 Hey, you want to learn how to do MIDI in Ardor? Come with me. Hey! It's Anfa. Ardor's MIDI workflow is a bit strange. It's also a little bit lacking and sometimes even buggy. Despite this, every month on my live streams I play dozens of amazing tracks made with Ardor. And I don't even mean my own ones. I mean viewer submissions. So how did I do it? How do I do it? I'll show you. In this video, I will teach you everything there is to know about Ardor MIDI. If you'd like a written version of this tutorial, check a link in the video description. Also check the timestamps if you'd like to search for a specific thing. And as I'm recording this, the latest official release is Ardor 6.3. You better get yourself something to drink, Mike. You ready? This is what Ardor 6.3 looks like when you open it and create a new session. There's a few settings I highly recommend you change before we start making sounds. Next thing, go to Edit, Preferences, MIDI, and make sure sound MIDI notes as they are selected in the editor is enabled. With this setting on, Ardor will play any MIDI notes you touch in the editor. Otherwise, the only way to hear what you're doing is to play the timeline. Another important thing is independent MIDI region copies. Go to Session, Properties, Misc, and select, MIDI region copies are independent. Then click Use these settings as defaults so you don't have to change this for every session you create. Why do I recommend you change this? By default, any copied MIDI regions you will have are going to be actually referencing the same file on disk. So when you make a copy and you change the copy, the original will also change. And you might not notice until much later when it's already long gone and you've forgotten what was there. That's why I recommend you disable this and I disable this every time I install Ardor. There are some people who are using it. I think this is a very cool feature but currently it's lacking visual feedback and usability so I think it's more trouble than it's worth. While we are here, there's another setting and it's Policy for handling overlapping notes on the same MIDI channel. It's usually not a valid thing to have two MIDI notes playing the same sound on the same MIDI channel and you can choose to make Ardor deal with that in various ways but I personally might just handle that stuff manually. However, if you're having lots of problems with stack notes, you may want to play with this setting. Okay, another thing I always enable right away when I start Ardor for the first time is the Editor Mixer. You can open this up in View Show Editor Mixer or by using the Shift E keyboard shortcut. What this will do is display a single mixer strip for the track we have currently selected on our timeline, which is very useful and thanks to this, I hardly ever go to the full blown mixer view. Now that our environment is ready, let's look into creating MIDI tracks. MIDI tracks are what allows us to record, sequence and edit MIDI data that can drive virtual or physical instruments. There's three ways to open the dialog window for adding tracks. One is from the main menu, you can go to Track, Add Track Bus or VCA or you can use the Ctrl Shift N shortcut. You can memorize it as N for new track and the third way is you can right click on the empty space in the track headers, not in the timeline itself, that does nothing. Okay, let's change the track type to MIDI and you can see that the available settings have changed a little. They're all described in the dialog itself, you can reference this help box here, though I'll explain all the settings anyway. So first you can choose how many tracks you want to add, you can type in a number. Obviously we can specify the name for the track or tracks to be created. If you create multiple tracks, Ardor will add sequential numbers to make the track names unique because no two tracks or buses can have the same name. Below you can select an instrument plugin, by default it's set to General MIDI Synth which is a stock Ardor instrument plugin which unsurprisingly plays a General MIDI soundfont present on your system. You can also select none which is on the top of the list to create the MIDI track without any virtual instrument added and you can insert it yourself later. By the way you can just press the home key to jump to none right away. Paging up and down also is possible. Now I have a lot of third-party instrument plugins installed but Ardor comes with a pretty limited set by default. For now I will select the General MIDI synth. The synth mode is mostly useful for audio tracks. If you set it to strict IO which is the default it's going to make sure that the amount of output audio ports is the same as the number of input audio ports regardless of what plugins you insert and how you route the signal internally. Flexible IO is not going to restrict that so sometimes it's the better option. For MIDI tracks this doesn't matter that much unless you want to add additional audio input channels to your MIDI track. For example if you want to use it as a vocoder and by the way like these here are actually templates like this is just for convenience. You can create any track and transform it into any other by adding and removing input outputs and adding plugins and such. And the last setting is position. This determines where vertically in your session the track will be inserted. First obviously puts it on the top of your session, last inserted at the bottom and there's also before selection and after selection. These are useful if you have a lot of tracks in your session and spawning a new track on the bottom and then having to grab and drag it up is going to take some time. There's two things we can do now. We can add selected items and leave the dial open or we can add and close. Okay I'm going to just change the number of tracks to one and add the track. Okay here's the MIDI track. Okay now I want to show you some operations on tracks. First let's learn how to duplicate tracks. To duplicate a track right click on its header and choose duplicate. Here we have a dialog window. We can of course select how many duplicates we want to create and we can also decide what happens with the track's playlist. I'm going to cover playlists in a while so don't worry about this for now. And also we have the position setting just like with inserting new tracks. I want to place seven duplicates. So we have eight tracks in total. Let's click OK and here's our track duplicates. As you can see Arthur added sequential numbers to make the track names unique. Alright let's say I changed my mind and I want to get rid of these tracks. Now I'm going to show you how to select and delete tracks. To select the track just click on its header or the name. If you want to select more hold CTRL and click more. Now if you want to select a whole range at once hold SHIFT and click on a track. And this will select all the tracks in between as well. Alright now to delete the tracks I'm going to right click on the header and choose remove. Ardall will let us know that deleting tracks is permanent and there is no undo. So if you're not sure it's a good idea to first make a snapshot of your session so you'll be able to go back. I'm going to show you how to make snapshots in a while but for now let's just delete these tracks. Okay we've got the tracks we want let's now rename them. To rename a track double click on the name and it comes into edit mode and you can type. Let's call it piano still. Now instead of switching off and switching to edit the name of another track I can just hit tab and this will instantly go to the next track what I can type the new name. Also SHIFT tab will go backwards and this is very useful if you want to rename tracks in large numbers. Hit enter to finish. Sometimes you know that you're not going to need a track for a while but you will need it later. So right now it's only hogging your resources and taking up screen space. To help with that we can deactivate and hide tracks. The activated tracks are not processed by Ardor so they do not consume any CPU time. They still will however occupy your RAM so if you have a heavy sampler like drum gizmo that's you know using five gigs of your RAM that's not going to help with that. You will need to remove the track instead. Okay so let's deactivate the track. I'm going to deactivate the piano 2 track. Let's right click and select click on this active checkbox. You can see that the track header is now grayed out. There's no buttons and the name is in parentheses now and I also can't do anything here. So this track is now deactivated. We can now hide this track as well. Now hidden tracks are not deactivated by default. These are separate things so a hidden track can still be active and can play sounds. You could use that to spook your collab mates but please