Locking certain Midi Notes?

Cubase
1

Hi all!

First of all, sorry for my english, it’s not my mother tongue.

I have always been wondering if there’s a way to lock specific midi notes to avoid them to be modified in any way (position, velocity, whatsoever…) …

The reason why I’m asking this is because of the following fact:
I often find myself building really complex drum fills or something similar … things, that can take me hours to get them finished, because of the fact that I want them to sound as natural as possible.

Problem Nr 1: when building such midi rhythms or melodies I also very often use quantizing on many notes, with the help of the default key command ‘Q’. Now, it unfortunately rather often happens that I accidentally hit the Q button without having any of the midi notes highlighted/selected at this moment. So EVERY midi note in my event is getting quantized AND THE BIGGEST PROBLEM HERE: of course sometimes I don’t even realize it. So I keep on building for hours and hours on several parts, when I suddenly realize that all the building that I’ve done some days ago is destroyed, because I must have accidentally hit the Q button during the current day.

Problem Nr 2:
Maybe some more information about my workflow regarding building virtual drums for example:
I very often like to quantize just some parts of my drum set, for example I like to have the kick drum to be quantized rather tight, while I like my cymbals to be more natural and a little off the grid.
Therefore it would be awesome to lock a whole note area, let’s say for example: look every note except for note 36 where my kick drum is. Then just hit the Q button and I don’t have to worry about having selected the right notes and not accidentally having selected some snare or so.

I know I could use seperate midi tracks for each drum part (kick, snare, hihat, etc.), at least for solving problem nr 2, but I want everything inside one midi editor.
And of course I want to solve both problems.

I also know that there is the logical editor and if no one of you guys will be able to help me further with the above described problems, then I will start using the logical editor in the future in some way…
but I thought before taking this step I should ask in this forum, if there are any features I haven’t found yet or if there is another way to improve my workflow and make things a little easier and less complicated.

By the way: I have also already thought about building a logical editor preset that is called something like “quantize selected” and put it onto a key command, so I cannot accidentally quantize ALL notes if there is nothing selected… unfortunately (as far as I can remember) this is not possible to do with the logical editor :frowning:

So, YES, I have already thought this whole topic through in detail but I am still looking forward to some replies and suggestions of course!
BIG THANKS in advance!

And to steinberg: Very good upgrade with cubase 7, the trackversions alone are worth 50€, at least for me, at least for my workflow!

Best regards
ben

2

Hi Ben,

it is possible to have your parts on individual tracks and still edit them all together by selecting all the parts. Is this not an option?

When you want to lock a part, simply lock the track. The part will still show up in the editor along with any other selected parts.

3

Hi Steve,

thank you very much for your quick reply… your idea brought me to another idea in the end:
I’m going to use lanes / subtracks onto one single instrument track. I use one lane for kick, one for snare and one for the rest of the drum kit. Since you can not only lock whole tracks in cubase but also individual lanes this is the perfect solution for me!

Best regards
ben