Studio One: Note FX

The Arpeggiator and Chorder Note FX are powerful on their own, but can also be put to work together to create arpeggiations from the automatically generated chords.

Spice up your MIDI data with Studio One’s Note FX.

There comes a time in every musician’s life when they get sick and tired of what they’re playing. The creative juices are simply not flowing, and you’re stuck in a loop of the same worn‑out chords and hackneyed melodies. Or, maybe, you’re not that accomplished and need just a little something to elevate your one‑finger meanderings to another level. Perhaps what you need is a little pick‑me‑up: a sweet line of possibilities that will make your head spin and return your sense of self to its rightful place at the top of the heap? What you need is Note FX.

Note FX have always been there, and in many ways, they’re Studio One’s secret weapons against banality. In this workshop, we’re going to remind ourselves of their awesomeness and start making the most of their largely forgotten set of very particular skills.

Take Note

Note FX are real‑time effects processors that act on MIDI notes, so not in an audio effect way of messing with signals, but in a way that reinterprets incoming note data from your MIDI controller keyboard or instrument track. All the action happens before the notes reach your virtual or external MIDI instrument, which makes them recordable, manipulable and reworkable.

Studio One 7.2 currently has four Note FX: Arpeggiator, Chorder, Repeater and Input Filter. Each one brings something interesting to the table, and they can also have a lot of fun working together. You’ll find them towards the top of the Instrument Browser, where you can drag them directly onto a track. Alternatively, you’ll find they have their own section in the Inspector where we can load them and have some control over how they work. Let’s dig in.

Arpeggiator

Everyone loves a good arpeggiator, and this is a great one that starts off very familiar and then gets increasingly funky as you get into it. The idea is that it takes any number of held notes and turns them into a run or pattern of single notes. So you could hold a chord and have the arpeggiator play the notes in series, either running up, running down, up and then down, down and then up, in the order your played them, or completely randomly.

 When you load it up, the default preset is precisely as you’d expect. It’s set to 16th notes over one octave, running up and down. The basic controls are on the left. You can push it up to four octaves and change the rate with the large knob, to anything from a 64th triplet to a bar and a half per note. You can introduce a bit of swing to give the arpeggiations some lilt, and change the gate length from short and sharp to sustained and overlapping.

Along the top, you have the choice of note flow modes previously mentioned. The last one is a chord mode, which plays the notes you’re holding as a chord in the rhythm of the arpeggiator. If you’ve set a larger octave range, it will play the same chord in different...