don't use loud sounds or I will personally shred your system discs partition table and I will also eat your lunch. Okay let's now hide this track. Right click and select hide. Note that the same options are often available in the track menu. You can select the track and go duplicate, remove or toggle active. Now to unhide the tracks we will need to use another tool called the editor list. You can open it up from the view menu by selecting show editor list or use the convenient shortcut shift L. The editor list is a very powerful tool and it has lots of tabs but conveniently for us what we need is right on top in the tab tracks and buses. If I extend this a little you can see that there's quite a lot switches here and if you use the tool tips you can learn more about them. You can pretty much manage all the properties of your tracks here but what interests us is the V for visible and A for active so we can make a track visible again and make it active again as well. Tab and shift tab also switches between the tracks and you can rename them here too. Neat! Okay this is a bit tangential to the midi topic but I think it's a good idea to teach you this. Ardor can manage multiple versions of your project. It's the dot ardor file which contains all the information of the layout of regions and automation data and plugins etc. And what I do every time I sit to work another session on a project is create a new snapshot and switch to it so that what I've done before is saved in a separate file and now I'm working on a new file. To do this go to the main menu session and select snapshot and switch to new session. What this will do is ask you if you want to save the changes first and yeah let's save them. Now we can add a new name. I'm going to type ardor midi02 and hit save. And now this has created a new project file on disk. To access an old snapshot we can do various things. We can go to the editor list and just select the snapshot from here. Or we can go to session recent and here you can see that if I hit this little arrow we're going to get a list of all the snapshots of this particular session. If you hover your mouse you'll also see what version of ardor the snapshot was modified with last time. I name my snapshots with incremental numbers so it's always clear which one is the newest version so ardor will automatically load the newest snapshot anyway if you just select to load the project from the recent menu. So if I close it and just hit this and go open you can see that we have loaded the second snapshot which is great. Finally we can record some midi assuming you have a midi controller keyboard or a midi dance pad. I will now show you how to capture your performance. If you don't have such devices ardor has options for you too and I will discuss them in a moment. First thing you need to do is obviously make sure that your device is connected to your computer. Mine is a USB keyboard. Now let's select the midi track you want to record on and click on the input button. It's the second button below the one with the name of the track. If I click here you can see that we have a few options. First we'll disconnect all the inputs and next is a section of various midi inputs that ardor has detected in the system. There's this midi fruit thing and also there is my keyboard M Audio Oxygen 49. So I will select it and now it's displayed here as the input for this track. Now if I hit a key on my keyboard ardor receives that sends it to the general midi synthesizer which turns the midi signal into a stereo audio signal and it goes down the track to the master bus and to my headphones and to your ears as well. We've baited sound. Now to capture performance we need to first arm the track for recording by using this red circle button and we also need to arm the whole session for recording which is done with a similar button here in the transport panel. So we could manually just press this and then start the transport to record but we could also just press shift space which will do the same thing for us. Now to stop the capture just press space bar again. Now if you've recorded something terrible that you want to forget about immediately press control space which will stop the recording, delete what was just captured and rewind your playhead as if nothing has ever happened. I saw nothing. A very useful option for transport is the auto return function. You can enable it here or by pressing the seven key on your alphanumeric keypad. What it does is it will rewind the playhead to the point where you started the playback when you stop it. So start playback, stop it, the playhead goes back to start. This is very useful for two things. One is re-recording a part over and over if you don't want to delete anything so you could use control space bar for that and the second thing is all dishing a part of your timeline over and over if you don't want to manually rewind. For example if you're tweaking a synthesizer setting or tweaking some automation or just sitting in the mixer view and tweaking the mix you can use auto return and just play and stop over and over to hear what you've done and iteratively improve on it, hopefully. Now let's talk about playlists. Each track has a playlist, at least one. You can access them with this P button right here. If I click here you can see we have one playlist present on this track. The name of the playlist is the same as the track. What we can do is we can create more playlists. For example if I create new I can give it a new name or just go with the default one and it seems like I've just deleted my work and that's not true. If I go and click this button again you can see we have two playlists and I can go right back to the previous one. What this is useful for is storing alternate takes for different parts. For example when I record vocals for a song I often have multiple sessions and I store these multiple takes from different sessions on different playlists because I'm not going to alter the processing anyway so having multiple duplicate tracks just to keep them stored is not necessary. But of course you can do that. Now one downside of the playlist is that you cannot access two of them at the same time unless you create another extra track. So if I for example had something cool recorded on the second playlist and wanted to comp that with my first one what I would have to do is for example use another track as a buffer so I could click middle click and drag now change the playlist here and middle click and drag again to have both of these regions present on the same playlist. Now let's go back to the situation where each take is on its own playlist. What I can do is use another MIDI track to access the other playlist so let's go here choose select from all and here we have a list of all the MIDI playlists inside of this session. First of course there is the playlist of this piano two track which is just one playlist and there's other tracks and we can select piano and choose piano dot one and you can see that immediately we have the region we've previously recorded. And this way we can also click and drag it on this first track. I'm going to show you much more ways of managing MIDI regions etc during this video but I just wanted to show you how you can use playlists. One thing to note maybe is that sometimes I have issues with playlists. There tend to be a name collisions between different tracks so if I use multiple playlists or try to select different playlists sometimes a playlist gets used in a different track I didn't intend. It's a little bit buggy but it can also be useful. Now the remaining options here are of course we can make a new copy which will go into duplicate the current playlist but we can alter the things on that playlist while still having the old one present. So this can be used kind of like snapshots for MIDI tracks that you can have alternate edits of different regions because yeah if I go back to the first playlist here we have the same regions but in the previous state. Another useful thing for recording is metronome or click. To enable it you can use the button on the toolbar right here or you can use the tilde key on your keyboard. If you hover your mouse you can also read some nice tips you can change the volume of the metronome with your mouse wheel or if you right click you're going to be transported to the preferences metronome settings where you can also change the volume or do whatever. Now some good news for those of you who don't have access to a MIDI controller keyboard or a MIDI dance pad for that matter. Ardor 6 has introduced a virtual keyboard. To open it go to window and select virtual keyboard. Now the virtual keyboard window will stay on top of other windows so unless you put it away in a corner like this and you forget about it you should know what's going on. And