I often start music or sections with a few beats of silence. But when I select and copy notes from one Part to paste into another another, Cubase left-justifies the first note to the program cursor position during the Paste, forcing me to either move them subsequently or move the cursor before pasting. This is extra work. How do I prevent this?
By comparison, here’s how FL Studio’s Piano Roll does it:
… the yellow border is the selection region. Notice that it includes two quarter notes of empty space. (AKA a half-note rest) So I do a Ctrl-C (copy) and in the bottom image I do a Ctrl-V (paste) into another instrument and the empty space in my selection is retained so the instruments line up.
In Cubase I make a similar selection and do a Ctrl-C (copy) and in the bottom image I do a Ctrl-V (paste) into another instrument but Cubase ignores my selection so the empty space disappears and Cubase shifts the notes.
. . .
That’s what I’ve been doing but it’s extra stuff to do and think about when you’re focusing on music. Engineers and geeks think about “objects” but anyone with formal musical training thinks about rests and notes. i.e., rhythm and melody, which is why you want to copy a whole section of your composition, rests, notes and all without privileging one over the other. I.e., think about it as a phrase, a section, a motif, etc, not have to get your head out of a musical space and descend into objects or MIDI events any more than necessary.
Cubase has a reputation of being more composer-friendly and FL-Studio has a reputation of appealing to non-musically-trained gear-heads so I’m surprised that in this case FL Studio seems more intuitively musical.
PS - I just noticed that people were asking for this feature almost 7 years ago and getting lots of +1’s. Range Selection Tool in Key editor window
… way to listen to your users, Steinberg!
I totally get where you’re coming from. It’s funny, I’m so used to how Cubase works that when I was watching a FLStudio tutorial, I thought it was magical how it knew where to paste the the copied notes.
I’m not surprised at all that this is a several versions old unaddressed feature request. It’s one of hundreds spanning generations of users. I will save my rant and frustration knowing my time left with Cubase is numbered.
Move the Timeline to wherever you want to paste the notes and ctrl-v or Paste. In your example you set the Timeline to Measure 11 and the program pasted the notes to measure 11. This will come in handy when you are pasting at differrent points in your piece.
As I explained above,I’m already doing that but it’s just a workaround that takes my mind off my music. I want to spend as much time as possible thinking about music and as little time as possible working around limitations of the tool. I want to paste my whole selection, including the starting rest, to my cursor position, as FL Studio does in the example I showed, and as a whole host of Cubase users requested in the thread I referenced from almost seven years ago.
