As you know, when you export rock guitars to MIDI, it only exports one note per chord, which respects the rhythm but nothing more. I would like to manually add the remaining notes, but since I am not a guitarist, I don’t know exactly how to build the chord. The three notes that make up a chord are easy to know, you can google it, but on a guitar, notes are repeated and in different octaves. Could someone give me a method to build these chords? I hope the question is understood. Thanks
what VI are you playing the guitars on? for myself - i use the VI rhythm/chord tools - Ample, Strum-GS, UJam, etc rather than depend on the HP rhythms. if i need to “make chords” in HP for driving the VI, i’ll use the melody section to construction the baseline chords and then create the rhythms in the VI using the exported (and merged) melody MIDI tracks.
This is what I mean: I have a song, with the chords already placed, and I add the instrument “Rock 1”, for example. Within Hookpad, you will hear a guitar playing the chords of the song, with a certain rhythm depending on whether it is “Rock 1”, “Rock 2”, etc. If I export that instrument to MIDI, instead of playing the chord, it will only play one note for each chord, which I assume will be the tonic. Right? What I want is to open that MIDI in Bandlab, and add the missing notes so that the chord sounds as it does within Hookpad. My question is this: Knowing the chord and the three notes that form it, how do I place them to form it and thus recover the chord that originally sounds in Hookpad? Placing the two remaining notes is not enough, because those are not the chords that a guitar plays. There are notes that are repeated and in different octaves.
which is why i asked about the VI you’re using. several ones i use, i can provide the basic triad (for example) and the VI will play “guitar” chords based on that (e.g. NI Session Guitar or AAS Strum-GS). Ample guitars will attempt play the triad as provided but adjust based on the strings available (lowest first i think) — but with the Ample guitars i can finely tune the chords to get them to sound the way i want using the riffer or strummer functions, then export those as MIDI (which if i use effects like pick scrapes, etc etc) will replay in those VI as expected.
so - short answer (from my workflow) is you will need to put in some extra work to get it the way you want. for me, the HP rhythms are just place holders in most cases which approximate what i want, and i know later i’ll be refining the instrument performances in the VI and/or DAW once i have the structure and most of the arragement done in HP.
Thank you for your answer. What I’m looking for is a more musical theory-based answer, or perhaps someone’s experience as a guitarist, so that I can apply it without those applications you’re mentioning, just with a piano roll and any MIDI guitar instrument. But I was particularly hoping for an answer from the programmers, since they, who configured the instrument, should know about it.
ah, gotcha. as a guitarist, i can say generally most “rock” / “metal” “power chords” use 5ths and/or octaves - so major chords 1-5 or 1-5-8 as the basis. for minor chords, then 1-flat 3 or 1-flat 3-8.
@DSchwachhofer does a lot of the patterns…
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In the case of the “metal guitar” instrument I’m sure they are power chords, but the other rock guitars, except for “single note” sound like they have more strings strung together. No? I hope Dennis can answer.
if i export a bunch of chords using Rock guitar - 1/2 beat open and import into Melodyne, this is what i see. ignore the lowest notes as these are sustain on rock bass.
So they are power chords? You have helped me a lot, thank you very much.
Could you try the same thing with “Rock sustain”? Whenever you can, no hurries
here’s the same set of chords using rock guitar - sustain. again, lowest notes are the rock bass sustain. one odd thing the Am is showing Db instead of a C… could just be the way Melodyne interprets it though.
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Hi, thank you for your questions. Let metro to shed some light onto our Rock Guitars.
The reason why you see only single notes in the midi export is because we have prerecorded samples with power chords etc in it.
In general all Rock Guitars are using either single-notes or Power Chords. But when you have inverted Chords instead of a power chord, they will sometimes play a sample with a 4th, diminished 5th or a small or big sixth, depending on the chord itself. But our Hookpad Rock Guitars never use three notes. The same goes for all the palm-muted samples.
It’s always a bit tricky to translate the MIDI into a DAW as most of the Guitar Plugins are using different standards to create something more realistic. If you want exactly the same sound in your DAW, you could also just export the Rock Guitar as a wav file. Just select the part you need, open the corresponding band and press the share button.
Please let me know if that helped.
Dennis
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Yes, I’ll repeat what has mostly already been stated, with the disclaimer that I don’t use HookPad. I use Cubase directly for arranging,but use HookTheory to help figure stuff out.
When I program midi guitars (which as a guitarist I generally hate as they never sound right) I take style into consideration. If it’s heavy rock on electric guitars, just root and fifth power chords, sometimes the root octave too.
If it’s rock clean or acoustic strumming, I’ll use the full 5 or 6 string chord voicing. And that will depend on the chord. Again as a guitarist I know what those voicings are but generally speaking you could get away with an E barre chord voicing for all chords : R 5 R 3 5 R
When I do this I offset the timing of each string a tiny amount to mimic the strum through the strings. It’s time consuming and a pain, and often isn’t worth it as it still doesn’t sound as good as me just playing the guitar. But if that’s your only option…
if you don’t already have Ample guitars or the GS-Strum guitars, there algorithms have built in “strum delays” which are user adjustable as well. so even the full chords in the MIDI from HP will mainly get the correct treatment. the NI session guitars are also nice but often take a bit more work. as a note the Ample guitars have a “strummer” and “riffer” tools which can do a pretty good job.
edit: also, look into the UJAM guitars, some of them have really good strum and pattern settings which can be very useful when triggered by single notes or triads.