Chord Pads: Another incredible Cubase feature!

[Music] cubase video for you here and this one i'm going to be going over another power feature of cubase called cord pads and this one comes built into all the versions of cubase which is amazing and i'm telling you this one alleviates the need for other software that gives you the ability to trigger chords full chords from your keyboard or from a controller like machine i'm telling you you're gonna want to check this out especially if you're not a keyboard player so let's go see what it has to offer and what i'm thinking in the future is maybe i will make a pack of cord pads available because you can make presets for this and then you guys could download them or buy them or whatever i decide to do so i'll put something in the description if i end up doing something like that for now i'm going to show you how you could take chords how you could manipulate the ones that it comes with and then also how you could put in your own chords if you wanted to so let's get right into it so as you can see here i'm using the amped electra [Music] comes with the latest version of absolute and it's a really nice little electric piano and i am going to open up the chord mode area down at the bottom so you click this little button or command option b key command go over to chord pads down here so the way it works is you have these little squares here and you can see them kind of line according to the notes on the keyboard so if i go down to my c1 you can see that i'm playing the chords in sequence as they go up the chromatic scale what is so fantastic about these well so we have these default chords we go over to the left hand side here and we can click this functions menu and we can say all right let's transpose all pads this looks like it's kind of in the key of c we've got c d e minor f g seven and a minor and then we've got some sort of alternate chords up top that are kind of related to the key of c uh you know not too far away from the key of c so we could say let's put this in the key of e flat so we go up three semitones now we've got the same thing but in the key of e flat and you can hear the notes changing a little bit as i go through these chords and what it's doing is something called adaptive voicing and so what that means is when you go from one chord to the next if av is turned on up here in the top corner that means when you get to the next chord it's going to choose a voicing or a selection of notes that is pretty close to the last chord and what's so brilliant about this is as piano players we try to make sure that when we jump from one chord to the next we're not doing these huge jumps on the keyboard so when i play an e flat triad when i go to the a flat chord i can get to the a flat chord without moving very far and then i can do the same thing with the b flat and then i go up to the c minor and then if i go back to the e flat i could play an e flat triad without moving my hand very far so this is getting pretty complicated with music theory but when you use adaptive voicing it's going to do that all for you kind of automatically if you wanted to we'll see how later on i might just turn that off and decide no i want this pad to be a very specific cord we have a few other controls that i can talk about really quickly right here as well and that's if you look on each pad we've got these these little buttons right here and that says voicing so if i play that first pad i can click this button up an arrow and you can hear as i keep going up it's moving this e flat position up the piano and keeping the root down at the bottom if we go the other way [Music] you can hear it going down the keyboard as well so that's how you go through and change the voicing of your chord and you can see that these other little dashes down here are changing on these other chords as well and that's because they are adapting to be somewhere close to whatever voicing i just changed on this e flat another thing that we have right here is these little green keys and you can see these green keys correspond to something as well if i click the settings button again we can see that the c sharp 2 this one right here is going to change the voicing up so it's the same thing as pushing that little up arrow on the pad and then c2 goes down the other way so we can do that with the keys just by pressing them i'll show you that in a second we can also then d sharp two and d2 these two keys right here are going to add tensions which we haven't looked at yet and then we can also transpose a chord by pressing f2 or e2 to go up or down and so let's see what that looks like so if i go to c2 these ones right here you can see it going back and forth so let's play e so that's using the keys themselves to change the voicing and you can do that in real time as you're playing along so if you want to change the chord just hit one of these other keys and it will change the voicing for you on the fly next we have the add tension which is the same thing that we have down here at the bottom so tensions start we've got an e flat major chord we can start adding tensions by clicking and we get the nine which adds an f so don't worry too much about what that means but the next one we've got is a six the next one we've got is a six nine chord we've got the e flat major seven which adds the seventh in there so things are getting a little bit more complex as we go next we've got e flat major seven with a nine and then we've got the 13 the sharp 11. so if we want to change this to something like a dominant 7 chord we can click this triangle right over here opens up the chord editor and in the chord editor we can then go you know what i want to make this one e flat major but this little thing right here this j7 is the tension that's gonna change this from a dominant seven chord to a major seven chord and one little note on this if you end up on a diminished chord if you know what a half diminished seven chord is in order to get a half-diminished seven or a a minor seven flat five chord then you would set it to this top seven and if you want a fully diminished seven chord then you click this little tension button right here j7 but what i would suggest is if if you don't know a lot about chord music theory you could go find somebody's suggestions for really cool neosoul chords or something like that and just punch in