that's important because when it is open it's going to steal some of your keys so instead of triggering actions like they would normally do they are going to trigger MIDI notes. So for example you know the A key is audition it's going to play and solo the track but if I have the virtual keyboard open the A key now is C4. So this is really good if you don't have a MIDI controller but it also has quite a lot of options so I'm going to now break it down for you. So by default you have one and a half octaves mapped to your QWERTY keyboard. You can change that if you go to edit, preferences, MIDI and then in the section virtual keyboard we can change the keyboard layout used. The default one is QWERTY single because only one row of keys on your alphanumeric keyboard are going to be used. Actually it's two rows because you have white keys and black keys but it's called QWERTY single and there's also QWERTY. And if I enable that you can see that the layout of the keys on the keyboard has changed and now we are starting from Z and we go up to M and then from Q we go up to P and we have two and a half octaves almost. Now alphanumeric keyboards are not made to press a lot of keys at once. It's a tool to be able to do anything when you don't have the right tool to do that which is a MIDI controller keyboard. Now an interesting thing is that by my request there was an option added to use mouse only so that the virtual MIDI keyboard doesn't map any keys on your keyboard and you can still use them to trigger hot keys but you can use it with your mouse and sometimes that's all you need. So okay, of course you can trigger MIDI notes but what does the other stuff do? Well from the left we can change the MIDI channel that the notes are being sent on, notes and also MIDI CCs as you'll see in a moment. Here we have a virtual pitch bend so we can play a note and pitch it. I'm going to maybe enable the QWERTY single. There's a tooltip with some extra options here. We also have a mod wheel which for this instrument creates vibrato. Now we have four MIDI CC controls. We can select any MIDI CC we want. The first one is of course the modulation wheel. That's why it's not present here because it's already present and you can select any MIDI CC you want and send the MIDI CC messages and you have four of these. Next we have a section where we can change the range of notes visible on this virtual keyboard. The first thing determines what octave does the middle note have. Now by default it's four so we have C4. We can do two and now it's C2 which also changes our keyboard assignments and because the MIDI notes don't go lower than C-1 our keyboard is also getting a little bit shorter. Let's go back to C4. We can also change the range which is the amount of octaves. Now you can also scale this keyboard if you want. We can have 11 octaves. Oh we can't have 11 octaves. Wow. Okay. The next thing is the default velocity of the note sent. We can click this to select a few common values. Now of course we have no velocity sensing on a typing keyboard but this allows us to mimic that and if you use your mouse wheel you can tweak that manually. I guess 100 is a good default. Now the next thing is chromatic transpose which means we can have the output MIDI notes being sent in a different key than what we're playing in. So I'm playing like the white keys on the C major scale but we're outputting C sharp major. So that's a little cheater mode for you. And last but not least we have the panic button that will kill all playing notes. So that's the virtual MIDI keyboard for you. Now let's talk about another MIDI tool that could be useful and it's called MIDI Tracer. We access it from Window MIDI Tracer. It's right below the MIDI keyboard. MIDI Tracer is a tool that lets you investigate what MIDI messages are being sent or received on various ports in Ardor. I can for example select the virtual keyboard and I can inspect what it's doing when I'm tweaking this knob. And you can see it's sending a controller change on channel 1, CC number 07 and value 36 etc. Okay so this verifies that we're actually doing things. And underneath we have a bunch of settings but I'll leave them for you to explore. Now as you can see as soon as I close my virtual keyboard window my keyboard is back to normal so it's no longer triggering MIDI notes. Let's go back to our MIDI track and I'm going to show you now how to create MIDI regions manually. That is with mouse as opposed to capturing our performance. We're going to be sequencing MIDI data manually. To create a MIDI region first we need to go to the draw mode. You can access it from the toolbar. It's this one draw mode or you can just hit the D key D for draw. Now let's create a MIDI region on the second track. I'm going to click and drag and this creates a MIDI region. It's empty but if I hover my mouse inside you can see that there is a little phantom note already present and Ardor shows us a hint as to what MIDI note it's going to be, what channel, what velocity and I can just click and drag to create notes. Now to access all the different modes I recommend you learn the hotkeys because it's going to save you a lot of time. My list of hotkeys for you is G to grab, R for range mode, D to draw, E to edit, T for time stretch and C for cut. Learn the cutkeys is going to save you a lot of time in the long run. All right this is cool and all about the MIDI region and the notes are not obeying the grid so let's fix this. To do that we'll need to enable snapping so let's click here to enable snapping and select maybe a quarter note. You can see that our grid has changed to reflect that grid density. Let's press G to enter grab mode. I'm going to hover my mouse over the middle of the region click and drag left to move it. Now I'm going to hover my mouse over the right edge until the cursor changes shape to let me know that I can click and drag to change the length of the region. Let's release it here and now it should last exactly one bar. And it does. We'll insert some notes in a while and make this an actual interesting MIDI clip but first I need to talk about navigating the view. Arnor doesn't have a dedicated piano roll. Instead each track has its own piano roll embedded in the track itself so you'll be editing our MIDI notes right in the timeline. This is a little bit uncommon but once you get used to it it gets the job done. However you'll be constantly changing the size of the tracks to have enough room to be precise with our MIDI editing. I'll show you how to do that right now. You can quickly focus your selection by hitting the Z key. That will make whatever you've selected fill the entire view and deselect it so that you have maximum space to work on. By the way we could close this editor list by pressing Shift L. We can select this and press Z again to make it fill the view. So now we see as much of this track as possible. Now a little problem with the Z key is that it doesn't resize automation lanes. So for example if I had two automation lanes here you see that they are not getting resized and I need to manually make them smaller and then use the Z key again to actually maximize my MIDI editing area. To get back to the previous view press the Shift Z key combination which works like undo but for review changes. You can use it multiple times to go back multiple steps. If you use the Z key without selecting anything it's going to try to fit all the tracks and make them fill the view. Again Shift Z to undo the view change. Another useful hotkey is F. F will maximize the selected tracks. However it only works if you have track headers selected. So if I select these two and press F it's going to make sure these are vertically maximized. Let's press Shift Z and if I press F now and I don't have any track selected it's not going to work because regions don't count. Also another problem is if you use F to maximize an automation lane Shift Z is not going to restore it to its previous height so you'll need to do this manually. I've reported that as a bug. Let's now zoom in manually. First I'll hold Ctrl and use my mouse wheel to zoom in and out on the mouse cursor. We can also zoom in and out using the three buttons on the far right of this toolbar. Zoom out, zoom in and also zoom to session which will make sure that everything between the start and end markers is visible horizontally. If you need some more zooming options go to View, Zoom and you can also learn some hotkeys here. Now let's resize the track to get more space vertically for our piano roll. To do that first hover your mouse over the track header and now move down until the cursor changes shape. This lets you know that if you now click and drag you're going to change the size of the track. Now there's a bunch of other ways to change track heights so I'm going to show them all to you so