Inversion Therapy

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Technique : Cubase Notes






With the Chord Pads configured, it’s time to write a song.With the Chord Pads configured, it’s time to write a song.



Cubase 8 can help you experiment with different chords and voicings to fake a good performance.



John Walden



In last month’s Cubase workshop (http://sosm.ag/cubase-0515), we used both the new Chord Pad functionality and the Chord Assistant to select a series of harmonically related chords that we might use for a songwriting session. This month we’ll build on that by exploring the performance options provided by the Chord Pads. These options will enable you to inject some life into your songwriting, and might speed the whole process up for you too.

Start Me Up



We finished last month’s workshop, courtesy of some help from the Chord Assistant, with our Chord Pads containing some classic chords in C major, a small number of extra harmonically related chords and alternative voicings of the three major chords C, F and G. The next stage of the writing process is actually about two things: finding some nice chord sequences from which to build your various song elements (verse, chorus and bridge, for example), and creating a ‘performance’ of these various sequences that captures the mood you’re seeking and inspires you to develop the song further.



Because the Chord Pads can be triggered by a single note, you’re freed from the need to concentrate on fingering the full chords — which is great news if you’re not the most accomplished of keyboardists! What’s more, because they respond to MIDI velocity, it’s easy to create fairly expressive performances. We can do better though, by taking that expression up a further notch (or rather three further notches!) courtesy of the voicings, tensions and ‘players’ options. I’ll consider each in turn.

Finding Your Voice



Pianists and guitarists will often vary their fingering/neck position when playing chords, just to add a little variation to an otherwise repetitive part — while these different voicings do result in the same chord, they sound different. Cubase’s Chord Pads can replicate this via the Adaptive Voicing system. When playing any Chord Pad, you can also step through some alternative voicings using the Voicings Remote Control keys (by default, C2 and C#2, as explained last month).    


Published in SOS June 2015