Working With Score Chord Symbols in Cubase

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Working With Score Chord Symbols in Cubase

hello everybody Andrew Blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today let's begintalking about some of the chord symbolsavailable in your score work in Cubasebut before we start I want to remind youthat there's a link below to the freecontent navigation guide which is aneasy to navigate webpage with links toall the content on this channel andbesides that in the near future I'mgoing to begin adding tips and otherbits of information that will only beavailable there you know things likesimple steps that will get you startedand up and running quick things that arein the videos but are written down insimple steps that serve as quickreminders when you need information downthe road if you're working with programslike wavelab or Cubase plugins or thecable guys shaper box and many manyother projects that are in the worksthen I know you're going to find justlike I have that this is an invaluablestudy Aid and the other thing I want tomake sure you understand is that this isnot a simple PDF this is a constantlyupdated page that has any informationthat is new or anytime videos arechanged really anything updated and onceyou have it you will always have thelatest information constantly updated soif you haven't gotten it already go tothe link below click on it and save itto your favorites it's my gift to youand it's absolutely free Okay so let'sget started so we're going to startlooking at the cord option but we havebeen looking at the score in quite a fewvideos now and of course all previousvideos are in the navigation guide inthe link below but if you look at thescore I have in front of me right now ithas some basic chords on it let's playit[Music]as you can see there's notes but there'schords written up here above the notesand one of the first things that wasannoying me is that I wanted to turn thecords off at some point you can actuallyselect chords and right click on themand say hide or show it but be carefulof that option because you might not beable to bring them back into view so thequick easy way if you've got chordsshowing up from a chord track and I dohave a chord track playing is simply goup to the scores option and at the verybottom you have a thing that saysAdvanced layout and in there you shouldhave the option to check or uncheck showthe core track so if I click that offnow I've taken the chords out of viewsame way I can go back up to scoresAdvanced layout and then show the chordsand then I can bring them right backinto view so if you need to manuallyenter some chord symbols in here if yougo over here into the left Zone and movedown to where it says other you have anoption in here that shows a little chordsymbol you can click on that and thenjust go wherever you want to manuallyput it in Click there you get thislittle X and then you can just fill inthe blanks I'm going to put another Eminor chord in here sometimes you canjust put it right over the letter andspin it to make it easy you can fill inall these other things but they alsohave some presets over here if you clickon the preset for example I'm lookingfor minor seven so I can just go downand find that click on it hit apply andthen close this a minus sign isequivalent to a minor if I want to movethis I can click on it kind of drag itaround where I want to you also over onthe right Zone can make choices as wellif I start clicking some of thesebuttons I can change the way the chordlooks or what the letters are and changethe quality of the chord and thetensions and all that stuff right hereas well if I want to get rid of it I canclick to my toolbar get the Eraser andclick the Eraser and zap it out of thereso as we said when you click on a cordover on the right you get the propertiesoption and these tensions like you seehere the seventh for example E minorseventh with a lot of chords you can addmultiple tensions so let's say I go downto the ninth now it says E minor sevennine if I go to the 11th I can clickthat on thereso be aware you can experiment withadding different tensions and stack themon top of each other to get differentchord combinations again at this pointit's not affecting the sound of thisthe chord's still playing as it wasoriginally but if you need to writesomething in you can make changes veryeasily here so some other options thatare available when you're looking atchords in the staff for example thesechord symbols are actually pretty big interms of my score so if I want to changethat if I go up to scores and down tothe settings and then I open up the tabthat says project and in the projectthere's an option that says chordsymbols and right next to that you havean option for the fonts you can changedifferent fonts in terms of the rootnote or the type of the chord or any ofthese kind of things let's change thesebig letters c f and g and all this kindof stuff down to a little bit smaller ifI go to the root right now it says 24and if I hit the drop down I basicallyhave different font sizes so let's godown to 14 I'm going to hit apply nowthe chords don't take up as much spaceup herelet's go ahead and take the type and thetension down as well I'm going to takethat down to 12 and the tension is downto 12. hit apply and now I have a muchmore manageable in terms of my chordsymbols up here we've