WORKING WITH CHORD PADS IN CUBASE 10

Chords are likely to be at the heart of almost every piece of music you create. Cubase recognises this with its Chord Track, which serves a number of purposes. It allows producers to rapidly sketch out the harmonic structure of an idea, while retaining the ability to modify and refine that structure; it creates a visual guide to the chord and scale/key at any point in a project and it can force other tracks to conform to the current chord or scale.

These abilities are extremely useful once you get to grips with them, but there’s a common misconception that the Chord Track is intended to create an actual audible output. It isn’t! If you monitor the output of the Chord Track, all you get is sustained chords that are held until the next change on the Chord Track.

Cubase does, however, provide a tool for creating audible, played, chord-based parts: Chord Pads.