Deep Dive Into Cubase Chord Track

what's up people craig lopez back once again with another tutorialism and today we're going to be talking about cubase's call track now not to be confused with the chord pads which are common to most dws the chord track is completely unique as far as i'm aware to cubase now it's been in cubase for a very long time but it's one of those things that i don't see too many people using and the reason for that is i believe not too many people understand what it is and what it's for but in today's video i'm going to show you exactly that so let's get into this [Music] okay so the way this is going to work is i'm going to start off by using the call track in its most simplest form so we have something like this and then i'm going to show you how we can use what's in the chord track to manipulate midi and audio in progressively more complex ways until we end up with something like this [Music] so to get started with the code track the first thing you're going to need is an instrument i'm using the stage 73 by arturia [Music] and then of course i need to set up a chord track so we can do that by right clicking in this area going to call track and i'm actually going to move the code track into the top section so that it's always visible regardless of where i am in the project in this section i'm going to route the output of the call track into the stage 73 now i'm going to select the draw tool and click to create a blank accord select the object selection tool double click on the x and we can audition cards by selecting a root note a chord type tension and a bass note [Music] or we can go to the chord assistant and audition cards [Music] by clicking on the icons now for this track i think i would like a minor scale so i'm going to click here and i think i would like this track to be in g minor so using these arrows i'm going to move g minor so that it is in position 1 in the circle of fifths to add a card we can just click on the add card button and select a card [Music] i think i'm going to go with a 1 6 4 5 progression click add again click on the fourth chord add again and click on the fifth and if i press play we should hear that chord progression play [Music] and if we would like that information as midi on our track we can just select the code track [Music] and drag it down onto our midi track so you always need to be aware as to where your call track is rooted if i leave things like this the code track will try to play at the same time as this midi so i'm just going to mute it and the midi should play back the exact same way as the call track did okay so let's see if we can add a little bit more tension to this progression so i've created a new instrument [Music] i'm going to mute the first instrument for now and with the code track routed to the dx7 let's see what we can come up with by double clicking on the first chord let's try a g minor 7th let's try that with a different bass note nice let's go to the next chord let's try seventh [Music] with the thirteenth let's try maybe a sus4 so add a seventh [Music] and the ninth why not and maybe just a seventh to end with let's have a listen to that nice okay let's see if we can do something interesting with this so i'm going to go to midi inserts go with the apache sx now this is an arpeggiator so if i just play it in its default state it will sound like this i can see where this track is going to go and let's have a look at some of these [Music] presets [Music] [Applause] so i think i'm gonna go with this clean rock guitar three sounds like this [Music] so if i would like to see that as midi firstly drop the call track into the midi track let's meet the chord track and i want to solo this channel go to midi and select mage midi and loop make sure i include insert is ticked and click on this arrow here and the track i want is this meshed one so i'm going to select it and go to remove overlaps we can turn the midi insert off now and you see we now have those arpeggiated chords as midi information and let's hear that with the original code track so the next thing i want to do is create a baseline so for this i'm using the mini v [Music] and if like me you're not too sure what notes would be nice to play along with these chords what we can do with the bass selected channel is select chords if you don't see it click on the cog wheel and make sure you have chords ticked and on the live input i'm going to select chords and what i'm going to do is just play these three notes here and watch and listen to what happens with these three notes as the code track manipulates the live input on this channel [Music] pretty cool stuff if we open up the midi even though i'm only playing this c g and b on my keyboard we can see what actually happened as i recorded [Music] and i'm just going to shorten this knot here [Music] with an empty code pad i'm going to click on this drop down menu and go to assign pads from call track i've got the call pads playing through this jupiter 8v this particular patch groove bar actually has its own in build sequence [Music] and under the player type i'm going to switch that from piano which was this to guitar and let's record that in [Music] just quantize that [Music] okay so i'm going to duplicate this and duplicate the code track and i'm going to add some automation to this these are my quick controls so i'm going to click learn i want to automate the brightness and maybe the timbre so i'm going to select a read and write let's record something in [Music] and now let's have a look at what we can do with audio and go to media loosen samples select something from the balloon pack is going to take this fight in the end and let's see if we can work with this one i started losing sight my place i started and let's try this one for the second half maybe let's have a look at another one am i really brave enough am i really brave enough and if we look all our vocals are in c minor so if i play that along with my track which as we can see is not in c minor it shouldn't sound too great in the end [Music] [Music] but with the vocal channel selected let's go up to chords and let's select follow chord track let's go with a single voice and it's going to select follow directly and if we have listen now the vocal should follow the chord track might not sound too great but there's only one way to find out [Music] it's in tune but it's a little bit high and we can see in this drop down menu it's because the code track was telling the singer to sing soprano now if i switch it from soprano to alto it sounds a little bit better but still not quite right it's take [Music] [Music] but if i go to the next drop down menu and try playing about with these options [Music] i fit a lot better let's try the next drop-down menu yeah i think i like this piano altered jazz [Music] so i've added a bit of reverb and delay to the vocal and now it sounds like this [Music] [Music] is and to finish things up what i want to do is change the chords slightly in the second section so the first thing i'm going to do is is get my first midi channel select chords and i'm going to go to chords and scales and i'm going to do that for all of these midi channels and i think i want to change the second chord in the second loop [Music] try this let's see what happens [Music] and let's change the next one [Music] and let's move this across and add maybe code two so i've got a two five one thing going on at the end [Music] so listen to that [Music] no that doesn't work let's go back to that [Music] cs4 let's try that [Music] is pretty cool stuff i'm sure you'll agree so yeah i think i'm going to leave it there i hope you found it useful if you made it this far through the video let me know in the comments how you're using the code track yeah anyway that's it for now i've been craig lopez this has been tutorialism peace

Channel: Tutorial[ism]

Views: 27,625

Keywords: cubase 11, cubase 11 pro, cubase tutorial, chord track cubase, chord progression, edm chord progressions, edm chords, edm chord patterns, house chords tutorial, house chords ableton, house chords piano, house chord progressions, house chord progressions midi, house chord progression piano, craig lopez, Tutorialism

Id: 8MhgDdkFDmE

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/C_Lopez_Tutorialism]

I just checked on the comparison chart on Steinberg’s website. It is in Artist 11... but please don’t feel like I’m trying to sell anything here. I’m not affiliated with them, just a geek who loves the software!

[u/DetunedKarma]

Hey man thanks for sharing this.

I was going through the vid and noticed you had all these presets for the Apache SX, which I had never seen before and was like hmmm, must be a Pro thing (I'm on Artist), but then I check my presets folder in program files and see all these presets that don't load up. So did a bit of googling and came across this vid: Restoring Missing Presets in Cubase.

And now I have all the presets :)

I can't believe I've been using Cubase all this time and never noticed it before !!

Cheers for the vid.

Edit: Artist doesn't seem to have follow chord function for Audio events, any workarounds to make sure a vocal is in the same key?

[u/sewphistikated]

This is awesome - thx for sharing. I’ve just starting using the chord track and this just expanded my knowledge big time.