a bunch of these fancy chords without even knowing what they are you do have to know how to get there and that's what i'm showing you right here is e flat major seven this is going to be a major seven chord this is gonna be a dominant seventh chord and then we add the other tensions above that which sound awesome and yeah so we'll get into some of those more complex chords in a little bit but that's how you go and choose your chords so we've got e flat minor seven and if we do this we get e flat minor major seven so that's a chord where you've got [Music] what does that sound like sounds like an old spy movie right that's a minor triad with a major 7 at the top these are the tensions right here so if you want to get to those tensions from the keyboard itself you can use the d and the d sharp keep pressing the d sharp [Music] it goes all the way through the complexities or the tensions of the major seven chord now these chords aren't that exciting and what i want to show you is how you can get some more fancy chords that maybe you'd never come up with on your own or you'd never be able to play on your own and that's these chords with these sevens and nines and sharp elevens and stuff like that and stuff that as jazz musicians we spend years training to be able to play these chords and i'm not encouraging people to use the technology to take the place of hard practice and hard work and stuff like that but this is kind of the the gateway into this world and once you get a little taste of it you're going to want to know more and so at that point i recommend that you start practicing get some lessons get lessons from people online but spend time practicing every day and getting better at your craft but let's see how we can make this stuff this technology work for us something occurred to me as i was playing with this i was thinking what if i wanted more chord pads would i have to make another chord pads track and no there is a way for you to get twice as many chord pads as you have right here so right now we've got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen chord pads so watch this if we go down to the settings and we go to the pad layout and we go leave it on keyboard and we're going to go two octaves we can go to our pad remote control and say pad remote range start and we're going to start it at c zero we've got twice as many cord pads so this is beautiful i can't see myself needing more than this next thing i want to do is show you some of these presets so i'm going to go load chord pads preset and in here we've got some really interesting ones so if you go lot of nine you just click on it once and you're going to see it as a little preview [Music] so kind of an interesting arrangement of chords already i'm going to put a five star on that one because it just does sound really nice let's try another one oh this looks really basic this one here is is one of my favorites and i think we're going to play around with this one a little bit [Music] sounds pretty good but i'm i am not super happy with a couple of the chords in here i'm going to go with an interesting little progression here i'm going to make this a g but i'm going to make it g major and i'm going to make make sure it's dominant then i'm going to set this to a sharp 5 or flat 13. i really like the sound of that and then maybe let's do the same thing to this one right here let's click this one and we're going to make that one major and then let's make it a different uh a different tension let's [Music] try so we got sharp 11 and flat 13. how would you come up with this on your own if you're new to jazz there you probably won't go online find yourself some chord progressions that somebody suggested for sort of jazzy neosole kind of stuff and then try punching those in to the chord pads next thing you can do once you've punched in the basic ones or if you're using just like a template like this one here is i can then click on this chord and how that's changing [Music] let's say i really like that tension i'm going to hold option the copy command for everything in cubase i just tried this to see if it worked and of course it does option drag i love how cubase has functionality built into so many different facets of the program so it's like option drag sure enough copy that over to a different pad this is stuff we can't do in a lot of different programs so i like this this voicing right here if i like that voicing i'm going to right click and i'm going to take it off adaptive voicing i'm just going to lock it what that means is from now on that's always going to be that those exact notes so let's try these ones let's take this one down a notch so i'm going to use the key to do that which is c2 let's take that one right there i'm going to lock that one and then let's take maybe take this one and we'll take it up a couple notches that's kind of fun let's do that so we'll lock that one so now we've got three different voicings that's pretty cool so we could do kind of a little riff with that but maybe what i'll do is i'll take this one and lock it and then i'm going to option drag this one up here so it's the same cord but we'll take it up another voicing [Music] oh that's fun we're going to lock that one [Music] and then you know what this one here i feel like the a minor seven the key of c minor we'd have an a flat major chord so i'm gonna click on that one we'll change that to a flat or g sharp major seven and then maybe we'll throw in a nine on that one but we'll make sure it's major seven there we go so now we've got [Music] that sounds really nice i'm going to lock that one and then we're going to copy that down to this pad and then we're going to try changing the voicing a little bit on this one well that sounds nice we'll lock that one too whoops lock that one down right there another common technique when you're playing with neosoul type stuff anyways is to take something like a minor seven chord and just to transpose it down a semitone or up a semitone so we could take this chord right here so i'm going to click on that and then i'm going to use my key command here to just take it down a semitone lock that one and then let's copy it over here and then we're gonna do the same thing raise this up two semitones so now it's a c sharp [Music] and then we're going to lock that so now we've got this interesting thing [Music] it's just kind