User manual

642
Working with chords
• To open the Edit Chord Symbol dialog for an existing
chord, double-click on the symbol.
You can also right-click on the symbol and select “Properties” on the
context menu to open the dialog.
Using presets
As with many other functions in Cubase, you can create
chord symbol presets for instant use. Each preset con-
tains all settings in the dialog – i.e. the preset list is a
“library” of chords. You can find the presets in the Chord
Symbols tab in the Inspector and in the corresponding
context menu. The preset handling is the usual:
• Click Store to store the current settings as a preset.
A dialog appears, allowing you to enter a name for the preset.
• To load a stored preset, select it from the Presets pop-
up menu or select it from the Presets submenu of the con-
text menu.
Note that this only loads the settings into the dialog – you need to click
Apply to apply the settings to a selected chord symbol.
• To remove a preset, select it on the pop-up menu and
click Remove.
Using Make Chord Symbols
If you already have recorded the chords for a project,
Cubase can analyze them and create chord symbols:
1. Open the recording in the Score Editor.
If you want the chords to be inserted on another track, you can create an
empty part on that track and open it along with the recording.
2. If you like, make display settings for the chords. These
settings are available in the Score Settings dialog, on the
Project page (Chord Symbols and Notation Fonts sub
-
pages).
You can change all these settings after you inserted the chords as well.
3. Select the notes for which you want chord symbols to
be created.
If you want chord symbols to be created for all chords on the track, use
the Select All function on the Edit menu.
4. Use the arrow keys to make the desired staff active.
This should be the staff on which you want the chord symbols to end up.
5. On the Scores menu, select “Make Chord Symbols”.
The chords appear. They can be moved, duplicated and deleted as any
other symbol. You can also double-click on a chord symbol to edit it in
the Edit Chord Symbol dialog (in the same way as when creating chords
manually – see above).
A staff after using Make Chord Symbols.
• Instead of using the “Make Chord Symbols” menu item,
you can click the “Make Chord Symbols” button on the ex-
tended toolbar.
• If the “Use for Make Chords” option is activated on the
Project–Guitar Library subpage of the Score Settings dia
-
log (see “Adding guitar chord symbols” on page 625),
guitar chord symbols are added as well (if the guitar library
contains any guitar symbols that match the chords).
About the analysis
The MIDI chords are expected to be played in their most
basic inversion. If not, an extra bass note is added. For ex-
ample, the notes CEG are interpreted as C major, but GCE
is interpreted as C major with a G bass note. If you do not
want any interpretation of the inversion (i. e. no added bass
notes) hold down [Ctrl]/[Command] while selecting Make
Chord Symbols.
All selected notes on all staves are taken into consider-
ation. Whenever there is any change on any staff, the
notes are reinterpreted and a new chord symbol is added.
This means you should probably avoid having the melody
track in the Score Editor when you use Make Chord Sym
-
bols, or you get a lot more chords than you expect, possi-
bly with strange tensions.
In addition to the above, the Quantize value is used. At the
most, there is a new chord at each quantize position.
There must be at least three notes at a certain position for
the program to interpret it as a chord. Also some combina-
tions of notes simply do not make any sense to the pro-
gram and do not produce any chords.