MIDI Advice in N

Hi…Im getting frustrated with MIDI in N.

Basically I’m comping piano tracks verse by verse…chorus by chorus. The problem is that the sustain is not playing on the following tracks after the first even tho the sustain events are showing on the list. What gives?

Also I tried copy and pasting the MIDI piano tracks to one piano track like you would to a WAV audio track and it won’t let me. I’m stumped!

Any advice from the MIDI gurus?

hey i had the same problem when pasting to the same trac or trying to anyway. Does your program create a new trac when using the commands u used in audio trac for looping in the same wavefile? thats what mine is doing!

it makes my head hurt to look at that midi grid too long and i hope we can find some advice

I dont use the key commands other than 0 and the arrow keys heh

But yea I cant treat midi tracks like audio tracks which is frustrating and comping tracks playing the piano with both hands…its pretty frustrating.

With your drum loops…I would convert all your loops to audio. Even better…convert each drum (channel) to separate drum (kick/snare/hh/etc) loop tracks so you can have more control and apply fx on individual drums where needed and then render them to a stem drum loop. I do that with leafdrums. I hope that helps.

sorry im a newbie how do you convert midi tracs to audio?

Load your .sng project with the drum vsti of your choice in N if not already loaded.

Brace yourself…this sounds a bit convoluted but essentially this is what “FREEZING” tracks sort of does.

Create a new AUDIO track…blank one is just fine.

Make sure your MIDI drum track is the ONLY track unmuted to play…otherwise mute your other tracks if you have them in your project.

Go to File->Mixdown or Control-R to render

And just do an offline mixing.

Make sure tho that your midi track’s output is routed to your vsti or it won’t work.


As far as separating your drums into individual kits…it depends on what vsti youre using are you using something like RMF LinDrums or Battery…if you got a powerful vsti like BATTERY…you can apply fx in the vsti itself for each cell.

OTHERWISE…you would have to export each drum to audio ONE at a time which seems painful to me.

I hope I articulated this well enough.

What synth are you using to play back the MIDI through? Are there any settings in that synth that controls how CC64 is handled?

I disagree about doing comping with wave files – better to do it in MIDI.

Regardless of which editor you use, you can have problems with sustain – depending on what the DAW does and depending on whether you pedal-upped at the right time in a following segment (IYKWIM).

The good news is that this is REALLLY easy to fix in the piano roll. Just use the band at the bottom – there’s a little button to click at the lower left if there isn’t a band there and it’ll pop up. Set it for Controller 64 (Sustain). You can drag the divider bar wherever you want it to make the bottom part as high as you want.

Tall blue lines are pedal down. Short blue lines are pedal up. You can draw them in and fix any problems. When you draw them in, anything over half-height is “down”, anything under half-height is “up” (at least, with synths I’ve used).

There are two drawing modes; try them both to figure out which one works for you. It’s a little goofy, but I find with the right too (I forget which one) I can drag a little at a high or low level to get an event drawn in.

Now just play through while watching the piano roll, and wherever there’s a missing pedal event, draw it in. Wherever there’s an extra one, just right click and drag over it to delete it.

HTH :)

LearJeff

You totally rock! :D

I love it! I only tweaked with velocity measures in the piano roll. Never occured to me about the combo box and select Controller 64.

I was looking at the Event List and that looked painful!!!

Thanks again!

Thanks Bubba for replying…to answer your question…its just a midi capable keyboard with 66 keys and I have sustain pedal…I comp my piano tracks but the issue was that sometimes the sustain event wouldnt be triggered. Jeff showed me the way!