Update
I played around with this poorly documented tool. I found the Drag MIDI field, something that would have remained totally hidden until the tooltips were turned on. To be fair, they mention this in Step 3 but it is not entirely clear, mostly because the icon (like all of them) is very tiny and the whole GUI uses a light grey on black color scheme - probably the worst way to design a GUI. It is the little tiny MIDI plug icon with an arrow facing in the 10:00 position. Here is a revised set of instructions:
- Click Record FlexPhraser MIDI Output. The arrow in the Drag MIDI field starts blinking to indicate record mode.
- Play some notes.
- After you are finished, click Record FlexPhraser MIDI Output again. The recording stops. In the Drag MIDI icon***** , the arrow remains lit to indicate that a MIDI phrase can be exported.
- Drag the phrase on to a MIDI track in your host sequencer by clicking and dragging the Drag MIDI icon to the target MIDI track.
- To play back the recorded sequence in the MIDI track, turn off the Arpeggiator.
*****The word field is incorrect. Fields are used in databases, not GUIs!!
I was recently asked by Steinberg to fill out a survey on their documentation. I am a technical writer and technical writing instructor at Humber College, Toronto. My comment was that the manual is nicely laid out with plenty of useful screenshots, however, the target audience is “expert.” The writer(s) have completely ignored the novice and intermediate audiences. Just because the professional studios often choose Cubase doesn’t mean a lot of other less-seasoned users aren’t going to buy it. Information that is either difficult to retrieve, simply not there, or is incomplete - is totally useless. Literally millions of dollars have been lost in sales due to poor documentation!
When we need to watch a YouTube video produced by the one person out of thousands who managed to actually figure out how to do something that was poorly documented or not documented at all, it means Steinberg needs to revisit their documentation practices. I’ve written for several companies who used their engineers and secretaries as “documentation experts.” That NEVER worked!!
My only hope is that Steinberg reads these forums.