The Chord Selector Wheel.
The Chord track continues to mature, and now lets you use Nashville Numbering.
We’ve followed the development of the Chord track over the years, and have got stuck into it a few times in these workshops. We marvelled at its introduction in version 4, revelled in its appearance in the Show Page in version 5, and admired the quality of the printout on lead sheets and guitar tablature in version 6. In version 7.22, the Chord system gets an additional approach, and I thought that would be a good opportunity to check in with how chords flow through Studio One. This new facet is called Nashville Numbering.
There’s nothing new about Nashville Numbering; it’s a tried and tested way of representing chords that’s terribly useful for session musicians, cover bands and worship environments, where keys can find themselves changed without a moment’s notice. It’s the idea that instead of naming chords in a song by a set key (using C, F and G and so on), you would use a numbering system where the key root major chord would be 1 and the rest would be numbered relative to that. So, in our C, F and G example, they would be 1, 4 and 5. If you’ve had any musical training, those numbers would already be familiar, and you might have even come across them as roman numerals such as I, IV and V.
The fabulous thing about this system is that if someone decides to change the key, you don’t have to print the whole sheet out again, or scribble new letters over your music. All that’s required is that you know a bit about how chords in different keys relate to each other. So if you’re playing in the key of C, then the number 5 chord could be G, but if you’re playing in E, then the 5 chord would be B. In G it would be D, and so on. So, regardless of whatever key you wish to play in, the Nashville Numbered chord sheet will remain the same.
When using major chords, you can simply use the numbers 1 to 7 to represent all the notes in a major scale. Once your chords become more exotic, it can get a little bit more complicated. You can use sharp or flat symbols, which is easy enough, but getting into chord types you have a ‘‑’ for minor, a little ⁷ for dominant 7th, a triangle for major 7th and a circle for diminished. Many of these are outside the realms of a standard alphanumeric keyboard, but what’s important is how Studio One presents and interprets the information.
Striking A Chord
Let’s recap how and where the chord system gets its fingers into Studio One. At the top of the arrange page, along with things like the Marker, Video, Lyric and Arranger tracks, you will find the Chord track. Double‑click (or Ctrl/Cmd‑click) in space and it will create a bar‑sized, resizable box with the chord C written in it. Double‑click the box, and the Chord Selector Wheel will pop up, giving you access to every chord you ever thought of. You can select chords by name, type or interval, or you can click in the keyboard to find the name of any combination of notes you wish to represent. It’s a handy and educational tool.
However, all this adding chords by hand seems a little long‑winded considering that the necessary musical information is probably already in the tracks of your project. Well, Studio One has considered this and gives you the convenient opportunity to extract chords from either MIDI or audio tracks to populate the Chord track automatically.
The Extract to Chord Track feature will populate the Chord track with all the chords in your selection, be it audio or MIDI.
For a MIDI instrument track, you’ll find the Extract to Chord Track option under the right‑click Instrument Parts menu. For an audio track, you’ll find it under the right‑click Audio menu. You can also pull a MIDI file into the Chord track directly from the browser, and Studio One will lay out all the chords for you without your having to create a single track. In all instances, the chord detection is pretty good. You might need to do a bit more editing and adjustment when extracting from an audio track, but that does depend on the source material.
Once your Chord track is fully populated, it has a few tricks up its sleeve. The first one will bring up a large display of the current and next chord. So, if you were recording a new guitar track, you could easily follow the chords of the song on screen. To pull up the Chord Display, click on the little note symbol on the Chord track header. There are three views you can look at. The Chord Track view gives you the current chord and next chord so you can play along with your song. The Input Chord view will show you the name of whatever chord you are playing on a connected MIDI keyboard. The Editor view will show you chords that are currently selected in the note editor.
The next trick is that you can drag the chords from the Chord track into an Instrument track, and it will create an event containing the MIDI notes of each chord. It’s just simple triads that last for the length of the chord box, but it could be a great way to turn a guitar track into a different instrument. Of course you are free to edit the chord notes, but this will not be reflected in the Chord track unless you pull the edited event back over the original chord box. This interplay gives you a lot of versatility as you shift chords from Chord track to Instrument track and back again.
