How to Get the Most out of the Chord Pads in Cubase | Q&A with Greg Ondo

[Music] I've been getting a lot of questions recently about the chord pad functionality in Cubase so let's go ahead and take a quick look at some tips and tricks the chord pads are located in the lower zone editor if you don't see the lower zone editor active simply go to the center icon of the three icons in the upper right hand corner and click there to show the lower zone editor here you'll see different tabs and we want to select the chord pads if for some reason you don't see chord pads active click on the setup icon and just select chord pads until there's a check mark to the left of it we could think of the chord pads as actually the ability to load up a chord to take a single MIDI note trigger that chord and to pass it to the selected MIDI track we can load up various presets by clicking on a preset icon or we could just load in our own chords by clicking on the left center edge and we could choose chords like so if I wanted to do D minor chord with different tensions as well as in verdict characteristics or if I wanted to right click I could just say assign a pad for a MIDI input and play a chord [Music] these courts can have different voicings so if I wanted to play my D minor chord I currently have it set as a piano player if I wanted to have a guitar player voicing I can just click directly there to switch different voicings now when we could have these chords also be suggested to us by the chord assistance so I could open up a chord assistant from the icon here on the left or I could say I'm in the key of C and I want to use C as the origin for my chord assistant and at this point I could look at it in two different ways I could look at it based on circle of fifths or proximity so if I want to see an audition different chords oh the a minor sounds good and let's say if I wanted to have an F chord there though say I want something that's really unexpected with an a-flat augmented chord I could just drag this and we could see different chords now when we have our different chords laid out for us we could trigger these chords from our MIDI note messages starting on C one and once chords are loaded up we could have different settings here for tensions or different voicings of the chords now you may notice that the other chords are kind of following the voicings of this chord that's because they're in adaptive voicing so if I wanted to I could set the voicing independent by clicking the voicing for the individual tab or if I right click I could just turn off adaptive voicing for that particular pad and as I do this and it just the voicing these two won't be affected you can have an external MIDI remote control so if I wanted to come over here and click on the remote control tab we can now activate and we see these green keys that are highlighted and what these will do is take each of the chords and if I hit C and C 2 and C sharp 2 that will adjust [Music] the voicings where that particular chord ad D in D sharp 2 different tensions and e to an F to transpose if I wanted to transpose all of the chord pads globally I just use my pitch Bend wheel like so the beauty of this is we can now take let's say I wanted to layer my Rhodes and the string patch I could come here and just using one finger to switch between different cords and one finger to switch between different tensions I could kind of come up with an interesting song that probably wouldn't have come up with otherwise [Music] and now it's recorded as if I played all those different elements even though I've only played one finger for some voicings tensions and transposition and one finger for the chords now if I didn't want it to be a block chord one of the things I could do also is just activate sections and when we see sections what we could do now is as I triggered these four notes this will be G to A to B to C three this would automatically play two different chord tones so I wouldn't hear anything of the chord but as I hit G 2 2 B 2 C 3 so if you're not a keyboard player you could just play these four notes and it will automatically transpose to the chord tones within the chord and that could be recorded as well at times you may want to actually extract the chords from a particular piece of music so let's say if I have a piece of MIDI that I've recorded and I want to use my piano part it's kind of the basis for the elements what I could do is I'm going to select my MIDI part here and we'll look at it in the score editor here in the lower zone and what I want to do is to right-click and we're going to say let's go to our chord track and we'll choose create chord symbols and what this is going to do is automatically create chord symbols on our chord track that have been derived from this particular piano part right here so I'm going to go to my chord pads and what I want to do now is to assign the pads from the chord track when I play back I could play back the actual chords from the part we showed how we could play the individual parts as sections but one of the things that's also really handy is the concept of players so I could let's say I have a guitar part here now guitar players walking or peji eight different chords so what I want to do is to go to my settings and we'll choose players and under guitar player what you could do is we'll say pattern and here I could import different MIDI loops but I could also just drag let's say I have a guitar part here we'll just listen to very quickly so I'll just take this guitar part [Music] they recorded with a MIDI guitar so it's kind of how a guitar player would voice it and I could just drag this part so as soon as I just drag that will now see our lectric guitar and as I trigger my chords instead of playing a block chord it's actually going to play this particular sequence of notes it's arpeggiation [Music] now I could also layer these different elements and I could have two players together so if I wanted to say go to my piano and harp I could say I wanted this as a pattern as my piano player so I could take this and let's layer that with another piano player under on patterns I'm gonna take guitar harp and some cello that are Arco and Pitt's and I want to take my strings and I want this as playing chords so now when I come here I'll just go back to the beginning of our project and we'll just choose this Asgard guitar player in plain cord so my guitar harp will be my piano player as patterns I want this as my piano player patterns and my string as guitar player and playing chords so now [Music] I could just simply play this now I could also just sequence on the core track itself so if I wanted to now I could just say well just select hit record [Music] and you could just have the MIDI parts directly here from the chord pads and doing that all with two fingers on your MIDI controller so as you can see once you start playing around the chord pads it's great for a mobile solution where perhaps you have a two octave MIDI controller with you and you're traveling or if you just want to experiment with fresh new and exciting chords that you want otherwise use the chord pads are very exciting to work with so if you found this video helpful please feel free to like the video and to subscribe to the channel you

Channel: Cubase

Views: 134,950

Keywords: Chord pads in Cubase, production tricks, production techniques, what are the chord pads in Cubase, how to enable the chord pads in Cubase, Chord progressions, chord assistant, intelligent chord assistant in Cubase, MIDI chords, MIDI tracks, MIDI, Chord Track in Cubase, music chords, importing chords, creating a chord progression from a single MIDI melody, Best music software, best daw software, best daw software for mac, best digital audio workstation

Id: gzT6RCMwxNE

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 11 2018