Friday Tip of the Week: Strums Made Easy with Step Recording

One of the main differences between guitar and keyboard is chord voicing. Guitar chords typically have six widely separated notes, whereas keyboard notes tend cluster around two areas accessible by each hand. For example, check out the notes that make up an E major chord on guitar.

If you're a keyboard player using chords to define a chord progression, it's easy enough to have chords hit on, for example, the beginning of a measure. But strumming the chord can add interest and a more guitar-like quality. Although you can edit the notes in a chord so that successively higher notes of the chord have increasing delay compared to the start of the measure, that's pretty time-consuming. Fortunately, there's an easy way to do guitar voicings-and strum them.

Stepping Out. The core of this technique is step recording, which is easy to do in Studio One once you've inserted a virtual instrument. Steps are keyed to numbers on the screen shot. This assumes the strummed chord will start on the beat.

Define your MIDI region, then open it in the Editor (F2).

Click on the Editor's Step Recording button-the one that looks like stairs going down and up.

Choose a note length value of 64th notes.

Click Enable.

Play the notes of the chord, from low to high (or strum down from high to low), starting from the beginning of a measure.

You'll probably want to extend the note lengths.

This will be a fairly slow strum, and there may be too much time between notes. No problem: select the notes, set quantization as appropriate to move the strummed notes closer to the first note (e.g., a half-note in the example above), and then choose Action > Quantize to 50%. Moving the notes closer to the first note speeds up the strum.

The moral of the story is that chord notes don't always need to hit right on the beat-try some strumming, and add variety to your music.

LINK:	http://blog.presonus.com/index.php/2018/03/09/friday-tip-week-strums-m...
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