5.1, whatever you choose, at a speed much higher than real time. Of course that depends on how big the project is (and for this we take for granted that it’s a project with VSTis, not an audio one), but in my case it’s several times faster than real time. That means that Cubase can read all those MIDI notes way faster than real time, and therefore it’s possible to assign some background tasks to read those notes that at the current playhead position, are already started.
Cubase converts the output of any MIDI note into a sound that the user can hear, or at least a digital signal that the audio interface will decode into sound that we can hear. If that’s the case, and given the extreme power of today’s computers, why wouldn’t it be possible for some background tasks to read that note from the very start and when the user presses the spacebar, Cubase already turned that note into a sound and plays that sound not at the start, but at the current point in the timeline.
It is doable, they just have to find a way to do it. The MIDI protocol by itself may not have this in the list of features, but Cubase can manipulate it to go beyond what it offers.
Hi,
That’s not a bad idea. But as you know, the offline Mixdown is not instant. But if you click somewhere in the project, you expect to get the position instantly.
It may not be instant but it’s very fast. In fact, I mentioned this before in another thread, when Cubase does a mixdown is like Popeye when eating spinach. Meaning, if I load a large project and try to play it as soon as I get the mixer and project window, it’s going to hiccup like crazy, and it will be several minutes until I can play it without hiccups.
But if as soon as it loads I export a mixdown, it does it much faster than real time and the exported file is perfect, without any errors. So there’s something very different in the way that Cubase handles playback in the project to the way it renders a mixdown. But the speed is there.
In the end, this would work as the “Render in place” command for a part, except in RAM. When the user starts playback, Cubase does a render in place for all tracks with notes that are at the playhead but started before it. Most likely it would take a couple of seconds to start playback, maybe more on older machines.
Obviously this would have to be an option, because for the most part people would prefer to not wait a few seconds to start playback, but when you work with instruments that have those pre-made phrases like NI Fables, Sonuscore The Score or The Orchestra, etc, then I would prefer to have to wait two seconds when I press the spacebar than putting the playhead like a minute earlier just to hear what that long note would sound.
Then if you’re working with mostly usual instruments, you can disable it.