of kind of interesting if we had some cool groove going with that that'd be a lot of fun but you can see how easy it is for me to go through and manipulate these chords to something that works for the idea that i have or maybe that the idea that i've been given now how sweet would it be to just have a whole pack of these right so yeah anyways you save these as a preset and then somebody else could use them on their own projects so another incredible feature of these chord pads is that of course you can go assign pad for midi input so i can right click on this track right here and i can go all right let's play a c minor with a nine and then there it is right there it just draws it in for us so if you know some funky chord positions you can play those in or maybe have a friend come over who's really good at keyboards drop in a bunch of chord positions for you and build up a nice little chords preset while you have them in the studio and then you can go and then play with those yourself after the fact so this is all fun but what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to load up groove agent and we're going to pull up the purple expansion and i've got a video on that i'll put a link to that in the description so make sure you watch that and i'm just going to get a little beat going here with that for this little idea okay so here i'm using the brap kit the brock kit and i'm just going to click on pattern and drag this onto a track and then we're just going to play along a little bit and see what this feels like [Music] all right so there we go we've got some little progression that took me more than just one stab by the way anyways so now we can see all of this note information that was just generated we could go in and sort of mangle these up a little bit maybe i'll select all of them and just do an iterative or a soft quantize as they call it now so now we've got these complex chords in here and so what we'll do is we'll do another video where we talk about scales but in this one i do want to just show you very quickly how we could take what we've just done on the chord pads and then apply that to something like a bass line now we command and right click on this information if you're on a mac or ctrl right click i think on a pc and then we're going to go right down to where it says create chord symbols and because i wasn't using the sustain pedal i don't need to have that one selected i hit ok and then up top we can see a whole bunch of chords that were generated just from what we played on the chord pads i'm going to turn the scales off that's this little button right here so all we're seeing is the chords now we can see if this kind of did the right [Music] looking good so far and then we go to the part where we change it up [Music] perfect so all the chords have been analyzed and by the way the coolest things about these chords chord pads is if you want another chord somewhere in a section of your song say a bar 17 i can just drag this chord pad right up here drop it and it's going to put that chord onto my track watch what happens if i drag it onto an empty space you'll see that even gets the name so you could just drag a bunch of these really cool chords and have them all named and you could you know copy them whatever move them around and play with them that way there's a whole bunch of different ways for you to work with this information but it's just extremely powerful so now let's just go to a retro log and we're gonna find a decent base patch here sounds of soul oh that sounds nice let's just go with that one so what we want to do here is we want to play a bass line but some of you are going yep jeff i don't play keyboards that's okay so what i'm gonna do and this is a little tip i got from my good pal nico he's a cubase genius and his suggestion was to use the chords to change the notes as i'm playing them so we go to live input and i go to chords right here and then now all i'm going to do is play an octave between these two c's right here and we're going to see what happens as we play along and then i'm also going to make sure i mute the chord track because i don't actually want it to do anything to my bass track i just want to play the bass track so let's go and play along [Music] all i was playing the whole time was two c's an octave apart and kind of playing in with the rhythm of what i had in there but the chord track was taking care of all the notes for me so you'll see if i double click on that now you can see it's gone through and it's fixed the notes to the root of what i was of the chord as i was playing it so i guess just if it's one single note it goes to the root i'm not sure but man that worked extremely well check it out right here on this section of the song [Music] maybe i want this one to go up the octave and then this one to go down the octave so now we just shift up and down by the way [Music] nice sounds really good i'm kind of lead synth so hang on [Music] do [Music] nice okay so maybe you need a little bit of music theory a little bit jazz training to get to those scales but i hate thinking of making a really complex scales theory video in the future so make sure you check back for more of those but i really hope this dive into the chord pads is going to help you out especially if you're not an accomplished piano player and you realize the power that is in these chord pads with the chord track and what you can do with it with not a whole lot of hard work so make sure you hit that subscribe button and the bell and thanks so much for watching i'm not getting paid to make these videos they send me the updates for free but if you want to help me out i do have a little tip jar in the description so thanks so much for helping there and we'll see in the next video

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 5,462

Keywords: Cubase, Cubase Pro, Intro to Cubase, Cubase AI, Cubase Elements, Nuendo, Cubase Pro Tips, Cubase Basics, Cubase Tutorial, Best Cubase, Jef Gibbons, Gibbons Creative, Cubase Lesson, Cubase vs, Cubase tips, Basic Cubase, Cubase Beginner, Cubase Update, Steinberg, Cubase Stock Sounds, Cubase Loops, Cubase Instruments, Cubase Channel, Cubase Pro 11, Cubase Artist 11, Cubase Elements 11, Cubase Chord, Chord Pads, Chord Track, Cubase vs Logic, Cubase vs Studio One

Id: idNPVksDBo0

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021