Cubase drag-and -drop dilemma

[Kristofer Emerig]

This is probably a silly question to most here, but I can't seem to find it in the manual, so here goes:

 

I've put several midi tracks in via keyboard, but now I've decided I want an additional intoductory passage. From what I've heard, Cubase isn't the best choice for editing through a score, but it's all I've got at the moment and I find to look at or edit with the key editor at this point too foreign - it really throws me off. Supposedly, I can select all notes across all tracks and drag and drop them. The problem is that when I select notes beyond what shows on the screen, they are not moved. Only the four or five bars showing on the screen when grabbed are actually moved, although many more bars are selected (in red). Also, when selecting more bars then what show on the screen, I have to scroll over, shift-select, scroll over, shift select, etc. It would seem that as I'm selecting, it should auto scroll until I move the mouse back from the right side of the screen. It seems to me I'm doing something wrong here, or there is a setting or option I'm overlooking.

[Kristofer Emerig]

Thanks Ray. It does seem to be the consensus that I'm going to have to work through the key editor to move multiple tracks of more than several bars. I've had some success through the main project window as well. If I can find a work around for the notation editor, I'll post it here.

[Kristofer Emerig]

Seems also to be the consensus among those more advanced in this technology than me. I'll either have to look at a different application for editing, or accustom myself to using the key editor. It's a little disorienting for someone used to working on a staff, but I'm sure if I force myself to use it for some time, it'll get easier. Incidentally, the score editor isn't all that bad for surgical work with small sections, but seems quirky when trying to manipulate large chunks.

Ray Kemp said:

Cubase is designed around the arrangement and key edit pages. To use it as a score editor is quite frankly "nuts".

[James Semple]

Kristofer, the common way to work like that would be to start with Sibelius or Finale, export the MIDI and import it into Cubase. Then you can do the final tweaking in Cubase.

[Kristofer Emerig]

Yes, thanks James. I'm slowly, by gathering informed opinions such as yours, digesting that reality.

James Semple said:

Kristofer, the common way to work like that would be to start with Sibelius or Finale, export the MIDI and import it into Cubase. Then you can do the final tweaking in Cubase.

[Don Kim]

Hi Kristofer,

For adding bars to the start, as stated in your original question, you don't necessarily have to go through the key editor.

In the main project view, select all your events (Edit->Select->All or control/command-a), or whichever ones apply. Then drag all your events over to the right, however many bars you'd like to move them. You can then resize your events by dragging the lower corners. i.e. if your event block starts at measure 9, you can drag the left corner until it's resized to start at measure 1. When you re-open your resized event in the score editor, you should see the appropriate number of blank bars prepended to your current notation.

[Kristofer Emerig]

Thanks Don, I'll try it out.

Don Kim said:

Hi Kristofer,

For adding bars to the start, as stated in your original question, you don't necessarily have to go through the key editor.

In the main project view, select all your events (Edit->Select->All or control/command-a), or whichever ones apply. Then drag all your events over to the right, however many bars you'd like to move them. You can then resize your events by dragging the lower corners. i.e. if your event block starts at measure 9, you can drag the left corner until it's resized to start at measure 1. When you re-open your resized event in the score editor, you should see the appropriate number of blank bars prepended to your current notation.

[Kristofer Emerig]

Thanks for the info Jan. Since this discussion, I took Ray's advice (see "just plain nuts" above) and purchased finale, which is much more intuitive an interface for someone used to working from a MS. I've been bouncing my little "tutorial" projects back and forth now, getting accustomed to using each application for their respective strengths. Fortunately, my real writing project right now is an acapella mass of eight voices, so I don't really need all of the production jig-pokery to convey it. I've just been auditioning it directly out of Finale for the present.

Jan Civil said:

In the key editor, there are + and - signs on the right hand side, on the bottom, which will zoom in or out to give you what you need here - to zoom out so all of your music in that editor is viewable on the screen at once.
There is an 'e' in this editor on the top (now a hieroglyphic in 5.5. wow.) that gives you the option of editing one or all tracks. With the e 'on' - not the default, and not what you get when you reopen the proj - it's a solo editor and when you select all, it won't select the other tracks.

You can insert bars in the tempo track; no smaller than 1/64, but out to anything (with the limit being the time of your project, defined by you in project setup), any number of bars, any signature (with the above caveat), at any bar line.

