29. Creating an Arranger Track

When working on a project, you might find yourself reorganizing the order in which sections of a song play in order to create variations, or simply to find which arrangement works best. To more easily facilitate this type of on-the-fly reorganization, Cubase 5 lets you divide your project into sections and then play these sections in any order you want. You can opt to play section B before section A, or repeat section C five times, or skip section D entirely. It’s like working with Lego blocks; you can construct your recording, start to finish, in whatever order you like.

In Cubase 5, this is called the Arranger function. (In previous versions of Cubase, it was called the Play Order function; little has changed in Cubase 5 save for the name.) To create this sort of arrangement, you first insert an Arranger track into your project. Within this track you create Arranger events that can then be organized in a type of playlist, called an Arranger chain. You can organize the events in a chain however you want—and you can create multiple Arranger chains from your original project.