said many timesalready that if you're going to do workon any staff in particular that youalways want to make that the activestaff by you know turning this littleblue bar on here you can also do thatwith the arrow keys if I hit my arrowkeys it moves that active staff up anddown if I want to make chords right outof what I'm seeing here I can actuallyselect the chords themselves and then Ihave an option to go up to scoresthere's an option that says make chordsymbols if I hit that it'll actuallydraw the chords and write on those notesand these chords look different becausethese don't have the bass notes in themso if I control Z out of this I canselect multiple stats by dragging overnotes in different staffs and do thesame thing go up to scores make thechord symbols and now because the bassnotes in these chords reflect exactlythe original chords so some otheroptions if we're going to create chordsin this display here I go up to thescores and to make the chord symbols youcan see these chords have the slash withthe bass notes in them if I click on achord and cause it to open up over herein the properties if you look at thesefirst letters not only do they have theletters on them they have these littleblocks next to it this gives you theoption to change the bass note forexample on this one it says a minorslash C if I hit on the a this littleextra button here and now just changesto a regular a minor but if I go down tothe G sharp and hit this little buttonnow it puts a G sharp in the bass or Ican hit the g and make it in the bass orany of these buttons with the extralittle note of the bass on the end hereanother thing to realize is if you wantjust your chords maybe displayed ontheir own maybe a lead sheet you'regoing to make for something you can goahead and just create a blank track andthen Ctrl R open it up back in yourscore and then you can have just thechords written up here with no notes atall written with itforeignso one more thing I want to show youbefore we wrap it up today and this canbe kind of finicky so you have to playwith it but it is interesting and kindof fun and that's how you can transposewith the chords let me go back andactually put a very simple piano part inhere[Music]now I'm going to open it up in the scoreand see what we have[Music]I'm going to shut this back down againnow let's create a chord track like wenormally would I'm going to go up toproject I'm down to chord track and thencreate the chord eventsjust take the defaults and now we havethese chords up here reflect whatever isplaying on the piano[Music]if I open The Score back up again I cansee I now have my chord symbols up hereabove the chordsI'm going to close this back down againand if I go to the track that I'mworking on say this piano right here andI go over into the inspectorand I look at the tab that says thechords and open that up there's anoption here that says follow the chordtrack and if I click on that well I getall kinds of options we've talked aboutthis in other videos chords and scalesand chords and scales and each one ofthese is going to produce a slightlydifferent result let's just take the onethat says root notes for now and againit gives you some options do you want tosynchronize do you want to file directlyjust take the default and say okayfollow directly so when we play it wekind of just have thisso now instead of opening it up in thescore I'm going to open it up down inthe bottom editor here change my Editorto where it says score and then if weplay it we have just the same thingstill[Music]but now if I take my chords and I selectthem and I go up into the info bar Ihave something that shows the root keyright here and if I take my mouse overit and spin ityou can see it changes the chords andthe notes and I'm able to transpose thiswhole thing in real time if I play itnow[Music]and then I start spinning the mouse here[Music]I can instantly change the chords andthe notes that are attached to itreally any key g flat d[Music]G sharp or a flat[Music]so it's pretty fun you know in terms ofjust being able to move your song aroundand then see all the changes happen inreal time[Music]all right it's going to wrap it up fortoday as usual if you haven't grabbedyour navigation guide be sure to grabthat from the link below has links toall the content on the channel evergrowing and free to use constantly beingupdated anything that's new or any newsthat's coming and you never know whenthere's news coming that's the onlything I can tell you around here butanyway all the latest in the navigationguys so be sure you have it keep ithandy check it out regularly and try tomake your life a lot easier when you'retrying to figure something out so therewe are with the chords today we kind oflooked at how to manually enter thechords we talked about stacking thetensions we talked about in the settingsand the project and the chord symbols wesaw how we could go to scores and makeour own chord symbols and we change thebass note in the properties on the rightthere in the right Zone added a blanktrack just so we could see the chordsnow we ended with the fun option ofbeing able to transpose the chords andthe notes in real time just anothergreat great tool in the Cubase Arsenalin terms of what you can do creativelywith your music and we have more to comewhich we will be exploring as we go asalways great to have you guys here I'llsee you on the next video