you can pick which ones are going to fit your style. If you right click on a track header and go to Height you can select from a bunch of predefined heights ranging from small to normal to largest. You can also use free controls on the toolbar. Right here we have control to shrink tracks and expand selected tracks and also this button here changes the number of visible tracks at once vertically so if we select all it's going to maximize all the tracks of the session and well sometimes it's going to fail if you have like 50 tracks it's probably not going to be able to fit them all but it will try. Now another way to change tracks height is by double clicking on the lower part of the header. If you double click there the track will toggle between the largest and the normal sizes which I think is pretty cool because if you want to do some quick editing you can just double click and then you have space for piano roll you're done with it you double click again and it's small so it only works if you're on the lower part. If I double click here it's not going to do anything. I guess developing a habit of zooming in vertically and on of expanding and shrinking track height can mitigate the lack of a separate piano roll editor to some degree and I think this approach has its upsides as it's easier to view the context of what you're editing in the whole project. However for a few years of using Ardor MIDI I was longing for an external piano roll when I came from a little mess. Okay now you know how to zoom around let's show you how to scroll the view. The mouse wheel can do it alone with some modifier keys. Let's add a bunch of tracks just to fill in the view. Mouse wheel alone will scroll the track list up and down. Mouse wheel with a control will zoom in and out horizontally. Mouse wheel with shift will scroll the timeline forward and back and mouse wheel with alt is going to change height of the track you're hovering over so that's one extra way to change the height of the track. Now page up and page down keys will also scroll the tracks for you and if you are zoomed in home and end keys are going to move your playhead and view to the start marker or the end marker of your session. Another way to zoom in horizontally is by using the summary panel. It's this one thing here so if you click and drag you can scroll the view horizontally. If you click on an edge and drag you can change the horizontal zoom level. Also if you use the mouse wheel you're going to zoom in and out on the center of currently viewed area. You can also right click and select reset summary to extents which will do the same thing as clicking this button here. Now let's talk about grid snapping. If you don't know grid snapping lets you make sure that whatever you do on the timeline is going to follow the musical time of your meter and tempo so that it's going to be aligned to even musical divisions of time. So for example you move a region or you move a note and it's going to snap to the grid lines. You can enable and disable snapping by using this snap button on the toolbar or by using four on your alphanumeric keypad or by going to edit menu and selecting toggle snap which does this. As you can see by the two hot keys here you can also change the snapping grid resolution by using the keys six and five on your alphanumeric keypad. So you can go to the next and go to the previous grid setting using the key five. So four toggle snapping five previous and six next grid setting. Now an important thing is that if you have snapping enabled at any time you can hit and hold alt and that is going to temporarily disable snapping. If I leave alt go again I am snapping to the grid and it also works in reverse. If I disable snapping and I move something and then hold alt it's going to snap to the grid temporarily. As soon as I release alt I'm back to no grid. I usually work with snapping enabled and whenever I need to move something out of the grid I just hold alt and release myself from it. Snapping will also help you align objects together. For example here I have this region which doesn't end on the grid. The grid is quarter notes but if I want to draw another region let's move this out of the way. I want to draw another region and I can drag and as you can see snapping is enabled and it makes sure that this new region I'm drawing here is aligned with the end of that region even though they don't follow the grid specifically. And even if I go to snapping and no grid at all still if I draw a region it snaps to an existing region edge. And the same is true for markers. For example if I move this region its start is going to snap to the marker or if I move it somewhere else its end is going to snap if I resize it. And this is with no grid it's just snapping between objects themselves. Before Ardor 6 this kind of aligning to different you know region edge bounds and markers was done with special snapping modes but in Ardor 6 they have been unified that it's all kind of automatic and I think it's a good idea. Since the grid lets your editing follow the musical time now let's talk about actually changing the meter and tempo of your session so that the grid snapping enforces your musical vision. Please know that the tempo map functionality is most likely going to change a lot in Ardor 7 but for now Ardor 6.3 is the newest stuff so I'm gonna cover it as it is. To simply change the tempo of your session you can do a few things. One thing is double click on the tempo marker to open the edit tempo dialog. Another way is to right click on one of the clocks and select edit tempo or under the secondary clock there is this tempo button and if you click on it it gives you the same result. Now let's talk about this edit tempo dialog. The first thing is you can tap the tempo with your mouse or with the keyboard once you select the button with your mouse and this will help you set your tempo. You can of course just type it in and the last setting we see here is the tempo type. This is actually like the tempo marker type and it's either constant or ramped. If we select a ramped what happens is that it lets us define what the tempo is going to be at the end of the ramp. Now because we have just one tempo marker in our session so far creating a ramp doesn't make sense because the ramp would have to go to infinity so I'm going to select constant. Yeah we have 140 let's hit apply and you can see our midi regions have moved forward because the musical time has changed and everything shrunk a little bit. To change the meter also known as the time signature we can similarly double click on the meter marker where we can just type in a value how many beats per bar we want. It takes fractions which is interesting I have never used fractions so and we can also choose what note is the baseline. Here we have four quarter notes so time signature of four four but we can have time signature of four eight or six eight. Now similarly to the tempo you can right click on any clock and select edit meter or you can just click on this time signature button right here and get the same effect. Let's create a tempo ramp as you already know we need to have another tempo marker for that and to create one we can do two things either control and click on the ruler or right click and select new tempo. Now we have one more than we need let's right click on the existing marker and select remove. All right now I can double click on this second marker insert a new tempo hit apply and to make a ramp between the two I can right click on the first one and select ramp to next and that will create a smooth transition between one tempo to the other. Now if we edit the first marker you can see that our and beats per minute value is set to the value of the next tempo marker and it's set to ramped but we can do something weird we can change this value and apply and now you can see that our tempo starts at 140 beats per minute it's raising up to the third bar where it's at 200 beats per minute but then it's immediately changing to 100 beats per minute so we can see that we can do some unusual things. Now again this is going to change a lot so I have no idea what is going to look like in order seven but probably is going to be much more flexible too. With new meters there is no such interesting stuff to do basically we can select the new meter maybe we can have eight quarter notes now and we can type in what bar the meter change starts at let's apply and we have a new meter starting right here. Another thing you might have noticed is that the markers have this setting called lock style and what it does is by default it's set to music what it does is a marker will maintain its distance to the other markers in music time if it's set to music if it's set to audio it's going to use audio time so minutes seconds etc instead of bars and beats and