Nothing New Here (but I did discover how to do it) - Chordpulse

This is for Sonar Platinum.  How I spent time on Saturday figuring out something to work with Sonar.
 
I have had a stand-alone tool called ChordPulse ($22, purchaseable at chordpulse.com) for some time.  It is hokey, but it is another way to toy with slapping together chords and rhythms and coming up with some super quick ideas.  I watched some YouTubes on it and toyed with it a few years ago and then left it abandoned because it seemed like a stand-alone application.  Other than saving some audio (which has not inspiring sounds), it didn't seem like it was that accessible (like a VST) for Sonar.

Reminder of what ChordPulse is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UczE65tORlI

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TYEDJ2O2feo

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K-NKxAS_bmc

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tnVD6XhevLY

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fPiOpeFlRSM

In cleaning up some things recently I revisited it on YouTube.  There's a guy in Europe who had posted a snippet on ChordPulse a few years ago, and I could see somehow he had wired the MIDI output of ChordPulse into Kontakt, and when he played ChordPulse song snippets he was playing back that snippet through Kontakt instruments.  That got me thinking.
 
So, I spent Saturday banging at it and finally cracked the mystery on how to get there.  So, in case any of you have ChordPulse (and forgot about it), this is actually quite interesting in terms of what it can do. (ChordPulse actually has some aspects (ease of use) and some power that are pretty slick.  And it's fun).
 
Here's how I did it, and it was a lot of trial and error before I figured this out.  I have the file now as a template file, so I can open it up and it's ready to go right off the get go.
 
1. Get loopbe1  (http://www.nerds.de/en/loopbe1.html).  It's free.  It's like 2 KB of space (meaning like nothing).
 
2. In ChordPulse under the Options menu, click the More link at the bottom, and then you can select where to send MIDI.  Send it to LoopBe1, and choose Channels 10-16.  The drum midi output from ChordPulse is hard-coded to Midi Channel 10.  There can be up to 6 more Midi channel outputs, it's convenient to pick the last series (11-16) so as not to cross paths with anything else.
 
3. Sonar is where some of the extra special trickery happens.  First, need to open preferences and activate LoopBe1 in the Midi In ports.  You cannot / should not set LoopBe1 as active in the Midi Out ports.  (Kind of cancels the midi transfer if you do that).
 
4. Probably should have mentioned after installing LoopBe1 you have to reboot.
 
5. I've found it successful (so far) to start with a clean Sonar file.  I had a bunch of roadblocks when I was just slapping this in to an existing song with already existing tracks and midi tracks.  So, I can say I've had success when I started with a Sonar file stripped clean of any midi tracks.  (A clean start).
 
6. Add a soft synth.  I started with Kontakt as a single instance, just the first line as the output (not multi-out Kontakt).   I saw on the YouTube clip (it only showed for a few seconds) that the guy had Channel 10 as drums in Kontakt (using Abbey Road drums), and had Scarbee Bass on Channel 11, and had a Piano Kontakt instrument on Channel 12.   So, I first had success by adding the piano called Giant from Kontakt (in Kontakt Komplete in any case).  In Kontakt, setting the MIDI input channel to OMNI works fine.  In Sonar Platinum, I set the MIDI In selection to the LoopBe1 12 Port.  And set Input Echo On.
 
7. In Sonar, in preferences I also set the Audio Engine to not only play when the Sonar screen is in focus.  In other words, I can have ChordPulse as an active window, and when I click Play in ChordPulse I can hear Sonar getting the signal and playing the sound.
 
8. Here's the key discovery, the hidden one that really held me up from success until a late night discovery:  In Sonar, on the MIDI track, in the various patch settings, I have to specfically set each of the four parameters.  So,
 
- Input -- is LoopBeInternalMidi, Channel 12. 
- Output -- is Kontakt 5 1 (the first instance of Kontakt I've added to the Sonar song). 
- Channel -- is: 1 Kontakt 5.  (if just typically adding a softsynth in a song this is usually fine left alone at the setting None).  Then choose 0-bank 0.
- Patch -- is: unknown (there are the choices unknown, then 1 through 127).  So setting should be "unknown".
 
If you hard set those 4 values on the MIDI track it actually does something to make this signal flow work for ChordPulse.
 
9.  So, I tested out the piano and it works fine on Channel 12.
 
10.  I then added another Kontakt instance.  Same thing, just the first line as the output.  I assigned the MIDI In port in Sonar to LoopBe1's channel 10.  I set Input Echo on in Sonar for that second instance of Kontakt (in addition to the first instance still having Input Echo on).   I set the 4 parameters (as described in 8).
 
In Kontakt I added an Abbey Road drum.  In this case I used the Modern Abbey Road drum kit.  I set the input in that to Omni. 
 
11.  Then I played ChordPulse and I could hear the piano and the drums.
 
12.  I first tried a third instance of Kontakt (setting the input in Sonar to Channel 11) for the bass. I selected a Scarbee bass.  The pitch was an octave too low.  It's sounded fine, but I thought I'd try Modo Bass (from IKMultimedia) to get a cooler bass sound.  I couldn't get that to work.  I then tried Trilian (from Spectrasonics) and that worked fine.  Also, for Trilian, the pitch coming through from ChordPulse was an octave too low, so I transposed the Key in the Sonar MIDI track up 12 steps.
 
13.  I played ChordPulse and I could hear all three tracks coming out of Sonar.
 
14. I adjusted the mix in Sonar to an appropriate mix.
 
15.  I clicked record in Sonar on each of the three MIDI tracks, then went to ChordPulse and clicked Play.
 
16.  Sonar recorded the individual Midi parts for each track as expected. 
 
17.  I turned off input echo on the three Midi tracks in Sonar and then just played back the Midi that was recorded.  Everything is there on each track separately as desired / expected.
 
Seventeen steps to describe it, but the potential is very good.   In a way, ChordPulse is like Easy Keys (simplified of course), but it has rhythm tracks as well.   
 
I'm intrigued by the potential of experimenting with ChordPulse now that I've figured out how to get it working with Sonar.

reginaldStjohn
 I don't have ChordPulse but I wanted to commend you for your detailed post. Hopefully someone will find it of use.

Thanks! Forum helps us all.

Additional points to what I illustrated above. Keeping the setup ready in a separate template song, I expect to fire up the template to make a quick scratch starting point song, obtain some Midi snippets from a passage from ChordPulse into that scratch Sonar file, then paste those snippets as I want into another song I'm working on in Sonar - with the soft synth sounds as desired in the actual Sonar song.

And I haven't fully experimented yet, but it looked is like there are four more Midi tracks I have yet to set up in the template file (Channels 13-16). When viewing the YouTube samples above, there are styles that play back with an additional keyboard ( synth or pad track) and depending on the style there's a guitar track or two.

I think some of the styles and or snippets would be potentially interesting passages within songs or jumping off points for creating songs or ideas.

Yeah, that's right. The Midi files can be imported into Sonar.

This isn't about Kontakt though. It's an example soft synth, as an example for providing soft synth play back in Sonar. You could try the technique with a soft synth of your choice. Dimension Pro, Rapture, Session Drummer 3 might also work (haven't tried them yet).

The advancement I'm providing info for is that you can hear the Midi play back live within Sonar. So possibilities open up because you can add other tracks and experiment around within Sonar, and you can re-arrange chords and styles and variations on the fly within ChordPulse without needing to re-import every time you make a change in ChordPulse. Which is very cool.

I like ChordPulse as a lightweight tool for experimenting with various progressions/styles while away with a laptop.