Key editor - issues and wishes

[HerrDerToene]

Here are some exercises I’d like to be able to do with the Key Editor for educational purposes:

• Show students the key editor grid, tell them a note value, let them enter it to the grid, check if the right note value appears
• Dictate a rhythm, let students fill in that rhythm on the grid of the key editor, observe what happens to the notation (beaming, ties, rests)

I think it’s a really nice way to explore and experiment with rhythmic notation.

Issues I ran into:

• Notes of the same pitch are visually not separated very well in the key editor (see image at the bottom)
• In pencil mode to enter a longer note value one has to click long and drag for a note to be drawn. That makes it impossible to enter a complex rhythm fast. As a long time Cubase user I’d prefer to stay in cursor mode and just use option click for immediate note entry.
• Can we please get a pinch zoom gesture in the key editor?

[dspreadbury]

Thanks for the feedback. You will find at least that switching to “played durations” display provides you with visual separation of abutting notes.

[JesterMusician]

Using played durations doesn’t work well when the Playback Option have notes playing at almost full value and humanize is off. I think it would be clearer if each rectangular note in the key editor had rounded corners or beveled corners, or maybe some shadowing?

[HerrDerToene]

In Cubase 11 each note just has a thin border which would be perfectly fine with me:

[dspreadbury]

Adding a border around the note rectangles means they’re quite a lot more expensive to draw. But I agree that we should provide some kind of differentiation between successive notes of the same pitch, and we’ll come up with something in due course.