ticks when it comes to music so if I set this to music and apply let's see what happens if I change this first tempo you can see that this marker moved now if I lock it to audio instead and change the tempo again you see that the marker didn't move and it's now completely off the grid so like of course if you're working with music it makes sense to use the music lock but if you're doing some special effects or sound design and using tempo to to modulate your MIDI data on the timeline that might be a useful thing to do all right back to creating our MIDI notes now let's make sure we can see what we're doing I'm going to expand this track and also zoom a little using the summary I'm also going to make sure that my grid is set to quarter notes and let's hit the D key to enter the draw mode now in the draw mode you can click to place a note and the note length is going to be the same as the grid spacing you've selected here so if I change to 16th notes I'm going to enter 16th notes remember that you can hold down alt to release yourself from the grid at any time so for example I can start a note at the grid point but then hold alt and drag to make the end outside of the grid and also shift right click will delete a note so I can get rid of those and we have just one note I can also click and drag these handles to change the area I'm viewing in this embedded piano roll also while we're at it if you right click and select note range you can use fit contents and that should extend your piano roll view so it you can see all the notes it doesn't always work great there's also a percussive mode for the notes which only shows the note starts and this is supposedly great for editing drumlines but I'm really not using it let's go back to the sustained mode now in the draw mode you can select multiple notes by dragging like you can hold shift and click on them to select them so the draw mode isn't the most suitable for editing midi and that's why we're gonna talk about the edit mode now all right so hit the e key to enter the edit mode now in edit mode clicking and dragging doesn't create notes it it does rectangular selection so we can easily select a bunch of notes to create a note just hold control and click or click and drag to create a note just like in the draw mode holding control gives you exactly the same behavior and you can also hold alt to release your from the grid I generally prefer the edit mode to do any midi editing because it has more options but you need the draw mode to create the midi regions themselves now to move notes around click in the middle and drag if you click on an edge you see the cursor changes and I can resize the note in both directions you can also select multiple notes and drag to change their size in both directions as well you can select all the notes inside of a region by using the control a hotkey let's now talk about editing velocity as you probably know midi note velocity is stored as a seven-bit digital number that gives us a range between 0 and 127 and the default note velocity in ardor is 64 so right in the middle there's multiple ways to change this value in ardor but sadly a lollipop graph is not one of them yeah I know that sucks but we can still do some solid midi velocity manipulation at ardor so bear with me first let's select a bunch of notes now control up and down arrows will change the note velocity of selected notes in the increments of 10 and as you see we have a handy tooltip near the mouse cursor showing us that if we hold control and alt and use the up and down arrow keys we can do the same thing in increments of one using the mouse wheel also will change the note velocity in increments of one if we hold down alt while doing so it's going to change the note velocity in the increments of 10 and finally you can hit the v key v for velocity and type a midi note velocity value manually now there's two ways to create a note velocity ramp in ardor I'm going to show you one right now and we'll talk about the other one later so the first way to create a velocity ramp is by using ardor's built-in velocity interpolation I'll insert two notes at the start and at the end now I'm going to change the velocity of the first note to one and change the velocity of the last note to 127 now as I move my cursor you can see that this phantom note drawn where I would insert a new note is changing velocity depending on where it is located between the two notes and if I click and insert the notes it fills up the gaps and now let's maybe mute the first track and play this we have a velocity ramp now we can tweak this if I undo a little bit and maybe change insert a new note in the middle and change velocity of this note to maybe 16 change velocity of this note to maybe 48 and fill in the gaps let's play again we have changed the curvature of the velocity ramp so that's the first way I'll talk about the other way in a moment and we're going to be using the MIDI transform tool but it's a bit complex and I want to give it its own section so before we go to that let's talk about MIDI channels let me create a new MIDI track for this and I'm going to import an existing region all right so here I have a mystery MIDI region let me play it to you in ardor every MIDI note can play on a different MIDI channel if I go to the edit mode and hover my mouse over a note you can see that it shows me the pitch then the MIDI channel this is on channel 1 and velocity which is 100 and every note can have a different MIDI channel if I select a note or a couple of notes and press c a MIDI channel chooser dialogue opens up and I can just click and select which MIDI channel I want these notes to be on and now we can see that they're on MIDI channel 3 let's undo that they're MIDI channel 1 now the problem is that right now to see what MIDI channel the notes are on the only way is to just hover the mouse and read the text but there's a better way if you right click on the track header we can go to color mode and select channel colors and now the color of the notes will indicate the MIDI channel they are on so if I change the MIDI channel of these notes you can see that they're now orange why would you want to have MIDI notes playing on different channels in a single MIDI region well for example if you're making a orchestral composition it's much easier to control the harmony and relationships between different voices or instruments if you do that and since you can have 16 voices in a single MIDI channel then you can do a lot and which can do then is have a master MIDI track which has the MIDI regions that play MIDI notes on multiple MIDI channels then you send the MIDI signal to multiple MIDI buses which filter out the MIDI tracks to only play a single voice and then synthesize that into audio with a sampler or a synthesizer and we're going to do that all right so let me change the MIDI channels of this particular MIDI region a little bit let's set these to MIDI channel 10 and set these MIDI channel 7 and now if I move this one octave down or two you can hear that this MIDI region plays a simple MIDI hip-hop beat okay why does that work if I open up the general MIDI synthesizer plug-in interface you can see that it has 16 channels and by default everyone is assigned a different instrument from the general MIDI specification the first channel is stereo grand piano which is what we're using for the lead line the channel 10 is a standard drum kit these are all different drum kits except for the s of x channel 10 and MIDI in general MIDI is reserved for drums for some reason they decided channel 10 is drums and we're using channel 6 which is FM electric piano for our bass now let's see what happens if I change MIDI velocities select a bunch of notes and hit alt and use the mouse wheel now as you can see even though the colors of the notes are indicating the MIDI channel we can still tell what is the velocity of the notes because of these inner dark bars and also the notes transparency or opacity is changing in relation to the velocity so there's plenty of visual indication to what the notes are doing which I think is great now having all of these instruments on a single track means that we can't mix them properly because all of the sounds are already mixed together we can't separate them but we can let's create free MIDI buses and we're going to send the same MIDI signal to each bus filter it by MIDI channel and then we'll have all the audio separate for the lead piano for the bass and for the drums I'm going to create free MIDI buses now I want to send the MIDI signal from this track to these buses so I'm going to click on the output button and go to rooting grid you can also right click on this button to open the rooting grid right away now we want to go to arthur buses and you can see on the top we have the tracks and we have our track