I have a track with a chord progression happening. Is there a way to move all the highest notes to a new track, then the second highest to another track, … etc. until you have each note (voicing) of the chord to its own track.
i.e. A chord progression that consists of triads (only) will be converted into Three monophonic lines, each line of notes will be moved to its own track. for a total of three tracks.
I’m asking about this because I would like to create chords using a Monophonic-Analog Synth, via Bouncing each midi track to an audio track. after doing some creative automation moves per midi track of the monophonic-Analog Synth.
What is the best/easiest way to accomplish this type of edit ?
You can’t do this automatically unless you’re using the Score Editor, and are setting up each pitch as a “voice.”
However, you can do it manually like so:
In the Key Editor, go into the “Event Colors” drop-down at the top (which defaults to Velocity) and change it to Channel. This is so that notes which are on different MIDI channels will be colored differently (you’ll see why in a moment).
Select the top voices in the part, and in the “Channel” box in the info line at the top of the editor, make sure they are channel 1 if they aren’t already.
Then select the next lowest voices in the part, and change them to channel 2. And so on, for however many voices you have. You’ll now see the notes which form the top line will be one color, the middle voices will be another color, and so forth.
Close the Key Editor, and go to MIDI → Dissolve Part. In the dialog, choose “Separate Channels.” It will automatically create separate tracks with each voice on its own track.
The only tricky part is selecting all the notes which make up the top, middle, and bottom voices…you have to sort of get clever with the selection rectangle and Shift + click. But barring that, it works quite well.
This is the kind of thing that the Logical editor should have some expanded options to allow it to do - it has the potential to be able to do all these sorts of things, but is hamstrung by a lack of selection capability. I know that’s not a help, but I think it’s the kind of feature Steinberg should be adding to help professional / creative users who want to do these kind of repetitive tasks easily.
i.e. sometimes I need to select every other note on a track, or just the highest or lowest notes of a chord progression, …etc. If there was a smart-Selection tool that offered these as options, we wouldn’t need to go into the more time consuming, and confusing logical editor to accomplish these types of selection functions.
Maybe Cubase 8 will offer a Smart-Selection Tool ! We shall see.
This can be achieved by setting conditions and filters along with other parameters quite easily within the logical editor. It’s one of the most powerful editors within Cubase, always has been and is well spending the time learning how to use it.
You can start by by playing with built in presets in standard set 2 >high notes to Channel 1> low notes to channel 2
Once you get the basics it’s quite astounding what can be made to do, so get in there and build up some conditional presets of your own and add them to your custom preset libraries!
You should explore the Logical Editor Presets, which can be found in the “Musical Context” category.
If these are used, Cubase analyses the complete context for the selected parts/notes or it uses the Chord Track as context source.(it knows the highest and lowest notes in this context for example).
You then can select notes, which define a “Position in a chord” like the root or the Major 7th and then apply all kind of unusual operations to them. (Change a minor to a major chord, duplicate the root note etc.).
There are even presets, that change the voicing in a sequence by transposing all the notes, which are in a bottom range in the musical context.
I guess, nobody found these Options so far ??? (RTFM …)
Werner Kracht (Steinberg - the man “behind” the Logical Editor)
Thanks for answering. The problem (for me) with these is that they don’t work on a “per chord” basis, or rather I’ve not managed to get them to do so.
For instance, if I have a part which has chords every beat, and I wanted to extract the top note from each one, if I set the Logical editor to:
Context Variable > Equal > Highest pitch
Then it selects the highest pitch across the entire part, not in each chord (i.e. in each beat, in my case).
If there’s a way to get it to do this, I’d love to know it as it would save a lot of work. I use the logical editor a fair bit, but it seems to me there’s scope for it to be expanded greatly, and to give a huge amount of power to those who use it.
Hm…
You may try to split the MIDI-Part for each Chord and apply Your Logical Preset.
You can glue the Parts together afterwards. The Musical Context is computed per MIDI-Part.
(You can also set a range for the Context Variable: Context Variable->inside Range->highest pitch will offer an additional Parameter.)
I know I -can- do it that way, but two things spring to mind:
In most parts it would be easier to do it manually by selection than it would be to cut them up and do that for each one
Are we really in a position where it’s not possible to solve this kind of problem with clever coding? I’d have thought an intelligent/musically aware logical editor would have been a really useful tool for lots of people. It certainly would be for me, and I don’t believe I’m alone in this. At present it has the potential to be an incredible tool, but only that. Yes, it’s a great tool and I use it for a lot of tedious tasks to save a lot of boring editing, but it’s pretty much the same as it was in the Atari era. Given all the other progress that’s been made, surely this can move forward? Sibelius offers useful tools and the ability to extend it, why not Cubase?
Yes, in this area no smart tool and the Logical Editor is a little outdated and needs an overhaul. I would use the LE more if it wasnt so mathematical. The GUI kinda scares me away form creating while I feel more like a programmer.
Loving 7.5.20 though…and still feel that Cubase is the best dawg’on DAW out there!
