Creating Note FX Chorder Presets From MIDI Regions & Instrument Parts

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve covered some uses as to how some of the various Note FX plug-in’s in PreSonus Studio One can be used. So far we’ve covered the Arpeggiator, and also the Repeater.

The Chorder however is a bit of a different beast. The main reason for this is because where as the above mentioned Note FX plug-ins can literally transform single notes and simple Chords into complex performances - The Chorder on the other hand requires some tasteful chords to be entered in before you can really make any use out of it.

How To Find The Chords?

Well, depending on your knowledge of musical theory, or your ear - this may be relatively easy. But in my personal experience of working with amazing musicians who have a deep understanding of theory, it can also be difficult to pick out the individual notes in chords, unless you specifically train yourself to do so.

3rd Party MIDI Loops & Studio One Musicloops

Having said the above, it’s also worth mentioning that there are literally tons of MIDI packs available with top notch musicians playing carefully selected chord progressions. In addition, there are even 3rd party plug-ins that can generate MIDI Regions in a song format/structure that drag and drop right into your DAW’s timeline.

Creating Chorder Presets For Popular Progressions

Now seeing as the chords that make up a song, fall in certain patterns and groups, and seeing as we can use transposing options (in addition to manually editing Note Data) to alter any of those progressions - I personally don’t see any issue with creating some Chorder presets that will allow me to quickly get some patterns laid down when producing and / or writing in Studio One. In the end, I’m up for any shortcut that will inspire me to create or help me work faster. Even if I end up changing the chord voicings after the fact.

Long story short, I’ve been doing this manually for some time now, by clicking in one note at a time - and usually end up only using the Chorder when I don’t have a MIDI keybaord available. But I just recently discovered that I can essentially extract the Note Data information from any MIDI Event (instrument part) in Studio One which makes the Chorder a lot more useful to me now. Because in the end, I always prefer to “play” or perform vs just mousing in my chords.

In this video I demonstrate how to go about creating custom Note FX Chorder Presets from MIDI Events (Instrument Parts) in PreSonus Studio One.