hi there. this is something that i haven’t seen in any other daw with midi capabilities. i just thought of it a moment ago and thought i’d see what people think.
the option to ‘snap’ notes to a particular key (as in musical key, scale etc) when dragging them vertically would make things like arpeggios really fast to make. of course there should be a way (say, for example, holding shift) to override the snap and allow ‘off-key’ notes. not sure if this is useful enough to warrant any extra interface clutter, but someone might think of how to make it useful
Something along these lines is definitely a good idea. This would work especially well with a ‘paint’ tool mode (an idea I like in general) so you could just drag across the piano roll and create large chords or melodies in whatever key (imagine how fast it would be to compose like this in a smaller key, e.g. pentatonic).
The ‘snap’ part is more or less obvious, the interesting questions come in when you consider how to set the key in the first place: to not be musically restrictive, the key needs to change over time, and it should be possible to have multiple keys at the same time (e.g. tracks with different keys), so some kind of “key tracks” are needed.
The best way to link to two would probably be free creation of key tracks, and being able to set the key track for each MIDI track (Paul’s idea), e.g. in a dropdown.
But: what does a key track look like? How do you edit a key over time? Could use some ideas here…
Maybe a key track could be shown as a single octave piano roll, where a note row is either toggled on or off for a certain section of time? Dropdown menu for making a key change separator and picking common keys (e.g. C major)?