and its output channels we have left and right audio and first MIDI output so I'm going to just click and drag here to root the first MIDI output to the buses one two and three I'm gonna close this now you can hear that our audio got much louder and it's because by default of course our MIDI buses were created with the general MIDI synthesizer which plays the same audio as this but we're not filtering the MIDI channels yet so every single of these buses and our original MIDI track are playing the same sound which is this gets multiplied four times what I'm going to do is disable this synthesizer on our original track and now if I mute our other tracks you can see that no audio is being sent from this track but there's audio being produced on these free buses let me name the first one piano name the second one bass and the third one drums now to filter the MIDI channels we need to use a MIDI filter plugin let's right click insert a new plugin go to plugin manager and I'm going to type MIDI channel and there is a plugin called MIDI simple channel filter let's double click to insert it what this plugin does is let's us select what MIDI channel we want to pass through and it discards everything else so if we go just leave this on channel one if I play this now we can only hear our piano which is perfect I'm going to copy this plugin and paste it here however there's an easier way to do this if we go to the full blown mixer view you can either click on the button in their top right corner or press the alt m shortcut on the keyboard you can see we have all our mixer strips right here and now if I just click and drag I can very easily duplicate a plugin between mixer strips okay let's go back to the editor now of course we need to change what channels are we filtering so bass is on MIDI channel let me look it up MIDI channel 6 let's double click here and go MIDI channel 6 now drums are of course on MIDI channel 10 let's hear it now we have everything separate so we can add effects to all of the instruments change the levels change the panning whatever we want so let's replace the bass with a synthesizer I'm going to select my bass track right click select new plugin plugin manager and let's type in helm I'm going to double click on the lv2 version which is what I prefer and now because we already have an instrument plugin on this MIDI bus Arthur is going to ask us if we want to replace the plugin or add it as a new one let's replace it and now you can see we have helm here which replaced our general MIDI synthesizer let's slow the bus and hear what it sounds like yeah so here is our synthetic bass let's hear it all together so now we could change our composition in this MIDI strip it might be a little bit inconvenient that our parts are overlapping it would possibly be best to separate the drums to a different track let's move this bass two octaves up so it's separate and now I'm going to go to helm and move these two octaves down 24 semitones so it sounds the same let's make this bass a little bit quieter and there you have it of course this is just a simple demonstration but I'm using this kind of stuff for orchestral compositions because it really makes it easier to control the harmony by the way I recommend you install the x42 midi filter plugin pack which is a free and open source plugin bundle for lemex mac and windows there is a bunch of very useful plugins there that will help you manipulate your midi signal and process the midi messages and do all kinds of weird stuff the fastest way to rename a midi region is to hold control and right click on it that will open up the region properties window where you can just select the name and type right in and you can hit alt c to close this dialogue if you select a single midi region and right click on it the first option in the context menu is going to have the name of the region and there we have midi and we have a lot of operations we can do with the midi data transpose lets you offset the note pitches up and down in octaves or semitones very useful insert patch change helps you to well insert a patch change honestly I never used this quantize also accessible with alt five lets you snap the starts and ends of your notes to your grid which is useful for tightening up his sloppy performance legatize let me show this to you on another region all right so you can see that I use legatize on this midi region and what it does it extends the midi notes to close all gaps but it also shortens midi notes to avoid any overlap you can see if I undo and redo there's also an option called remove overlap what this does is similar to legatize so it will never extend notes to only shorten them to prevent notes from overlapping there's also the transform tool which we're going to cover in a moment there's unlink from other copies now if you have followed my recommendation and enable the checkbox to make all midi copy regions independent you're never going to have to use that but if you want to have your midi region copies to be linked by default then this is what you'd use to separate them and last but not least is the list editor which is a tracker like interface basically you have all the events in a list or you can audition them and you can directly change the values like oh I need to type in the octave to D3 and as you can see the note moved now this sound with selected midi notes button is actually directly linked to the one in preferences so if you disable this it's going to be disabled globally uh yep and that's all the midi related stuff you can do on the region level now let's go deeper into what you can do on the midi note level so it's so let's enter the edit mode by pressing the e key and let's select the note now if I right click you can see we have a couple of options of course we can delete the notes but honestly way better is just to use the delete key or even better hold shift and right click this will also delete midi regions automation points even plugins in the processor box but there is no undo for that so now for a single midi note you can also open this edit dialog where you can directly change all the properties of the note like the midi channel the midi note pitch or the velocity also the start and end time now it seems like this should be enabled for multiple selected notes because if we open it you can see that there is options to set selected notes to this channel so we can like force the same setting for all selected notes but it's not active for multiple notes so I guess this is an unfinished feature next we have of course the transpose option which works exactly the same as on the region level if we select multiple notes we're going to have more options so let's go and see we have legatize of course we can remove overlap same as before quantize same as before and again midi transform okay with a bunch of notes and open up the midi transform tool midi transform dialog lets you take some numbers describing midi notes and transform them or translate them into other values for example you can make the note pitch translate to midi note velocity or reverse what I use it mostly for is to create midi ramps and to randomize note velocity so you can see we have set and we can set the velocity note number which is the pitch you can set the start time a length or midi channel and we can set it to this notes velocity so note change or we can translate like the the start time to velocity not sure how that's gonna work well somehow but we can do something like a random number from and we can randomize the note velocities in a given range let's hear that this is pretty useful let's undo that and of course we can maybe we would want to replace the note velocity but we just want to add a little bit of randomness actually we can also do this on the region level so let's do this here midi transform and we can do set velocity to this notes velocity plus we can actually like subtract a random number between 1 and 32 and that's gonna take the original midi velocity randomize the number between 1 and 32 and subtract it so now we have some randomization so our part sounds more human it's humanized what we can also do is use the equal steps from operator which will create a midi velocity ramp so we can have equal steps from 1 to 127 let's transform and here is our midi velocity ramp now in earlier versions of ardor the midi transform was only doable on the region level so it wasn't very feasible to create like more complex midi velocity ramps but now we can do that because i can select a bunch of notes select transform select equal steps from and maybe 16 to 64 transform now select a bunch of other notes transform equal steps from 127 to 8 transform and we have a two-part midi velocity ramp if you want to soften it a bit we can also use this built-in midi velocity interpolation so if i just removed