Visual MIDI/Audio synergy, anyone?

Cubase
1

I just gave this prompt to Gemini and was discouraged by its suggestions somewhat:

I’m editing some MIDI that controls a synth that controls a vocoder. I would like to align the key editor with the sample editor containing the spoken audio so I can visually see the peaks and align my MIDI notes with them perfectly. Is there an easy way to do this, like an alpha-blended overlay or something? It’s easy to do with multiple MIDI parts, to see all the notes, but not with audio.

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I think this would be incredibly helpful to my workflow. Anyone else feel the same?

And while I’m at it, another really nice thing would be to be able to set locators consistently, reliably, no matter what’s in the way, whether it be the cursor or anything else, by having a dedicated band of pixels that ONLY responds to e.g. Option + click or Command + click to set the left & right locators, respectively. Can’t tell you how many times to this day I get annoyed that something is in the way preventing me from doing this quickly and reliably.

2

Have you tried in-place editor (don’t remember the actual name, the one that opens a small key editor right in the project window, where the actual midi track lays? If you have adjacent midi and audio tracks it would work, I guess.

You can also build a workspace. I’ve done exactly this, with a key command I open two adjacent windows, in sync, the top with the midi part and the bottom with the score editor. Killer setup, for tidying up scores. In fact workspaces are super powerful, I have 6 configured for different workflow situations.

4

Hmmm, thank you for the ideas. I’ll try the workspace one. The in-place editing idea, maybe, but I’ve found it fiddly to work with MIDI that way in the past.

Would be cool to be able to conjure an alpha-blended overlay (underlay, really) of a given audio track or tracks, or even a more sophisticated one with spectral information so you can easily see, for example, where a snare hit lands.