[feature request] MIDI step editor

[antic604]

I'm coming from trackers background (ProTracker on Amiga, FastTracker & Renoise on PC) and one of the things I always missed in DAWs was the ease of how quickly and easy it was to enter notes with keyboard. Many of us - me definitely - cannot really play keys very well or at all, or work in genres that require fast input and it's simply impossible to do it on a MIDI keyboard "live". The other alternative - drawing boxes on a timeline with a mouse - is really unnatural, awkward (especially for chords) and ultimately it's slow, which in turn breaks the creative flow...

What I'd like to see (in Bitwig, ideally ) is a "tracker mode" in the piano-roll:
- you'd move about the piano-roll with arrows, moving a cursor - a blinking square, or something - back, forth, up & down,
- you'd place the notes with Space/Enter, and they'd by default be the length of current grid,
- if you'd play a single note or a chord on QWERTY keyboard, you could hit Space/Enter and the note(s) would be entered at cursor's position,
- if you moved the cursor on an existing note it would get highlighted and you could:
- delete it with Del/Backspace,
- move it around, holding Shift + arrow keys,
- change its length, holding Alt + left/right,
- change its velocity, holding Ctrl + up/down,

Would anyone find such a feature useful as well?

[pdxindy]

I like Midi step record in Live. That is how I would like to have it in Bitwig

[reflekshun]

I come from tracker background as well (greets!) but not as 'real' as you (modplug tracker for windows, I listened to tons of mods on amiga though and was a huge fan of the scene).

This would be pretty amazing if it happened. Even as someone that has classical background in playing piano, it's useful because a lot of electronic music is written well with this step kinda method, it's more thought out etc, using a different part of the brain, but very effective for writing in a different way from performing live on a keyboard. I also feel that Bitwig has strangely the closest feel to a tracker in some ways so we might not be the only ones who gravitated towards it who would benefit from this.

[reflekshun]

(ignore)

[sharke]

I spent many happy hours programming sequences in OctaMED on the Amiga - entering numbers into the tracker to trigger samples and more numbers for things like velocity. I used to write some pretty involved melodic lines like this, and it's a totally different way of working which stimulates a different creative part of the brain. It's also nice to put the mouse down for a while and use nothing but the keyboard. Would be a nice feature for sure, but I'm not sure how it would stack up against other feature requests.

[antic604]

Would be a nice feature for sure, but I'm not sure how it would stack up against other feature requests.

If done right, it could be pretty transparent - just click a button / key command and you can move the cursor around the clip editor, add, delete, move and change notes. It doesn't have to interfere with any other features, people may not even be aware it exists.

[sharke]

Oh yeah I agree it would not interfere with any other features - what I meant was that a software team has a finite amount of resources to develop new features, so adding one new feature is always at the expense of another one. They have to think about how many people the feature would benefit before prioritizing it for development, and I'm just not sure that tracker functionality would be as popular as other feature requests like time sig automation, better time stretching and a better sampler etc. I'd love to see it incorporated into a DAW however.

[pc999]

+1

[arrakeen]

+1 (ex OctaMED / Renoise)

[SoundLight]

I'm coming from trackers background (ProTracker on Amiga, FastTracker & Renoise on PC) and one of the things I always missed in DAWs was the ease of how quickly and easy it was to enter notes with keyboard. Many of us - me definitely - cannot really play keys very well or at all, or work in genres that require fast input and it's simply impossible to do it on a MIDI keyboard "live". The other alternative - drawing boxes on a timeline with a mouse - is really unnatural, awkward (especially for chords) and ultimately it's slow, which in turn breaks the creative flow...

What I'd like to see (in Bitwig, ideally ) is a "tracker mode" in the piano-roll:
- you'd move about the piano-roll with arrows, moving a cursor - a blinking square, or something - back, forth, up & down,
- you'd place the notes with Space/Enter, and they'd by default be the length of current grid,
- if you'd play a single note or a chord on QWERTY keyboard, you could hit Space/Enter and the note(s) would be entered at cursor's position,
- if you moved the cursor on an existing note it would get highlighted and you could:
- delete it with Del/Backspace,
- move it around, holding Shift + arrow keys,
- change its length, holding Alt + left/right,
- change its velocity, holding Ctrl + up/down,

Would anyone find such a feature useful as well?

I would say that any implementation that has all the features of FT2 > Only turned Sideways to work as PianoRoll would be the best most effective DAW anyone has seen

+1

Actually this is one of the most important the most groundbreaking feature requests on the board

Once people realize the power of this when composing, it is a whole different ballgame after that

[pdxindy]

I'm coming from trackers background (ProTracker on Amiga, FastTracker & Renoise on PC) and one of the things I always missed in DAWs was the ease of how quickly and easy it was to enter notes with keyboard. Many of us - me definitely - cannot really play keys very well or at all, or work in genres that require fast input and it's simply impossible to do it on a MIDI keyboard "live". The other alternative - drawing boxes on a timeline with a mouse - is really unnatural, awkward (especially for chords) and ultimately it's slow, which in turn breaks the creative flow...

What I'd like to see (in Bitwig, ideally ) is a "tracker mode" in the piano-roll:
- you'd move about the piano-roll with arrows, moving a cursor - a blinking square, or something - back, forth, up & down,
- you'd place the notes with Space/Enter, and they'd by default be the length of current grid,
- if you'd play a single note or a chord on QWERTY keyboard, you could hit Space/Enter and the note(s) would be entered at cursor's position,
- if you moved the cursor on an existing note it would get highlighted and you could:
- delete it with Del/Backspace,
- move it around, holding Shift + arrow keys,
- change its length, holding Alt + left/right,
- change its velocity, holding Ctrl + up/down,

Would anyone find such a feature useful as well?

You can effectively do most of that in Live's midi step mode... you do not navigate vertically to a note position with a cursor... just horizontally and then play whatever notes you want on that step... you can overwrite/delete/add notes, holding the notes and advancing the cursor makes the notes longer. Using a midi controller, you can play notes/chords and the recorded notes respect velocity.

It is one of the features in Live (that nobody ever talked about) that I miss in Bitwig.

[cyrex_inque]

Live's midi step mode is fantastic and an enormous time-saver. I cannot overstate how happy I would be seeing this implemented in Bitwig.
Hope this is on the radar of the devs.

[xbitz]

http://revisit.info/ ?



it's plugin so just drop into BWS

[JHernandez]

A tracker plugin, neat.

[arrakeen]

Don't forget there's also Renoise Redux - http://www.renoise.com/products/redux

Tracking is also my background, Soundtracker > OctaMED > Renoise