Timeline chord chartĪ Chord Track shows a series of chord ‘events’. These are blocks that define a chord and display its name on the timeline, and, given the relationship between chords and scales, can also show scale ‘events’. At their most basic, these events allow you to map out and notate a chord (and scale) progression for a piece of music and to have that progression show in the timeline so that you, or the musician(s) you are working with, can follow it when laying down new parts for the music. This is actually a very rapid and effective way of laying down a musical idea. It’s the DAW equivalent of sketching out a chord chart on a piece of paper. By doing this, you unlock a whole load of Cubase’s other chord-based tricks.Ĭhord events aren’t intended to actually play a chord (although you can assign a MIDI or Instrument track through which to monitor the chords being generated by the Chord Track), but rather to act as a data track through which you can tell Cubase what chord is active at any point on the timeline. Chords are added to the timeline using the Draw (pencil) tool, with which you define the timeline start and extent of a chord once a track contains one chord event you can also use the Chord Editor to add subsequent chord events. A chord stays active until the next chord event occurs, even where there’s a gap between chord events on the timeline.

The Chord Editor – accessed by double-clicking on a chord event – provides a table in which you can select the root note, ‘type’ (major, minor, diminished, etc), ‘tensions’ (dom7, maj7, #9, etc), and also specify a different bass note (a G chord with a C bass note – G/C – for instance). The editor also allows you to specify the chord via MIDI, or to type the name of the chord into a type-in field. The Editor provides access to the Chord Assistant, which suggests chords based on the preceding chord and scale, and can display these suggestions in a number of different ways. As well as being an excellent tool to help you experiment with more advanced, colourful chords that may be beyond your playing ability or theory knowledge, the Assistant is phenomenally helpful for building great-sounding progressions and changes. Once you have defined a progression of chord events you can use them to enforce harmonic accuracy on your project in a few different ways. MIDI and Instrument tracks, for example, can be switched into Live Transform mode, which forces incoming notes into the chord and/or scale defined by the Chord Track.

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