Suggestions for the piano-roll

[somniumdigitalmedia]

Greetings. This is my first post. I love Cubasis and the direction Steinberg is taking it with the release of the high quality plugins and the yearly improvements and video tutorials. I have made some very cool tracks in Cubasis using the Micrologue synth – it is a surprisingly powerful sounding synth, and it comes with a generous amount of high quality presets. However, over the years (I have owned Cubasis since version 1) I mostly used it for audio and not MIDI. I am considering investing more time in Cubasis in the future now that I own Halion.

I’ve got all the other DAWs on IOS, pretty much all of them. I like to play favourites, to get very familiar with the workflow and features, and for this reason, I mostly work in Gadget. I own Grooverider II which is amazing, but between Gadget, Grooverider II and Cubasis, for my style of songwriting, there are only two important features that are deal-maker/deal-breakers for me, and the dealbreaker with Grooverider II is that it hasn’t given us access to the CC automation window, and when I am writing piano, I need access to the damper automation. So this leaves me with Cubasis and Gadget. Gadget has two important advantages over Cubasis which I want to bring to your attention, and I will make a suggestion.

Folding/Scale-Aware Piano-roll for Clips and Setting the Clip/song Key

First, folding/scale aware piano-roll. A folding/scale-aware piano-roll is important fundamentally because we are working on small screens (I work on an iPad mini.) If I want to have two octaves in view, this makes note input very difficult, as the note lanes are incredibly narrow. Folding/scale-aware view gives me the notes I want and not the ones I don’t want and it gives me more space for my fat fingers, or Apple Pencil to move around. In Gadget, there is a “Function” button that allows you to choose between ‘scale on’, ‘scale-off’ and ‘in-use’. These kinds of features are what keep me working in Gadget 99% of the time, this and the access to all the MIDI automation. What I would recommend in Cubasis is to use the side panel, left of the vertical piano. Create an icon that looks like a quarter note or something. Tapping the icon opens a pop-up window containing the features: 1. Set the scale for the clip (not the song), 2. Set the view in the clip to All / Scale / or In Use. To take it the extra mile, you can also set the song key in the tempo window perhaps.

Note Duplicate

Secondly, Gadget has a feature to duplicate a note or a group of notes. I use this feature often for things like working with notes in a certain velocity range, or duplicating passages or chords etc. Cubasis needs this. Copy/paste simply doesn’t work when the clip is playing and the cursor is moving. Duplicating the notes in Gadget basically overlays the duplicated notes on the existing ones and you drag them where they need to go. I would recommend adding the Duplicate icon beside the Copy icon, or between the Copy and Paste Icons. Recognising this might cramp the space for the Grid Quantize icon, I would recommend moving this icon over to the left panel as well, grouped with the suggested Scale icon.

I hope that is clear. I will be making a few more suggestions in other posts.

Regards

[somniumdigitalmedia]

Just to provide a bullet point summary:

• Suggested improvements for a touch-screen oriented piano-roll editor:
• Scale aware settings
  • Scale aware/folded piano roll that can apply to the entire song, or per clip
  • Set the song key in the tempo window
  • Set the clip key adding an icon to the panel left of the vertical piano, clicking the icon opens a pop up window allowing users to choose their key and scale type. It also allows the user to choose whether the piano roll has all keys (chromatic), scale only keys (folded) or the keys in the clip that are used (in use, which is very useful for making edits). The last request is a stretch.
• Note duplicate: Moving the clip quantise icon to the left panel, add a new icon between copy and paste, called duplicate. Selected notes will be duplicated as an overlay that can be dragged into place. Copy/paste does not work well if the cursor is moving/the clip is playing.

[LSlowak]

Hi @somniumdigitalmedia

Thanks, and shared with the team.

Best,
Lars

[somniumdigitalmedia]

I hope it’s not too confusing if I add to this thread with some more ideas / observations, but here it goes anyway. More suggestions for the piano-roll:

Select Tool

I am note sure if it’s a feature or a bug or something about my iPad mini, but whenever I activate the select tool, if I don’t hold in place and wait at least a second, the Lasso will not expand. By touching the screen and moving my finger immediately, the Lasso will not do anything. It will just pulsate uselessly. You have to touch and hold and then you can move your Lasso. This to me, feels like a bug. Please let me know if you are aware of it or if you need me to take a video that can re-create it for you to see.

