Cubase Tutorial: 10 MIDI Key Editor Tips and Tricks

what's up everyone we're back with another tutorial in Cubase today I'm going to give you ten quick tips to use the key editor in Cubase so I've just written this in and MIDI and you can click into it and you get the key editor and some people find the key editor intimidating but once you learn a few quick tips everything becomes much much easier so let's just jump right in first is the settings that I like to use here on my top bar so this is your snap setting and that's hotkey J with snap off you can place things wherever you want on red as you can see they're not lined up to the lines so we'll take those out with snap on it will line up to your quantum lines it will snap to your grid that is important and the way I am putting in this is number two the way I'm putting in notes is using the modifier key vault it turns your selection key into a pencil and allows you to draw now if you didn't want to do that and you wanted to change it to a pencil the hotkey would be 8 but I find that a bit laborious because then you have to hit one to go back to your selection key so number two tip is definitely alt so number one tip is have snap on because if you're editing MIDI with a mouse and a keyboard it is nice to snap it to the grid the next thing would be I would advise you use grid as your manner of editing as opposed to any of these others grid relative would work as well but just for the sake of argument grid is good so number 3 tip let's discuss quantize and lengths these are key hotkeys for when you're editing MIDI control - selects the previous quantize and control equals or plus I think it's control equals selects the next quantize this is great for when you want to change the quantize on the fly and you will want to do that if you're editing MIDI with a mouse so just keep those in mind and as a caveat I will say that I know that these hotkeys were setup when I first started using Cubase but I not certain whether or not when I switched to Cubase Pro 9 they were still there so if you need to map those or if you want to map those to something you know for all the key commands you can search quantize or whatever and you'll get you know your list of key commands and I have these set up as ctrl + equals and ctrl + - or underscore whatever and that works for me but if you have a different idea of what you'd like to do or you want to set the individual quantizes because that's how it works with lengths you can't actually choose and next so if we go back to hotkeys and we look for length key commands lengths set insert length it's Alt + the number so as you can see 1 is 1 1 2 is half note 4 3 is quarter note before they snowed so the length is important so right now it's set to eighth notes so if I draw a note it will be an eighth note but if I switch this to 16th or I can use the hotkey alt for five all five it will switch to sixteenths and you'll see when I draw on a note it'll be a sixteenth note so now that we know this that's the first three things use Alt key as your modifier to draw in notes have snap-on and grid relative and number three is quantized as control equals and control - and length is all one two three four five all the way up depending on how long you want your notes to be so now that we know this let's just go ahead and do a little bit of entering of notes so I'll set the quantize to eighth notes and let's just move right in a baseline see we'll just walk into the scale and we'll actually make these quarters so we'll switch the length to quarters by hitting all three and then we'll go back to 801 D I'll make these quarters GE CE o and I didn't actually play what I had here was just something I wrote in and MIDI so that you probably see in there cool and this should probably be a G right here and that is my tip number 4 if you want to move a note up and down the scale you just need to use your up and down arrow key that will come in handy trust me so we've learned four things so far and they are you snap on grid how to change your quantize in your length and how to insert notes the first three and the fourth is how to change a notes pitch was up and down the next thing is you know there will be often times where you want to move a note along with a quantize path and that's easy too that is control and arrow so this is tip number six to move it along a quantize path and that works for whatever you select so if I wanted this whole thing it's set up to eighth notes so if I wanted to start one bar later I would select everything hit control one two three four five six seven eight that's how eighth notes work and the whole thing starts 1 bar later let's take a listen [Applause] hey not too shabby so we have this piece and we can just move it back one two three four five six seven eight and if you wanted to transpose the whole thing it's in C because it's easiest to write in C because as long as you don't have any other black notes here okay a little tip for you but if we wanted to transpose it let's say - B flat we have everything selected and we just and the whole song is in B flat or a sharp would depending on your viewpoint so same so that's an easy way to transpose just select everything and move it up or down and it shouldn't really screw anything up because if you write it in a certain key it'll work in any key now that is tip number six so let's get it back in D as opposed just our original thing and let's say you wanted to select multiple things at a time using your keyboard and this I use this all the time so you have this G selected on this chord here well if you hold shift and use the right and left arrows you can select the whole reward so if you want this to hit an eighth note later you know you can select the whole chord and move it so and you gets like this and move it but if you wanted to not select everything we could do it that way so that is tip number seven you use the shift key to select multiple notes at a time that's pretty handy now let's take a look at tip number eight and this is where we get into some of the sweet stuff there's controller lanes down here and they control things like let's take a look at what they control velocity pitch Bend aftertouch and then you get into your big MIDI stuff like modulation and expression expression is basically like volume within volume velocity is more or less just the volume of a note and sustain sustained is on 64 so you can choose whatever Lane you wish and as you see I've done some stuff here where Lane 64 comes in right here and that's kind of screwed up so it moves back and so the sustain is on but if we take the sustain off you will hear so if we go back to where the sustain was on I think this is supposed to be there you'll hear the sustain ringing out and you can you know automate when the sustain goes on and off as if you had a sustain pedal and you were playing the piano so that is very helpful another thing and this is where Cubase becomes a great teaching tool is this tab right here on the left and this is tip number nine chord editing so if you're wondering what chord is this you just highlight it and they'll tell you it's F over a and let's say you add the D in there oops what is that that's D minor seven actually and then in its original incarnation with the B it's actually F over B so you can see you know what the chords are and if you don't like a specific chord like I don't like this coil this is C over G well we can go to inversions here and cycle through and you know it'll move lowest note to the top and you'll get different [Music] [Applause] we can go back down sounds silly but [Music] so not bad that is tip number nine you can do inversions and you can see what type of chord you're dealing with in this chord editing tab finally let's go to something that is pretty amazing and powerful in Cubase it's here and the where is it oh yeah it's in the MIDI tab that's what that's what I was going to say it's here in the MIDI tab and there are these logical presets so if you select everything there are a bunch of them and a lot of them are awesome like delete short notes you can fix all velocities at one hundred so if we go back to our controller lane and select velocity we can see our velocity and so this is all editable let's say it's all over the sides someone had a choppy performance in real life you want to select all these and compress it it will compress it's not like a compressor because there's no coloring of the tone it just sort of evens out all the volume so this is compressed and this is total velocity this will perform a fade if you drag from the corner so that's helpful to know - that's a bonus tip and going back to what I was talking about before MIDI logical presets you can fix all velocity at 100 you can do you really got to dig into these because they are very cool add octaves to chords with less than four voices listen to that now this [Music] that's pretty awesome so that is my tip number 10 dig into the logical presets see if some of them work for you because they are pretty impressive so those are my 10 quick tips for editing MIDI in Cubase I hope you found this helpful if you didn't feel free to like or subscribe and if you'd like to see me do something in the future feel free to leave a comment take care everyone I hope you all have a great day bye bye you

Channel: Talking Leaf Media

Views: 107,005

Keywords: Cubase, Tutorial, DAW, MIDI, Key Editor, Shortcut, Editing Piano, Audio Engineering, Producing, Music Production, How To, Talking Leaf Media

Id: 2quzr2AZO8k

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2017