[Kristofer Emerig]

You're right. "Intuitive" is a bad choice of words. "Familiar" would have been a better one. The piano roll is actually probably more intuitive, being merely a propotional mapping of scale steps across time. It also looks pretty cool with imitative counterpoint; The thematic relationships stand out as recognizable patterns and shapes even more prominently than notation.

Jan Civil said:

I thought the piano roll was a not very intuitive visual interface at first, and I guess most people will, unless they're Conlon Nancarrow or somebody and has punched out actual rolls. Couple of months, quite used to it, couple years, I prefer it to all things.
Kristofer Emerig said:

Thanks for the info Jan. Since this discussion, I took Ray's advice (see "just plain nuts" above) and purchased finale, which is much more intuitive an interface for someone used to working from a MS. I've been bouncing my little "tutorial" projects back and forth now, getting accustomed to using each application for their respective strengths. Fortunately, my real writing project right now is an acapella mass of eight voices, so I don't really need all of the production jig-pokery to convey it. I've just been auditioning it directly out of Finale for the present.

Jan Civil said:

In the key editor, there are + and - signs on the right hand side, on the bottom, which will zoom in or out to give you what you need here - to zoom out so all of your music in that editor is viewable on the screen at once.
There is an 'e' in this editor on the top (now a hieroglyphic in 5.5. wow.) that gives you the option of editing one or all tracks. With the e 'on' - not the default, and not what you get when you reopen the proj - it's a solo editor and when you select all, it won't select the other tracks.

You can insert bars in the tempo track; no smaller than 1/64, but out to anything (with the limit being the time of your project, defined by you in project setup), any number of bars, any signature (with the above caveat), at any bar line.

[Kristofer Emerig]

That's actually one of my main motivations for wanting to breach the DAW technology. Of course, all manner of 12 tone temperaments/tuning can be achieved on the harpsichord, within the somewhat narrow elastic limits of the stringing schedule (a science or voodoo unto itself), but that's just it - you're bound to 12 tone temperaments within a narrow deviation from equal temperament (my least favorite, tbh, but it does lend some universality and interchangeability to things, much like using PC and Microsoft, I suppose), and it's extremely time consuming to retune 5 1/2 octaves, most often several times through due to the flexing of the instrument.

Enter the DAW. Now you can get any number of divisions by setting up differing microtuned intervals on different tracks, alter them in efficient convenient amount of time, and save them as templates. Some say electronic music is just plain inferior, and always will be. I disagree, and view them as just another instrument with some irrefutable advantages as well as disadvantages.

When I first got Cubase, the first things I went after were some of the experimentally tuned pieces that proved to be practically unachievable on a twelve tone keyboard arrangement.

Jan Civil said:

oh, you should know: in Cubase you can tweak temperaments. Logical editor aka transform window.

[Kristofer Emerig]

The ability to assign instruments to individual tracks and microtune them separately allows for any scale pattern, although I'm sure with more comprehensive knowledge of the application there are better ways of achieving that goal. It's a bit messy in the sense that one melodic line has to be distributed across multiple tracks.

A practical application and example could be made of the quarter comma mean tone dilemma. On a harpsichord, one conventionally tunes C just to E, then tunes the chain of fifths between the two just slightly narrow to achieve an equal distribution of the comma. F is just to A. Turning to the accidentals (here's the "dilemma", but not really, just a reality), one must choose whether to have a E flat, just to G, or a D sharp, just to B. A typical historical arrangement would be C sharp, F sharp, G sharp, B flat, A flat, E flat, which will work with literature of the time up to a few accidentals in the key signature. So the accidentals are biased, and tuned as perfect thirds to only one white note, not truly functionally enharmonic. When used the "wrong" way in a melodic passage, it's a very subtle difference, and many listeners won't notice. In the case of a vertical triad, say F, G sharp (note, not A flat), C, it is very evident. Whether this is pleasing or not is subjective; I prefer QCMT specifically for its pungent sound. A flattened ninth in a dominant chord resolving to the fifth in tonic has a distinctive howl to it - little things like that to which once the ear is accustomed, will be missed when in equal temperment.

The point is, with a DAW, one could now hypothetically tune all of the flats on one staff, microtune a second staff for perfect sharps, and add another tone to resolve the "wolf" - that's the one triad so horrible it's regarded as "unusable", but even that's subject to debate.