Following Suit
You can take this a step further by imposing the Chord track onto tracks that already exist. The brilliant thing about this is that you can experiment with different chord progressions and harmonic structures without having to re‑record all your instrument and audio parts. The Chord track becomes a bit of a harmonic playground. To make this happen, you need to enable the Follow Chords function for both the Chord track (press the big Follow button) and the tracks that are going to be following it. You’ll find this as an option in the Inspector for the track. Halfway down there’s a drop‑down menu for Follow Chords. Initially this is set to Off, but there are three other options. In Parallel mode, the notes align with the root note of the target chord and existing note relationships are maintained. In Narrow mode, all the notes shift to the nearest note in the target chord. And Bass mode is the same as Parallel, but where the bass or root note shifts to the nearest note of the target chord.
Remarkably, Studio One can also do this for audio tracks. Now, polyphonic pitch‑shifting is not always fabulous and can produce a lot of artefacts. In the manual, PreSonus suggest that this is very useful for experimentation and trying out ideas, but you will likely have to re‑record the audio track once you’ve decided on the changes. To help with the accuracy, there are some Tune Modes on audio tracks that optimise the algorithm to the source material.
Editing the chords in the Chord track can be done in a couple of ways. Double‑clicking the chord will bring up the Chord Selector Wheel that we saw at the beginning of the workshop, and you can use that to change every aspect of the chord. But there’s a simpler option, which is to right‑click the chord. With this menu, you get quick access to the root, type, bass and intervals used in the chord. You can also transpose or select all the chords of that type to change them together.
The last area of play is in the Chord Track Inspector. The top section of the inspector is all about the auditioning of chords within the Chord track. In a way, it turns the Chord track into a musical track of its own. With Audition Chords enabled, the chords will sound whenever you click on them. But sound with what? Well, you can select any loaded virtual instrument or MIDI output from the Instrument drop‑down menu. If you have nothing else to hand, you can choose Chord Preview and get treated to some terrible piano sound Studio One has hidden away within itself. Enabling Play Track will allow all the chords to sound in order as the song plays back.
You may have noticed the list of chords in the inspector that look suspiciously like the entries in the Arranger track for different song sections. These are a list of all the chords in your song as they happen, and they act in exactly the same way as the Arranger sections. They let you dash about your song by clicking alongside the chord you want to get to.
Nashville Numbering
The Chord track can now show your chords in the Nashville Numbering style in the Chord Display.
Finally, after journeying through the chord system, we find ourselves ready to check out the Nashville Numbering options. You’ll find them in the Chord track inspector under Chord Display. You have a couple of options here, beginning with Regular, which shows the chords using standard definitions. Alternatively, you can display the chords as numbers like they do in Nashville, or you can opt for Roman numerals if you were perhaps more classically trained. We then have some additional options in terms of style. Small Caps uses two‑ and three‑letter abbreviations, so ‘mi’ for minor and ‘aug’ and ‘dim’ for augmented and diminished, respectively. Minimal reduces the letter count a little bit with ‘m’ for minor and ‘M7’ for major 7. And then we have Symbol, which introduces the aforementioned Nashville Numbering.
With Nashville Numbering, the key becomes very important, as that denotes the chords that the numbers refer to.
With Nashville Numbering, the key becomes very important, as that denotes the chords that the numbers refer to. If you want the Chord track to play back in the correct key, you’ll need to define it. This can be done in a couple of places. You’ll find an entry for Key on the transport bar, and you’ll also find the option in the Chord Track Inspector.
However, there’s a little bit of a disconnect between the key and chords. If you change the key, nothing actually happens to the chords; they play back the same, and in Regular chord mode, they remain named the same. So, a C chord is still a C chord whether you are in the key of E flat or G minor. However, as the Nashville Number system defines chords in relation to the key, you’ll see the numbers change as you change the key, in order that the played chord remains the same. This sort of defeats the point of the Nashville Numbering system, but there’s a way to make this right through the use of Transpose. To make it work, start by defining the original key and set out the numbered chords. Then, if you wish to change the key being played, use the Transpose option next to the Key on the transport bar. This changes the key and pulls the Chord track along with you. There’s one other box you have to tick and that’s in the inspector of each of the rest of the tracks. It’s called Follow Global Transpose — make sure it’s ticked.
The chord system in Studio One is super‑powerful and can be a terrific aid to songwriting and playing with harmonic content. Nashville Numbering is also a useful and very welcome option.