drawing notes in MIDI Editor problem

[levelaudio]

Is there any way to draw notes of a fixed duration freely up and down the scale with a single click & drag?

It seems no matter which pencil tool drawing shape or key modifiers I use, I'm limited to either drawing one really long note, or a series of shorter notes, but all at the same pitch/MIDI note number. If I move the pointer up and down the scale, it simply changes the pitch of all the note(s) I'm drawing, rather than drawing a new note at a different pitch.

So, is there any way to draw in a series of notes in Pro Tools at different pitches with a single mouse click & drag operation?

[Darryl Ramm]

It's pretty unclear what exactly you are trying to do or why.

You click each note in with the mouse cursor one at a time. I don't follow what else you would want it to do with trying to simultaneously enter multiple different notes. Maybe you need a MIDI keyboard.

If you are trying to get the MIDI notes to uniform length you set the timeline grid to the value you want and set the timeline edit mode to Grid Absolute.

You can do all sorts of stuff.

When in Grid edit modes command-Click lets you enter a note as if you are in slip edit mode. And if you are in slip edit mode then Command-Click enters a note in Grid Absolute mode.

If you select the freehand (aka normal) pencil tool and click-drag it it creates a note of the length you hold the mouse clicked. If you select the square wave (or some of the other) pencil and drag a note out you get a string of notes at whatever grid value you have defined (in any edit mode).

Like you can also select or multi-select and stretch note beginnings and ends and slide notes or multi-select groups of notes up and down the scale as it sounds like you have discovered. Maybe you can find some online video tutorials about the MIDI editor (look on YouTube and Groove3.com) that will at least show what the timeline or full MIDI editor can do and some of the handy shortcuts.

Have I totally missed what you are asking?

[daeron80]

No, not with a single click-drag. One MIDI note number per click.

[daeron80]

That could be pretty cool, though, if it were well implemented. Which I would not trust Avid to do, by the way. But one could imagine setting the key and entering chords in the ruler. Then a simple click drag would create a string of chromatic notes, holding option would constrain notes to the diatonic scale of the key, holding option+shift would constrain to the pentatonic scale of the key, and holding alt would constrain to the current chord. That could be an amazing way to quickly create custom, changing arpeggios.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by levelaudio

Is there any way to draw notes of a fixed duration freely up and down the scale with a single click & drag?

It seems no matter which pencil tool drawing shape or key modifiers I use, I'm limited to either drawing one really long note, or a series of shorter notes, but all at the same pitch/MIDI note number. If I move the pointer up and down the scale, it simply changes the pitch of all the note(s) I'm drawing, rather than drawing a new note at a different pitch.

So, is there any way to draw in a series of notes in Pro Tools at different pitches with a single mouse click & drag operation?

Are you aware of the note length setting? For example, you can choose to have every note(made by double-click with the smart tool) be an eighth note, quarter note, etc. It might be worth a free week's trial at groove3.com and watching some tutorials