Quickest way to move selected midi notes from one clip/instrument to another?

Good day, everyone.

So I’m working on a piece with a ton of different midi instruments. Often, I’ll have written or recorded parts for specific instruments, but later I decide to swap certain notes from one instrument to another.

Here’s one example situation, and the kind of functionality I hope to discover:

  • Two concurrent clips are selected. Each belongs to a separate track/instrument. Let’s say that one is cello, and the other is violin.
  • The editor displays all the notes from both instruments. Certain notes would sound better if I swapped them from cello to violin, or the other way around.
  • After selecting the notes that I intend to swap, I press the super awesome magical hotkey that you guys are about to tell me about. Maybe a special dialog comes up, wherein I can select which track I want to move the notes to. Or, maybe it automatically swaps them to the other selected clip/instrument that I’m editing.

There are multiple approaches to this problem, but the ones I already know about are pretty inefficient. Here’s the fastest one I know:

  • select the notes that I intend to swap. Let’s say I’m swapping them from violin to cello.
  • press l to move the playhead to the start of the first selected note
  • press cmd-x to cut the notes out of their original violin clip
  • select the cello track
  • press cmd-v to paste the notes, creating a new clip in the cello track
  • if applicable/desired: merge the new cello clip with the original that it’s sitting atop

If my described quick swap functionality isn’t yet a thing, what’s the fastest way to achieve it within Cubase today? I’m working with version 12 Pro.

Thanks for your time.

You don’t need to create a new MIDI Part for the pasted Notes. Open the MIDI Parts for both the Violin & Cello in the Key Editor. Make sure the Violin Part is active and do the cut then make the Cello Part the active one and do your paste.

From your description it sounds like you are trying to do this in the Project Window but the Key Editor is better for the task.

1 Like

You mad genius, why didn’t I think to try that? Definitely an improvement - thanks!