I’m trying to do something that is trivial and common in every other piece of music software I’ve used: select a span of MIDI notes in Cubase 14, copy them to the clipboard, move the insertion point/play head later in the track, and paste them.
I’ve read everything I can find on Forums, I searched the user manual, I’ve chatted endlessly with Perplexity about it, and I’m beginning to conclude that it is simply impossible to do – you cannot clone a section of midi notes to another part of the track, and therefore… the DAW is simply unusable? How could they mess up something so basic and common?
Select notes with mouse. Hit Ctrl+C to copy to clipboard
Double click at destination, or double-click and move the playhead manually, or alt-click or any other combination you can think of
Paste with Ctrl+V. Doesn’t work. Alt+Shift+V? Nope. Try a mathematically thorough combination of all variations. Nope.
I’m sure I’m missing something and will come away feeling dumb when it’s pointed out, but as much as I’ve started to like Cubase in 2 days of experiments, this feels like a deal-breaker: if you can’t do cut-and-paste, what else is fundamentally broken?
Are you talking about the Key Editor? Is the focus still in the Key Editor, when you try to Paste? Is the Cursor within the given MIDI Part, when you try to Past?
Could you please attach a screenshot, before you press Ctrl+V?
Thanks for responding, Martin. In the attached image, I selected 4 bars of midi notes by left-clicking and dragging the mouse over the notes.
Now if I press Ctrl+C, I’m expecting them to be placed on the clipboard. Then, I move forward to bar 36 and click in the bar-marker strip to set the white vertical cursor:
Expecting to paste the notes at that bar marker, I’ve tried all the combinations of keys and menus I can find. At best, I get a 2nd copy of the the notes at the original position – which seems like an utterly pointless feature?
Lots of searching for “how to copy and paste midi notes in Cubase” has not helped, and the manual does not help. If there are good tutorials somewhere I have yet to find them. It feels like a generally abandoned product?
Sorry I just discovered that if I create a virgin project, add an empty midi “event”, draw a few notes… I can copy and paste them without incident. So there’s something about my project that’s locked or broken or … disabled. Don’t know. Lacking the knowledge and experience to troubleshoot, I’m inclined to start over with a fresh project space and copy (!) the content of the old project to the new. Don’t wish to waste your time, thanks for helping.
If you have resource suggestions for newcomers-to-cubase (I have extensive production experience with other tools), that would be great
Is it possible that bar 36 lies outside of the MIDI Part you are editing?
One thing that can be confusing is that in Cubase Notes don’t live on Tracks. Notes live in MIDI Parts and these MIDI Parts are what live on the Tracks.
And that would be a MIDI Part. MIDI Events are things like Note On/Off or cc messages. The jargon throughout Cubase can be a bit different from most DAWs because it was created before folks settled on a common terminology.
Yeah, it’s in the range. But I’ve moved on – presumably if I persist then the day will come when I would see the root cause in retrospect. But trying to work that out now seems too challenging. My new project is working and until the next bit of madness appears
Anthony is doing a wonderful job of explaining a lot about Cubase. I think his main target are people who not necessarily experts with DAWs already, so it might be a bit slow paced for you. It’s a 16 video long playlist.
