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The MIDI editors
Introduction
There are several ways to edit MIDI in Cubase AI. You can
use the tools and functions in the Project window for large-
scale editing, or the functions on the MIDI menu to process
MIDI parts in various ways (see “What is affected by the
MIDI functions?” on page 172). For hands-on graphical ed-
iting of the contents of MIDI parts, you use the MIDI editors:
• The Key Editor is the default MIDI editor, presenting
notes graphically in an intuitive piano roll-style grid.
The Key Editor also allows for detailed editing of non-note events such as
MIDI controllers. For more information, see “The Key Editor – Overview” on
page 184.
• The Drum Editor is similar to the Key Editor, but takes
advantage of the fact that with drum parts, each key corre-
sponds to a separate drum sound.
This is the editor to use when you’re editing drum or percussion parts.
For more information, see “The Drum Editor – Overview” on page 199.
• The List Editor shows all events in the selected MIDI
parts as a list, allowing you to view and edit their properties
numerically. It also allows you to edit SysEx messages.
For more information, see “The List Editor – Overview” on page 206 and
“Working with System Exclusive messages” on page 210.
• The Score Editor shows MIDI notes as a musical score.
This offers basic score editing and printing – see “The Score Editor –
Overview” on page 213 for details).
Ö You can define each of the editors mentioned above
as your default MIDI editor, see below.
Please note that features that are identical in these editors
(especially in the Key and Drum Editors) will be described
in the Key Editor section. The sections about the Drum Ed-
itor (see “The Drum Editor – Overview” on page 199), and
the List Editor (see “The List Editor – Overview” on page
206) describe the specific features of these editors only.
Opening a MIDI editor
There are two ways to open a MIDI editor:
• Select one or several parts (or a MIDI track, with no parts
selected), pull down the MIDI menu and select Open Key
Editor, Open Drum Editor, Open List Editor or Open Score
Editor from the Scores submenu (or use the corresponding
key command).
The selected parts (or all parts on the track, if no part was selected) will
open in the chosen editor.
• Double-click a part to open it in the default editor.
Which editor opens depends on the Default Edit Action setting in the
Preferences (Event Display–MIDI page).
If the option “Edit as Drums when Drum Map is assigned”
is activated and a drum map is selected for the edited
track (see “Selecting a drum map for a track” on page
204), the Drum Editor will open. This way you can double-
click to open the Key Editor (or the Score Editor or List
Editor, depending on your preferences) but drum tracks
will automatically open in the Drum Editor.
Ö If the part you open for editing is a shared copy, any ed-
iting you perform will affect all shared copies of this part.
Shared copies are created by pressing [Alt]/[Option]-[Shift] and drag-
ging, or by using the Repeat function with the “Shared copies” option
activated. In the Project window, shared copies are indicated by the part
name in italics and an icon in the bottom right corner of the part.
Handling several parts
When you open a MIDI editor with several parts (or a MIDI
track containing several parts) selected, you might find it
somewhat hard to get an overview of the different parts
when editing.
For such cases the editor toolbar features a few functions
to make working with multiple parts easier and more com-
prehensive:
• The Part List menu lists all parts that were selected when
you opened the editor (or all parts on the track, if no parts
were selected), and lets you select which part should be
active for editing.
When you select a part from the list, it is automatically made active and
centered in the note display.
Ö Note that it is also possible to activate a part by select-
ing an event within this part with the Arrow tool.