Jan Civil said:

I wouldn't have thought to go past a set of 12 in Cubase.

Theoretically (which doesn't count for too much), Arabic musics have 24 to an octave; but, about all the applications of are restricted to heptatonic rows. I've used harmonic series tunings using a keyboard, and well, I'm playing by ear totally, I don't know where anything is. I guess a large template which can be then filtered in the logical editor would be the way to go here.
Kristofer Emerig said:

That's actually one of my main motivations for wanting to breach the DAW technology. Of course, all manner of 12 tone temperaments/tuning can be achieved on the harpsichord, within the somewhat narrow elastic limits of the stringing schedule (a science or voodoo unto itself), but that's just it - you're bound to 12 tone temperaments within a narrow deviation from equal temperament (my least favorite, tbh, but it does lend some universality and interchangeability to things, much like using PC and Microsoft, I suppose), and it's extremely time consuming to retune 5 1/2 octaves, most often several times through due to the flexing of the instrument.
Enter the DAW. Now you can get any number of divisions by setting up differing microtuned intervals on different tracks, alter them in efficient convenient amount of time, and save them as templates. Some say electronic music is just plain inferior, and always will be. I disagree, and view them as just another instrument with some irrefutable advantages as well as disadvantages.
When I first got Cubase, the first things I went after were some of the experimentally tuned pieces that proved to be practically unachievable on a twelve tone keyboard arrangement.

Jan Civil said:

oh, you should know: in Cubase you can tweak temperaments. Logical editor aka transform window.

[Kristofer Emerig]

That sounds like a very nice feature. The only shortcoming I see is that it is still predicated on the assumption of some sort of temperament of the twelve tone scale.

If I could imagine the ultimate DAW, as well as notation system of the future, it would be a modular staff of as many lines as the composer chooses. Instead of assumed frequencies and key signatures, the composer would simply assign frequencies to each line, perhaps printed in the key signature area. This imaginary DAW would have the capability to "portamento" any note to an adjacent one by any number of user defined curves (linear, parabolic, or none at all, just leap to it - whatever). I think that would enable just about any conceivable polyphonic experiment one could conjure.

Mind you, in such a notation system, one could still write "conventional" music, but the flexibility would allow for much more.

Jan Civil said:

horns and strings players will know to adjust some things, to give proper natural pungency or flavor/spice to such things, esp. in the realm of ('dominant/tonic') tonality.
VI Pro has a window now where you can adjust +/- 50 cent on any tone, and a humanize function to control the timing of such 'corrections'. The whole interface is made to obviate all of this, til now standard in sequencer work, separate tracks to get realism.
It's less 'messy'.
Kristofer Emerig said:

The ability to assign instruments to individual tracks and microtune them separately allows for any scale pattern, although I'm sure with more comprehensive knowledge of the application there are better ways of achieving that goal. It's a bit messy in the sense that one melodic line has to be distributed across multiple tracks.

A practical application and example could be made of the quarter comma mean tone dilemma. On a harpsichord, one conventionally tunes C just to E, then tunes the chain of fifths between the two just slightly narrow to achieve an equal distribution of the comma. F is just to A. Turning to the accidentals (here's the "dilemma", but not really, just a reality), one must choose whether to have a E flat, just to G, or a D sharp, just to B. A typical historical arrangement would be C sharp, F sharp, G sharp, B flat, A flat, E flat, which will work with literature of the time up to a few accidentals in the key signature. So the accidentals are biased, and tuned as perfect thirds to only one white note, not truly functionally enharmonic. When used the "wrong" way in a melodic passage, it's a very subtle difference, and many listeners won't notice. In the case of a vertical triad, say F, G sharp (note, not A flat), C, it is very evident. Whether this is pleasing or not is subjective; I prefer QCMT specifically for its pungent sound. A flattened ninth in a dominant chord resolving to the fifth in tonic has a distinctive howl to it - little things like that to which once the ear is accustomed, will be missed when in equal temperment.

The point is, with a DAW, one could now hypothetically tune all of the flats on one staff, microtune a second staff for perfect sharps, and add another tone to resolve the "wolf" - that's the one triad so horrible it's regarded as "unusable", but even that's subject to debate.

Jan Civil said:

I wouldn't have thought to go past a set of 12 in Cubase.