something and click in it's ardor's gonna fill in the gaps to smooth it up i think there's some weird overlap going on but remove overlap takes care of that too now there's a bunch of different things you can take different parameters set it to different things and apply to different parameters and you can also pile a bunch of different stuff you can do addition multiplication division and modulus and uh you can like i don't know interpolate notes velocities between each other the next and previous one you can like do velocity smooth or weird stuff like um let me know if you figure out some cool things you can do with midi transform i'd love to know something happened now one of the most basic things in editing is cutting you can cut midi regions just like audio regions using the s key that's the short tutorial let's go to the grab mode and now i can just hover my mouse over some part and hit s and we've split the region now s is the hot key for edit split slash separate and that is going to separate the selected regions at the edit point now edit point is defined by this drop down menu here by default it's set to the mouse cursor position but you can also set it to playhead now if i move my playhead to a specific point and press s the selected region is going to be separated there let's undo that you can also insert a marker and set the edit point to be a active marker you can see that our marker now has a blue vertical line on it and that means it's gonna be the place our stuff is going to be separated tada let's go back to the mouse edit point and you can see that when i do that we do have this blue vertical line under our mouse cursor but it's snapping to grid you can see if i move it it starts to snap then it breaks through lose it starts to snap again breaks lose again now if i set this snapping to no grid it's also going to snap but it's going to snap to objects like region bounds so this also shows you where snapping works if i disable snapping altogether this blue vertical line is not going to snap to anything anymore let's enable it so now of course snapping a base editing grid so if you have your grid set to something coarse you don't need to be as precise you can just hover your mouse somewhere press s and and know for sure it's being precisely done on the grid but if your grid is fine you better zoom in before you cut now cutting can also be done with the cut mode that i mentioned before you can access it with the button on the toolbar or with the c key now cutting with this tool always happens under the mouse cursor of course so being snapping and it doesn't care for what you have selected so even if i have my edit point set to playhead cutting is also always going to be done on the mouse cursor position snaps to grid now if you want to cut multiple regions at once you can do that just select all the regions you want to cut and use the s key all the regions that were intersected by your edit point are going to be split if there is a region you are trying to cut that doesn't intersect it for example here you can see that this region goes unaffected now this is useful if you sometimes want to like rearrange your composition or just cut all the regions vertically you can hit control a while in the grab mode to select all the regions then place your mouse or playhead if you're using play head as the edit point wherever you want and press s to split again all the regions that were intersecting your edit point are going to be split but the ones outside of that are not going to be altered at all now another useful tool for managing region starts and end points is trimming trimming is done with the j and k hotkeys j will set the midi region end point to your current edit point so it could be playhead or it could be mouse depending on what you said it to and k will set the out point to your edit point now they are not going to touch the contents of the region so this is very quick to for example if you just like let's say i've done a split and i want to like i want to make a pause in here like i do i can do it in multiple ways i can split and then drag the boundary in or i can select this and just press k could be faster so for a single region j and k that is trimming are doing the same thing as dragging the region bounds but for multiple regions let me select them on two different tracks k is going to snap their end points to the same place so it's not going to work relatively if i were to click and drag the edit the end points of them that's going to work relatively k will just snap them to the same place and of course if you select multiple regions on one track and do that they're going to end up overlapping each other which might not be what you want now there's some more trimming options if you go to the region menu and select the trim some menu now same as with audio regions you can join media regions together using the range tool let's select the range tool either with the toolbar button or by pressing the r hotkey now if i select the range on my timeline i can right click and select consolidate range and others going to ask me for a new name for the region that's going to be created but we can just press enter to dismiss that and now we have a new region that contains the sum of all of the regions that were here previously by the way another cool thing we can do with the range mode r is to crop now if i select a range on my timeline then right click and select crop region to range it's going to delete parts of the region that were outside of the range now we can't select regions while selecting a range also but this tool works for multiple regions as well if we just select a range on multiple tracks for example and right click crop region to range is going to crop all the regions that were intersecting our selection now another basic operation is copying media regions and this can be done in multiple ways just as with audio regions the most basic way we can do with the range tool again is to select a range and then right click and select duplicate range what it's going to do is spawn an exact copy touching head to tail the hotkey is alt d and we can press this multiple times to create more and more duplicates as it's going to shift our selection to the last created duplicate let me undo that now another thing we can do is hit the shift the shortcut on the keyboard where we can type in the number of duplicates we want let's say four in theory you can type in fractions but when i tried that it crashed harder well that's new so maybe don't do that now this one won't shift our selection to the last duplicate created which kind of makes sense another very simple way to make duplicates is just to hold control click and drag and we can create duplicates this way also if you hold control and click with your middle mouse button instead of the left one you can shift the duplicate to a different track and if you control and middle click and drag down outside of existing tracks other will create a new midi track to hold your midi region same with audio tracks by the way so that's a secret way of creating midi tracks let's delete this track by the way now same as with the range tool we can also duplicate with the grab tool so alt d is going to duplicate the region or selected regions as a group and shift d will also open up this duplicate dialogue where you can type in the number last but not least you can just copy and paste selections anywhere you want you can paste some different tracks which also works with ranges which is very useful and we're going to cover this in a moment let's copy a range and paste it here this is going to be used to rearrange your track this is going to be used to rearrange your track rearrange swap song sections around and stuff i'm going to cover this in a moment oh by the way if you go to the edit mode control and drag will also work on midi notes so you can copy them this way too alt d or shift d will not and will copy the region instead but control c and control v also work inside of midi regions okay since you know how to create a mess by duplicating your midi regions frantically now would be a good time to learn how to delete them afterwards let's go to the grab mode so the first most basic way is to select a midi region right click and select remove so the most basic way to delete a midi region is just to right click on it select its name and select remove but that's super slow i don't recommend you do that just select it and hit the delete key instead what you can also do is just hold shift on your keyboard and right click that will delete a midi region a midi note or an automation point or even a plugin in the processor box that one has no undo fuck it won't delete a track though and i think that's good another way to delete midi regions is of course by selecting multiple of them and just