One of the things I like about the note tools popover (Shift+I) is that I can work with nonconsecutive notes or chords. But I don’t like that it restricts me to working with intervals only, requiring me to switch to other modes if I want to add a fixed note.
I started with this…
…and wanted to get to this…
If I use Alt/Opt with the mouse and drag, the lower notes are (diatonically) parallel to the upper notes—intervals. So, I tried the note tools popover, where I hoped that typing something like “-c” would get me what I wanted, by analogy with “-3” for a third below. But that doesn’t work; I checked the documentation, and I’m limited to just intervals there as well.
This functionality was first requested seven years ago, but nothing came out of that request at the time. It was suggested in response to use Q for the first note followed by R to repeat the new note. Normally, this would be a nice workaround, but R doesn’t work that well with nonconsecutive selections. I suppose that I could simply type R to get the low C in all of the subsequent notes and then simply delete the extra ones, but it would save time if I could simply add notes above or below on a fixed pitch.
There are three ways I can see this being implemented: “c” for C above, “-c” for C below, and “c3/c4” (etc.) for C in a given octave; likewise for other pitches.