4. Editing and quantising a MIDI performance

1 Continuing from our previous tutorial, we’ve got a bit of MIDI data recorded on the Drum Machine track. It’s a live performance, consisting of a simple beat using only the kick and snare drums. As you can see, the recording ends just after the beginning of bar 5.

2 To tighten the clip’s length, we want to excise that overlapping end section beyond bar 5, beat 1. Do this by placing your mouse pointer along the top-right of the MIDI recording and dragging it left. It should snap to the correct length.

3 Hover your pointer over the Beat Ruler at the top of the project (until it becomes a magnifier), then drag down to zoom out on our timeline. To loop the clip’s playback for more than four bars, place your pointer over the bottom-right of the clip and drag to the right.

4 Double-click the clip to open the piano roll-style editor in the lower Detail Editor Panel. There are tabs to the left for choosing between the actual Track, which contains all of the data, and the Clip, which contains only the data we originally recorded. Click the latter. We’ll drag and select all of the notes in the clip.

5 Right-click one of the notes in the piano roll. A menu appears, from which we choose the Quantize option. All highlighted notes will jump to the nearest step. Though we’ve only quantised a single clip in our project, all of the copies will play back quantised, too.

6 Let’s manually draw some open and closed hi-hats into our pattern. In the upper-left of the editor sits a box in which our Pointer tool is indicated. Click on that to select a different editing tool, choose the Pen tool, then click to draw in hi-hat notes. Double-click or right-click a note to delete it.