Introducing Chord to Bass Note Maker
I love playing keyboards. Sometimes I play in church, alone or with a parishioner or my old band (from the '70s and '80s!!!).
Some people play drums or percussion, some play guitar, some sing (I’m not a great singer, I’m just not good at it!).
And often, you feel the need for a bassist! The guitarist on duty plucks the bass strings every now and then, but it’s never the same. Sometimes I try to play bass myself with the pedalboard on my church’s Viscount, but it’s never the same either! Bass players aren’t easy to find here in the parish.
So I searched online for a VST that could reproduce a bass guitar, like an arranger, but I couldn’t find anything that met my needs.
I asked the great Dave to help me with the idea, I explained what I meant, and little by little, some ideas emerged. The basis of my idea was to associate a chord with at least three keys pressed (left hand, accompaniment – Ch2 for me) with a single note.
After several attempts, we managed to find a good solution, thanks to our legendary Brad, who made the use of logic gates (mainly OR logic) available in Cantabile.
Let’s just say this was a good way to get a bass note to correspond to a chord!
Bindings were set that “imposed” the single note to be obtained when playing a chord. Bindings were also set with staggered chords (I call them that out of habit), such as an F Major: instead of pressing the 53, 57, and 60 keys (bass note = 53 or 41), you can press the 48, 53, and 57 keys (bass note = 53 or 41).
The staggered note mode becomes a little less manageable if you want to use semitones up or down while playing a song, but if you stick with the transposition off (0.0 = perfect unison), there are no problems.
An example of part of the contents of one of the bindings:
Chord held = C Major
Condition: all_notes_held([48,52,55],1)==1
Bass note obtained = C
Result: lowest_held_note() -12
Using the set logic, the bass note corresponds to the lowest note of the chord, that is, note number 48, which will be lowered by 12 steps, that is, the note becomes note number 36 (48-12=36).
After this simple and effective method, I came up with a way to play the bass with the famous A Whiter Shade of Pale: bindings with dedicated chords (such as inverted chords) were set. For this reason, other bindings were set up, suitable for using A Whiter’s bass.
There was, in fact, a practical problem: the sheer number of bindings to set up!
Brad stepped in and advised us not to overuse Cantabile (in truth, we’d overused it!). He recommended a script that, again using OR logic, could simplify the result we were aiming for as much as possible: in other words, 100 times simpler!
So he helped us with this, and found another way to do it using Reaper’s Reajs plugin. He explained how to use a script he’d written, which worked and greatly helped the project.
With this script, the lowest note of the formed chord is generated (always with at least three keys pressed simultaneously) in a much, much simpler way.
The biggest problem for me is that I don’t know much about writing scripts! But Brad is amazing! Luckily Brad’s here, otherwise we’d have to invent him!
In the song, I left both Racks, so you can choose one or the other, at your discretion!
We’ve therefore perfected a simple song that contains Linked Racks to manage the bass notes, including bindings, with both modes for obtaining bass notes: you can choose one or the other, one or the other being convenient.
In this song, we used the IK B-3X, the Cherry Audio Lowdown, and the IK Bass 2 Mode as VST instruments, but you can replace these VSTs with others of your choice, just as you can, depending on your taste, add effects like reverb, EQ, or whatever.
The Chord to Bass Note Maker system we invented isn’t perfect; there will certainly be some small errors, but overall, at least for me, who sometimes prepares my own lyrics, having a free bassist is always very useful!
One last thing: I apologize that the chords and notes are written in Italian rather than English…
I hope you find this tool enjoyable and useful!
Chord_to_Bass.zip (132.1 KB)
Sergio