Theoretically (which doesn't count for too much), Arabic musics have 24 to an octave; but, about all the applications of are restricted to heptatonic rows. I've used harmonic series tunings using a keyboard, and well, I'm playing by ear totally, I don't know where anything is. I guess a large template which can be then filtered in the logical editor would be the way to go here.
Kristofer Emerig said:

That's actually one of my main motivations for wanting to breach the DAW technology. Of course, all manner of 12 tone temperaments/tuning can be achieved on the harpsichord, within the somewhat narrow elastic limits of the stringing schedule (a science or voodoo unto itself), but that's just it - you're bound to 12 tone temperaments within a narrow deviation from equal temperament (my least favorite, tbh, but it does lend some universality and interchangeability to things, much like using PC and Microsoft, I suppose), and it's extremely time consuming to retune 5 1/2 octaves, most often several times through due to the flexing of the instrument.
Enter the DAW. Now you can get any number of divisions by setting up differing microtuned intervals on different tracks, alter them in efficient convenient amount of time, and save them as templates. Some say electronic music is just plain inferior, and always will be. I disagree, and view them as just another instrument with some irrefutable advantages as well as disadvantages.
When I first got Cubase, the first things I went after were some of the experimentally tuned pieces that proved to be practically unachievable on a twelve tone keyboard arrangement.

Jan Civil said:

oh, you should know: in Cubase you can tweak temperaments. Logical editor aka transform window.

[Kristofer Emerig]

In the example I presented of how QCMT might be tuned, I really didn't mean to make the thrust about just attaining pure intervals, though I can see how it might be interpreted that way. I was really describing a system which would allow the prerogative of using the dual enharmonic intervals, eg having a just C# and a just Db. On an acoustic keyboard, the very physical configuration of the keyboard precludes this, except for the occasional split keys which arose now and again, but never seemed to take hold. Achieving pure intervals entirely might not be the best sound, I'm guessing. You need a little mud and grit for things to sound good.

On my imaginary DAW construct (and I don't know if it is imaginary - perhaps these capabilities are available in existing DAWs with adequate knowledge of their use), you could still use such an animal to achieve all of what we've discussed, including 12 and 24 tone temperaments, but any other as well. I think this mode of thinking could propel music beyond the model of tones confined within a predefined scale/modality/temperament, and into a conceptual space where the lines between those concepts and the composition itself would dissolve, leaving pure fluid music which could go anywhere in any manner; We could call it Omnitonality.

Jan Civil said:

I don't imagine anyone is going to successfully market, or market at all, anything that isn't.
As I said, the maths basis for talking about Arabic systems is 24 to an octave. There is 24-tone ET and things that have just-intoned, or Pythagorean bases. These give a palette from which can be derived very subtle inflections.
(It's largely an oral tradition though, and the math doesn't 'necessariiy' apply to what a person does with the voice. It does apply in instrument building, the Oud etc.)

Isn't what you do on a harpshichord predicated on a tempering of... 12? I see that the thrust is to restore true intervals, but when you discuss it you compare to ET, yes/no? How would one implement something that doesn't have that as a template? Anything past 12 ET freaks people out I think. I don't know that I have the intellect to abstract from other than such restricted 'predication'. YMMV.

There was a couple of Turks and otherwise Arabs and me lobbying VSL repeatedly for this feature. Fortunately they listen to everything over there.

Kristofer Emerig said:

That sounds like a very nice feature. The only shortcoming I see is that it is still predicated on the assumption of some sort of temperament of the twelve tone scale.
If I could imagine the ultimate DAW, as well as notation system of the future, it would be a modular staff of as many lines as the composer chooses. Instead of assumed frequencies and key signatures, the composer would simply assign frequencies to each line, perhaps printed in the key signature area. This imaginary DAW would have the capability to "portamento" any note to an adjacent one by any number of user defined curves (linear, parabolic, or none at all, just leap to it - whatever). I think that would enable just about any conceivable polyphonic experiment one could conjure. Mind you, in such a notation system, one could still write "conventional" music, but the flexibility would allow for much more. Jan Civil said:

horns and strings players will know to adjust some things, to give proper natural pungency or flavor/spice to such things, esp. in the realm of ('dominant/tonic') tonality.
VI Pro has a window now where you can adjust +/- 50 cent on any tone, and a humanize function to control the timing of such 'corrections'. The whole interface is made to obviate all of this, til now standard in sequencer work, separate tracks to get realism.
It's less 'messy'.