Cubase and Chord Looper Song Progression

[Michael Trigoboff]

I have worked out a slick way to use Cubase and the Chord Looper to automatically play back the chord progression for a song.

In Cubase, I use a Chord Track and an Arranger Track together to produce the song's chord progression. (The Arranger Track lets me specify sections of the song to be repeated, which saves me the trouble of entering chords for identical sections of the song.) Once I have the chord progression set up, I can play it through any style on the Genos, via a process I described in this thread.

EDIT: I linked the wrong thread. The link is now correct.

The next step is to "flatten" the Cubase project, which produces a linearized version of what the Arranger Track specifies in a new Cubase project. This is necessary because when playing under control of the Arranger Track, position in the song jumps back and forth, and this seems to interfere with inputting the chords into the Chord Looper.

With the Genos set up as described in the thread linked above, and the "flattened" project open in Cubase, I get into the Chord Looper and hit Rec/Stop. This arms the Chord Looper. I hit the spacebar on my PC, and Cubase plays the chords into the Chord Looper. Once the song has played, I hit the spacebar again to stop Cubase, and then hit Memory in the Chord Looper to store the chord progression in one of the eight available slots.

I can now play this sequence of chords at any tempo, through any available style.

The linked zip file contains the results of this process for the Jefferson Airplane song Wooden Ships from their Volunteers album:

• the original Cubase project
• the "flattened" Cubase project
• a Genos subfolder containing the Chord Looper bank and item, and a registration file

I'll be happy to answer any questions and provide further details for anyone who requests them.

zip file

[Lee Batchelor]

Hi Michael,

That is definitely a deep dive into what can be done with the Genos. I have a hard enough time setting up the Genos to record in Cubase! I'd wager that even the Yamaha engineers haven't made it as far as you in this one function. Thanks for the info!

- Lee