I didn’t even realize that you can record chords visibly in the note editor with the help of an additional routed BUS track. Just as I play the set chord options in “Midi Chord” on the keyboard, the played notes appear directly as correct chords in the note editor (1 keystroke = 1 chord). Just great. I always thought it didn’t work at all.
But if I insert “Midi Chord” directly into the Midi track via the VST plugin, I hear the chords being played. But!!! The chords are not recorded as visible chords in the score editor.
The Midi Chord plugin will take a single MIDI note as its input and output a MIDI chord.
When you record MIDI onto a track, you are recording the original MIDI being sent to the track (e.g. from a connected MIDI keyboard), not the result of any plugin. This is exactly as expected and as normally desired: the plugin is modifying the recorded notes on playback.
It is not expected that the plugin modifies the notes before they are recorded as this would be problematic in many cases: you would not be able to remove the plugin to “undo” the effect of the plugin.
If you want to convert the individual recorded notes to chords, you will need to bounce the recorded track through the plugin to another track.
As some method//
Connect “OUT” of the Chord’s track to the “IN” of the track with sound instrument plugin. Activate “Input” (Monitor Input) button in the instrument’s track. Enable record in the instrument’s track and record:
I was pleasantly surprised that it worked the way I wanted it to. That makes me happy. There is more to do with this.
I use the “Midi-Bus” as “Keyboard Midi-Input” and add “Midi-Chord” above the fader. I route the “Midi bus output” to the “Midi track input”. I insert the “General Midi Synthesizer” above the fader. The signal is routed from the keyboard via the “Midi bus” to the “Midi track” for recording and records the notes played as chords and displays the recorded notes as chords in the note editor.
I think you don’t need an extra track. I was able to create a MIDI track and add the midi chord plugin and then move the record head below that. A right click on the plugin box gives a dropdown box and one of the items in there is “Disk I/O”. Disk I/O has three options: Pre-Fader (default), Post-Fader and Custom. Choosing Custom adds three more “plugins”, Trigger Box, Recorder and Player. To be honest I am not sure what the Trigger Box is for. However, I moved the Player to just before the fader, and the Recorder to just before the Player. Now the recorder is after the MIDI chord plugin and it’s output is what goes to disk and therefore what shows up in the editor. In my case I do not have a synth plugin but if I did I would want the plugin order to be:
MIDI chord
Record
Player
synth
Fader
I would experiment with the trigger box either as the first plugin or just before the Record plugin to see which works best for you.
Edit: see below, leave the three boxes in recorder, player, trigger box order where ever you put them.
Custom allows to put a plugin in-between Recorder and Player. The plugin affects the live signal only, but isn’t recorded. Not sure if it makes much sense to do that, perhaps an expander/gate.
The problem with Post in this case, is that if a synth is involved, the recording will be audio. The reason I would want to use this is to do “everything in one track”. So a synth for monitoring but any editing I would want to do would be MIDI not audio. The most convenient use of the Fader is to control output synth level for either monitoring or mixing. So the recorder/player/trigger box block needs to be just in front of the synth which is before the Fader. Neither pre or post will do that, it requires custom. What might make sense for this and other instances, though maybe not worth the effort, is to allow “blocking” a set of plugins. That is taking two or more plugins and treating them as if they were one. An example besides (rec/play/trig) might be gate/eq/comp. This would be very handy if these plugin “Blocks” could be saved as a plugin that the user could add easily to a track. Of course being able to split a block would be handy too. Like I said, a lot of effort.
