Feature Request: Global Ghost Notes display in Key Editor

[riflinka]

Global Ghost Notes is a static image of all notes from all chosen tracks, displayed in the background of Key Editor.

While it’s simple, it’s also extremely useful for UX to immediately see the MIDI context in Key Editor, and it’s a massive time saver for certain types of workflow, such as but not limited to:

• Harmonization - you see the chords instantly even if all voices are on separate tracks
• Orchestration / Voice management
• Quick editing and jumping from part to part, constantly reopening Key Editor
• Adjusting note position to match to some other track
• Drawing CC Curves in the active track to match notes in other tracks

How it looks in FL Studio:

There is also a selector menu where you can choose, which tracks to render to Ghost Notes.

In Cubase, currently the only way to achieve something like this is by manually selecting tracks/parts you want to see each time you open a Key Editor, which takes a lot of time and breaks the state of flow (because you switch your focus from the MIDI editing to remembering and searching tracks), especially with the freeze from “Show All” function.

Ghost Notes don’t need to be editable or selectable, just a background image to see the context.

There were a lot of similar requests before, so I hope this will be considered.

[Johnny_Monteo]

You just need to use the “Show all tracks” option.

[riflinka]

Exactly, you NEED to use it, and:

• You waste at least 1 second every time, which accumulates, and more importantly, can interrupt a state of flow, which is very dangerous if you are focused and work fast.
• You waste 1-3 more seconds in a heavy 1000-track project because of the loading freeze.
• You can’t show only desired tracks that way, for example a sketch piano.

I can tell you more, you can make a macro using the following trick:

This will show all tracks, bring the selected track to the foreground, and focus on an active part. It removes the 1 second delay, but the freeze is not going anywhere, just like the need to constantly press a macro button.

My suggestion eliminates all that - you would need to only configure it once, and then every time you open any part, you will have a static-ish image rendered in background to guide you.

You probably won’t understand the reason for such optimizations if your workflow is more relaxed, and that’s fine, but I just can not afford to waste the momentum as a full time game developer, graphics programmer and music composer. And people who work fast and rely on reaction time like me do exist, and many daws already have this feature.