Cubase 15: Create Ambient Guitar Parts With Cubase’s HALion Sonic

With a suitable HALion Sonic guitar preset, a few carefully voiced Chord Pad chords, and possibly a few DIY MIDI chord arpeggio patterns, it’s easy to create ambient virtual guitar parts.

Want some ambient guitar parts but can’t play guitar? HALion Sonic makes it easy to create cool chords and mellow moods.

For those who don’t play guitar, or if it’s not your first instrument, there’s always the options of using virtual guitar sounds to create authentic‑sounding parts in your projects. But it does require you to think like a guitar player, at least in terms of how you voice the chords. In this month’s workshop, I’ll help you by working through an example — I’ll creating some ambient chord parts based on simple triads, using the ‘open’ chord voicings that are often played on the guitar fretboard. To keep it as inclusive as possible, I decided to stick to tools that you’ll find in all the main tiers of Cubase (Elements, Artist and Pro). At the time of writing, I’m on Cubase 15, but the advice should hold in other versions too.

Make Sound Choices

Cubase’s stock effects plug‑ins are perfectly good for dialling in your ambient guitar tones.Included in Cubase is the HALion Sonic virtual instrument, whose sounds are sample‑based, and its factory library includes a number of very usable acoustic and electric guitar sounds. For these ambient chord performances I started with a clean sound, but this style could suit an acoustic or an electric source equally well. For the audio examples that accompany this workshop on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/cubase-1026) I used an electric guitar patch called ‘Long Whammy’, which offers keyswitchable performance articulations for a bit of additional flexibility. To give the part the atmospheric vibe I wanted, I also used stock Cubase reverb and delay effects as inserts.

If you prefer an acoustic sound, then HALion Sonic’s ‘Nylon In Concert’ patch makes for a similarly suitable keyswitchable starting point. But if you have other guitar VSTi sound sources and effects, or you want to use a favourite amp sim, you don’t have to stick to what I’ve used — the basic advice I give below still applies, so feel free to experiment and build your own sounds.

Find Your Voice

There’s a lot to love about a simple, well‑strummed barre chord! But if you’re aiming for a more delicate, ambient sound, a simple triad may be all you need. And if you choose the kind of triad chord voicing that a guitar player might use for this style, the results can be very effective — both for the part itself, and in giving other instruments in the musical arrangement the space they need to make their own contribution to the piece.

I want to keep things simple and easy to follow. So, with the slightest of tweaks, I’ll stick with chords from the key of C major, but substitute Em‑augmented and Bm‑augmented (raise the fifth by a semitone in each case, to go from minor form to augmented minor) for the...