Point two. Select all. I am aware that double tapping when Select is activated in Clip Editor that you can select all notes, but this is a problem for me because in the Timeline Editor, or Song Arranger, it does not behave similarly. Double tapping in Timeline Editor frustratingly deactivates the select tool. And to be honest, I am not a fan of the double tap to begin with.

It seems to me that we do not have a ‘Select all’ in the timeline editor. What I suggest instead:

• Both in the Clip Editor, and in the Timeline Editor, when Select is activated and an element is touched (whether it is a Note, or an Automation Point, or a Clip) we get a Pop-up to ‘Select all’.

Summary

• Possible bug with the Select Lasso tool. It needs to be more responsive.
• Touch an element, (note, automation point, or clip) to get a pop-up select all (in the clip, or in the timeline)

Scrolling/Zooming

Two finger zooming in Cubasis has ALWAYS been way to sensitive and jittery for my taste. In Gadget I can zoom very reliably. And here’s the thing, the people at Korg very cleverly separated horizontal zoom from vertical zoom. Pinching and expanding in the Piano-roll area only gives you horizontal zoom, which 95.73% of the time, is all you want for your zoom. When you need vertical zoom, you pinch over the Vertical Piano. Ironically, this is the zoom behaviour in the Timeline Editor. Pinch to zoom in the track lane, horizontal zoom only. Good. Pinch to zoom on the track Channel element, vertical zoom. We want the same inside the clips. PLEASE!!!

Secondly, the Lock tool is placed off to the top left, behind the vertical piano, and the zoom tool is located in the bottom right. I feel as thought the Lock tool and the Zoom tool belong side by side. Logically this makes more sense to me.

Lastly, the Zoom tool is too small. There is ample room on the right hand corner for a larger Zoom tool element, and I like it very much, but it is too small, and since it is tucked at the bottom corner, it means that when you try and fiddle with it, iOS recognises it as a window gesture.

Summary

• Reduce the sensitivity of the pinch zoom from 100% down to about 85%
• Disable vertical/horizontal combined zooming. Pinch zooming in the piano-roll should be horizontal only.
• Use the pinch gesture on top of the Vertical Piano for vertical zooming.
• Request to enlarge the Zoom tool located in the bottom right corner, significantly
• Relocate the Lock tool to sit beside the Zoom tool in the bottom right corner, rather than behind the Vertical Piano.

Hope that makes sense, and I really hope we see some more testing and attention given to the MIDI editing in future updates.

[somniumdigitalmedia]

I would also like to point out that this little element that appears on top of the Piano-roll window, it is redundant and obstructive.

If I am doing split-screen work with the Piano-roll and the Timeline Editor, it means I want to move between tracks and clips.

There is absolutely no need for this thing to sit on top of the Piano-roll window. Rather, it belongs behind it.

If I want to add tracks, I would close the Piano-roll and add tracks.

When I have the Piano-roll open in split screen, it is because I want access to something in the Timeline editor.

This thing just gets in my way!!!

Please tell the devs, we DON’T need it and we DON’T like it here.

[CJ_Monster]

This can be easily bypassed by adding an empty channel so you can easily do whtever you want to do on the channel you are working on by scrolling it a tad up.

Keep in mind that this is not really a problem on larger screens/screenmodes

[somniumdigitalmedia]

Fair point. But I am not buying another iPad until Apple gives us a second USB port and I will wait as long as it takes before I give Apple more of my hard earned money.

[Samuel_Lindeman]

You can still swipe-scroll to the other tracks?!

Personally I’ve never seen those buttons as a ‘problem’ when using smaller devices like the iPhone 16…

[somniumdigitalmedia]

In my opinion it’s unnecessary and obstructive. Here is a use case example. I am writing inside a clip, and I decide I want to solo the track. Those buttons get in the way.

But It’s not a hill I need to die on, so to speak. I am just offering a bunch of comments from a user perspective. There’s a lot of room for UI optimisation when it comes to writing MIDI in Cubasis.