The MIDI editors

About editing MIDI

There are several ways to edit MIDI in Nuendo. You can use the tools and functions in the Project window for large-scale editing, or use the functions on the MIDI menu to process MIDI parts in various ways (see “What is affected by the MIDI functions?” on page 352). For hands-on graphical editing of the contents of MIDI parts, you use the MIDI editors:

• The Key Editor is the default MIDI editor, presenting notes graphically in an intuitive piano roll-style grid.

The Key Editor also allows for detailed editing of non-note events such as MIDI controllers. For more information, see “The Key Editor – Overview” on page 366.

Opening a MIDI editor

There are two ways to open a MIDI editor:

•Select one or several parts (or a MIDI track, with no parts selected) and select Open Key Editor, Open Score Editor (Nuendo Expansion Kit only), Open Drum Editor (Nuendo Expansion Kit only), Open List Editor or Open InPlace Editor from the MIDI menu (or use the corresponding key command).

The selected parts (or all parts on the track, if no part was selected) will open in the chosen editor.

•Double-click a part to open it in the default editor.

Which editor opens depends on the Default Edit Action setting in the Preferences (Event Display–MIDI page).

•The Score Editor (Nuendo Expansion Kit only) shows MIDI notes as a musical score and comes with advanced tools and functions for notation, layout and printing.

•The Drum Editor (Nuendo Expansion Kit only) is similar to the Key Editor, but takes advantage of the fact that with drum parts, each key corresponds to a separate drum sound.

•The List Editor shows all events in the selected MIDI parts as a list, allowing you to view and edit their properties numerically.

For more information, see “The List Editor – Overview” on page 383.

•The Edit In-Place function allows you to edit MIDI parts directly in the Project window.

This is similar to working in the Key Editor, but makes it easier to edit MIDI in context with other track types. See “Edit In-Place” on page 381.

•You can also edit MIDI in the Project Browser.

Like the List Editor, the Project browser shows the events in a list and allows you to perform numerical editing. However, you will probably find the List Editor better suited for MIDI editing, since it has various dedicated features and functions for this. The Project Browser is described in the chapter “The Project Browser” on page 428.

Ö You can define each of the editors mentioned above as your default MIDI editor, see below.

About this chapter

Please note that features that are identical in these editors will be described in the Key Editor section. The sections about the Inplace-Editor (see “Edit In-Place” on page 381) and the List Editor (see “The List Editor – Overview” on page 383) describe the specific features of these editors only.

Nuendo Expansion Kit only: If the option “Edit as Drums when Drum Map is assigned” is activated and a drum map is selected for the edited track, the Drum Editor will open. This way you can double-click to open the Key Editor (or the Score Editor, List or Edit In-Place Editor, depending on your preferences) but drum tracks will automatically open in the Drum Editor.

Ö If the part you open for editing is a shared copy, any editing you perform will affect all shared copies of this part.

Shared copies are created by pressing [Alt]/[Option]+[Shift] and dragging, or by using the Repeat function with the “Shared copies” option activated. In the Project window, shared copies are indicated by the part name in italics and an icon in the bottom right corner of the part (see “Aligning events” on page 45).

Handling several parts

When you open a MIDI editor with several parts (or a MIDI track containing several parts) selected, you might find it somewhat hard to get an overview of the different parts when editing.

For such cases the editor toolbar features a few functions to make working with multiple parts easier and more comprehensive:

• The Part List menu lists all parts that were selected when you opened the editor (or all parts on the track, if no parts were selected), and lets you select which part should be active for editing.

When you select a part from the list, it is automatically made active and centered in the note display.

Ö Note that it is also possible to activate a part by selecting an event within this part with the Arrow tool.

• The button “Edit Active Part Only” lets you restrict editing operations to the active part only.

For example, if you select “All” from the Select submenu on the Edit menu with this option activated, only events in the active part will be selected. Similarly, if you select notes by dragging with the Arrow tool (making a selection rectangle), only the notes in the active part will be selected.

• The button “Show Part Borders” can be used if you want to see clearly defined borders for the active part.

When this is activated, all parts except the active one are grayed out, making the borders easily discernible. In the Key Editor, there are also two “markers” in the ruler with the name of the active part, marking its beginning and end. These can be moved freely to change the size of the part.

“Show Part Borders” activated on the toolbar.

• It is possible to cycle between parts (making them active) using key commands.

In the Key Commands dialog – Edit category, you will find two functions for this: “Activate Next Part” and “Activate Previous Part”. If you assign key commands to these, you can use them to cycle between parts in the editors. For further information, see “Setting up key commands” on page 518.

Controller display

The toolbar

As in other windows, the toolbar contains tools and various settings. You can specify which toolbar items should be shown and store/recall different toolbar configurations

– see “The Setup dialogs” on page 506.

Ruler

Note display

MIDI Input

Mouse pointer display: Current Color pop-up menu Chord recogni-

The info line shows information about selected MIDI notes. You can edit all values on the info line using regular value editing (see “Editing on the info line” on page 375 for details). Length and position values are displayed in the format currently selected for the ruler (see below).

• To hide or show the info line, click the icon in the toolbar.

The ruler

The ruler shows the time line, by default in the display format selected on the Transport panel. You can select a separate format for a MIDI editor ruler on the Ruler pop-up menu, opened by clicking the arrow button to the right of it. For a list of the available formats, see “The ruler” on page 31.

At the bottom of the pop-up menu, there are two additional items:

•If “Time Linear” is selected, the ruler, note display and controller display will be linear in relation to time.

This means that if the ruler shows bars and beats, the distance between the bar lines will vary depending on the tempo.

•If “Bars+Beats Linear” is selected, the ruler, note display and controller display will be linear in relation to tempo.

This means that if the ruler shows bars and beats, the distance between beats will be constant.

In most cases, you would probably set the display format to “Bars+Beats” in “Bars+Beats Linear” mode when editing MIDI.

The note display

The note display is the main area in the Key Editor. It contains a grid in which MIDI notes are shown as boxes. The width of a box corresponds to the note length, and the vertical position of a box corresponds to the note number (pitch), with higher notes higher up in the grid. The piano keyboard to the left serves as a guide for finding the right note number.

For a description on how to display colors in the note display, see “Coloring notes and events” on page 370.

The chord recognition function

Nuendo features a handy chord recognition function that helps you identify chords in the Key Editor note display. To find out which chord is formed by simultaneously played notes, place the project cursor over the notes. All MIDI notes currently “touched” by the project cursor are analyzed and the chord recognition display in the toolbar shows you which chord the notes form.

In the picture above, the project cursor touches the notes C, Eb and G. As shown in the chord recognition display, this results in a C minor chord.