I recently put together a song using the Cubase Chord Track and Arranger Track features. When you're using an Arranger Track, the cursor jumps around from place to place in the timeline under control of the Arranger Track as the song plays.

Once I got the song playing the way I wanted it to, I wanted to produce audio of it. To do this with Cubase involve something called "flattening," which means that Cubase lays out all the pieces of the song linearly one after the other. In the process, it changes the Arranger Track to a linear sequence with no repeats.

I didn't want to lose the original Arranger-controlled version of my song. Cubase gives you a way to do that, but it involves creating an entire new project. I didn't want to clutter up my computer with two different projects for the same song, so the ability to "flatten" a song into a new project did not appeal to me.

Instead, I played the song into the Montage audio recorder. Once I had the audio for the song there, I played that audio back from the Montage into a Cubase audio track. It worked like a charm.

I now see the combination of a Montage and a PC running Cubase as an interesting collection of components that you can wire together in many different ways to accomplish many different things. When I started out with a Motif XF in 2011, I thought I was buying a musical instrument. Silly me. It turns out I was buying a fascinating (and often frustrating!) journey into music worlds whose existence was unknown to me.

I keep saying this, but I feel like it's important to acknowledge that I couldn't have learned all of this without the great help I get around here. Thanks, everyone!