Copying Velocity Info , PT

[JayB]

How do you copy velocity info for MIDI in PT? When I try to do this it always copies the notes as well... any help would be greatly appreciated ! For instance in a song I am working on it has a blast beat that goes on for like a minute... to do velocity for each hit would take forever. I was planning on doing a section , copy pasting , then messing with some of it more thoroughly throughout the rest.

 

[JayB]

Anyone have an idea?

 

[colynomial]

I'm not sure it's possible my friend.

Think of it this way though, velocity applies specifically to each note, not a position with respect to the grid. So you can copy things like pan or volume envelopes anywhere because they can be applied to the track even if there's no information there. But with velocity, each note velocity would have to find a corresponding note to be applied to. Intuitively, I don't think this is possible.

Why not just edit a bar of the blast, then select only the snare notes by ctrl+drag with the mouse, copy, deleted the snares from the next bar and alt+m to merge the notes (snares) in with the existing ones (cymbals). This will copy the velocity and the note placement should be the same since it's a blast beat.

 

[JayB]

Thanks colynomial ! I am pretty new to midi , I did not even know about the merge feature ! Does that mean that I can copy specific notes , add them to another part and just merge? Because when I tried doing this on an orchestral thing I made it just pasted the copied notes but deleted everything else that was there.

 

[colynomial]

The merge function will add your copied notes to the section without destroying what's there while copy/paste overwrites the MIDI you're pasting over.

With merge though, it is possible to merge the same notes over each other. So if you have a C#3 and you merge another C#3 at the same location, you'll effectively be triggering the sample twice even though it'll only look like one MIDI note (because you've stack two on top of each other).

Once other thing you can do is use the pencil tool to draw in notes and more importantly, draw velocities. Switch the track to velocity, then grab the pencil tool and click and drag across the track. You'll see the MIDI velocities change as you drag- this might helpful for quickly adjusting your blast section velocities. I use it all the time for "build ups"- rather than moving the velocity of every single note, just "draw" steadily increasing velocities.

 

[JayB]

Thanks so much man ! I totally forgot about being able to use pencil to draw velocities. You are a huge help !