the note I hear is indeed a dotted quarter note, what I would expect.
the note written is still a quarter note. whatever I do.
I need to explicitly click the augmentation dot in the toolbar to see it right.
having added the augmentation dot that way, selecting (undotted) quarter note in the quantise box and using fixed length : same thing, the note written does not correspond to what you hear.
call it a trifle if you want, but it’s just one of the many things that make this score editor so unpractical.
Hi Martin, thanks for the tip, but yes I checked the key editor, there the length is shown correctly. I also hear that it’s correct. But it’s written differently in the score editor. closing/opening editors has no effect. the length field in the info-line also says it’s a dotted quarter note, but I see a quarter note in the score. I don’t use the DQ, instrument setting is 1/16, should be no problem
It’s not a solution but it sounds like another manifestation of what we discussed below. We need a “literal mode” in the score editor. I was struggling with this issue again today myself.
yeah, I read your other post before, and it seems to be the same kind of issue I now realise. I also need to set the correct representation manually using the toolbar. But it would make a lot more sense if it came automatic. Much in favor of what you call ‘literal mode’.
I think @PaulWalmsley people at Steinberg are aware of this? It’s the composer that writes the music and makes his choices, not cubase?
This behaviour is intentional. In Cubase a note has two ‘personalities’ – it’s notated appearance and its playback duration. When you record a part the note durations are not quantised (and often when importing a MIDI file too). Quantize changes the playback duration of the notes and Display Quantize changes the appearance. All notes have a MIDI duration property, but notes may also have an optional notation duration property.
When you click a notehead duration or note dot from the Score Editor toolbar, this is telling the Editor that you are making an explicit decision about how you want the note to be notated by setting this notated duration property. However, when you choose a duration from the Quantize toolbar then you are making an explicit decision about how you want the note to be played.
If you have notes that were originally entered by the score editor toolbar but then you change their playback durations eg with the quantize toolbar, then you can remove the notated duration properties with Score > Reset Properties
Sorry, I don’t think I like that double system very much, unless there would be an option to force the score editor to show the midi length yes or no, so the user can decide what to show. As a composer I want to see the true length (the one that you hear)
Now I have to check everything all the time and keep my ears open if I hear what is written.
Hi @PaulWalmsley, thanks for explaining more but how are we supposed to know which personality the note has taken on? Unless I’m mistaken we can’t see that and it leads to all this confusion.
I think the current approach assumes we can glance and spot issues between midi and notation and take manual action, but for example I’m working on a 350 bar piece of music in 5 parts that has taken a few weeks to write where that is just not practical.
I’d just like to have the option of knowing my midi notes are the same duration as notation.
If you require a more ‘literal’ mode then I suggest turning off Fill Gaps mode as this will turn off some of the logic that cleans up recorded MIDI to produce a cleaner result. There is a bug that was reported on the other thread which I have now fixed and will be in the next update. Also in the next update there will be a ‘Quantize as Notated’ menu item which will set the playback length of notes to how they are notated (in earlier Cubase versions this was called ‘Score notes to MIDI’)
Unfortunately I don’t think there is a simple way of solving this issue because for users who work with recorded MIDI, notes will have different played durations and notated durations, and so there needs to be a way of having the two things be different.
it was there in C13 as well, but it doesn’t look very handy. Never used it. You have to edit note by note as I understand. I want to be confident that what I intend and what I hear is also notated. I don’t understand why it should be written differently, makes no sense to me.
It’s because for many (most?) users, they record live MIDI rather than click to enter each note, and you don’t want to quantize recorded events because that makes it sound very mechanical. So the score editor has to make decisions about the best note lengths to use, in order to create the cleanest notation. Sometimes the user wants the note to appear a bit longer or shorter, but they don’t want to change the playback.
If you work primarily from notation I would urge you to try out Dorico, because that may be more aligned with your expectations.
Our goal with the Score Editor is that it’s to visualise and edit note data within Cubase. We don’t intend that it is a comprehensive score editing package. We know that some users liked the old score editor, but we’ve found that really very few people used it because you could get some good results, but it was very hard to use.
Daniel’s blog post from the initial launch describes why we decided to take this approach:
Because midi in Cubase has a much finer time resolution than what you use in score sheets. Thus the positions have to be “translated”.
It is not so easy in notation to express whether a note is supposed to be played 2ms before the grid or 5ms.
I’m on Sibelius for creating the actual sheet music, that I’ve composed/arranged in Cubase.
I’ll learn to live with this. For my own ‘free’ music I don’t care much about notation, the sound is what it’s all about. For my orchestra’s it’s a different thing.
This new score editor does look much better engraving-wise from the old C13 score editor. Very happy with that!
I was going to post a few feature-requests though, but maybe I can do it here:
- muted notes used to be greyed out. Now I can’t tell the difference between muted/unmuted notes.
- more editing ease: copying notes (option-click and drag on a mac) in one go to any position, pitch or staff. Now it takes multiple steps.
I’ve added the request for showing muted notes differently as a couple of people have mentioned it. However, we do also need the ability for muted notes to be drawn regularly because one of the common use cases is that extra notes are added to be shown in the score but not heard during playback. Conversely, it’s required that notes can be played back but not shown in the score.
We know that there are a number of editing operations that are difficult at the moment. The UI code from Dorico that is now in the score editor is completely different to the C13 score editor and operations such as dragging have to be totally rewritten.