hitting delete or using the range tool we can select the range and clear it by hitting delete of course what i'm going to talk about now is a little bit tangential but since we're dealing with midi it's important so i want to talk about the difference between how midi automation behaves and the regular automation behaves and how do you deal with that in ardor so basically in ardor there's two ways of storing automation data there is the normal way which works with fader automation mute automation plugin parameters panning etc and that data is stored in the dot ardor project file but there's also midi automation and midi automation is stored in the individual dot mid files each one representing one of the regions on the timeline if you control right click on a region you can see the name of the source file right here and this file is what contains the automation for midi pitch band uh mod wheel any arbitrary midi cc automations and extra stuff like midi program changes or cys axis i don't know so when you have a region and you have plugin automation underneath if you move the region the automation stays behind now if you have a midi region which has midi automation when you move that the automation goes along with that and the problem is and this is especially troublesome if you have sim sections that have both midi automation and plugin automation because these will go out of sync if you try to move them the usual way so the solution to this problem i found is to use the range tool so let's hit r on the keyboard to enable the range mode now i'm going to select a range then press and hold ctrl and click on the automation lane header to select it now if i press ctrl c i will copy this range along with the automation now if i put my mouse somewhere else and i do ctrl d you can see that i've pasted this midi region along with its automation but if i went to the grab mode and just move this on its own it would not follow so here we have a region that has both plugin automation and midi automation let's use the range mode to select this range as you can see it automatically selects my midi automation lanes because they belong to the same region now i'm going to hold ctrl and click on these automation lane headers to select all of that ctrl c will copy it ctrl v will paste a duplicate and you can see we have all of that coming along nicely we can also cut to move our part somewhere else and paste all right let's scale this up a bit let's say you want to shuffle around some song sections or just copy and paste the song section now again i believe the range tool is the only way to do this without pulling your hair out so make sure you're in the range mode first let's make sure we can see as much vertically as possible so i'm going to click on this drop down and select all so it's going to compress my tracks now this project has way too many tracks to fit them all in one screen now let's say i want to copy this drop okay where does it end first need to find all right there so i'm gonna click and drag now let's press ctrl t on the keyboard to select all the tracks as you can see it has conveniently omitted all the automation lanes for us so we need to select them one by one manually and if we screw up we need to start over so hit and hold ctrl and click click click click click you get the idea okay we have everything selected now be very careful to not click somewhere randomly because we'll have to do this again now the good thing about the range mode is that once we have this all selected you can click on the edges to drag and reposition them so we don't have to reselect all of our tracks and lanes when we want to paste that or do some other shuffling so when you want to restructure a song it's best to do this in one go so you have to select all this stuff just once now i really hope that the order team can come up with a better way to do that and i have reported the issues all right let's let's maybe cut this section i'm gonna hit ctrl x and as you can see it's gone now let's zoom out a little bit and maybe i will change my edit point to playhead so that it's easier for us to make sure we're pasting this stuff in the right place i'm gonna find an empty spot on my timeline to paste this track section temporarily okay i'm gonna hit ctrl v so let's listen and see if it does sound correctly yep that's proper all right now let's say we want to copy and paste something else into that spot we've made empty now because we have all of these tracks selected i believe i just click and drag it should oh my goodness yes it works okay so if you just click and drag it's going to select a range in your timeline without changing the selected tracks and automation lanes all right so we can now pick another section of the song let's say i want to use this part of the of the song and replace it with that other one i'm going to copy now let's move our playhead back find the place where we need to paste let's move the playhead where we need to paste and go ctrl v now there's one important thing that i missed before copying and cutting and pasting you see my grid is pretty fine and that is not fine when copying sections of songs it's best to use the bar grid because that makes sure you're not gonna cut like that while we're at the topic of restructuring your song i'd like to point out that you can insert empty space at any point in your project you can also remove that to do so put your playhead at the place where you want to insert empty space let's say we want to make a new section right between these two now hit ctrl t on your keyboard to select all the tracks don't worry about the automation lanes they will follow anyway more of that please now from the track menu select insert time as you can see the location of our playhead visible on the first clock has been copied to this insert time at dial now what we need to do is define how much time we want to insert what i do is right click on this second clock change it to bars beats and now these values are bars beats and ticks so this is in musical time let me click on that with the left mouse button and now we can type let's say we want to insert 16 bars let's type in 16 and now fill it up with zeros until the 16 is in the bars field okay now with the settings we can define what's gonna happen when our playhead is intersecting some regions and let's let's split such regions now let's apply it to all the playlists let's move glued to musical time regions let's move markers move locked markers and move tempo and meter changes the safest way is just to enable everything when you want to insert a section on your song let's hit insert time and now you can see we have brand new 16 empty bars to fill with new music now we can reverse that by going to track remove time this dialogue is a bit simpler let's again change the second clocks type to bars beats now let's type in 16 pad it with zeros and again apply to all playlists move markers move locked markers and move tempo meter changes let's remove time and as you can see it has removed this new empty space up we've just created i guess that's going to be useful for inserting new sections of your song media regions can be stretched just like audio regions using the time stretch tool to use it hit t on your keyboard then click and drag on the region you want to stretch to set the new length when you release your mouse button all the region contents are going to be stretched to fill the new length the time stretch tool can also work on multiple regions let's select these two regions and time stretch one of them to be twice as long as you can see both have been scaled to 200 of their original length we've discussed differences between media and regular automation in regards to moving and copying data around now let's take a closer look at what we can do with media automation in ardor or what we can't something you'll probably use the most is pitch band automation called bender unfortunately using this is not exactly a smooth experience let me show you why to add a bender automation lane click on this a button as usual select bender and select the midi channel you want to use bender starts in the neutral position which is 8192 what you see midi pitch band is stored as a 14 bit digital number which means it can have values between 0 and 16 384 8192 is right in the middle being the neutral position unfortunately ardor doesn't do anything to make this any easier on the users and just exposes the raw midi data and says deal with it it's fine if all you ever want to do is capture and play your performances but editing this by hand is just a pain in my shiny metal i've reported issues with the bender automation back in 2017 by the way so how do i use bender automation a big problem here is that there's no easy way of telling what value here is going to correspond to what amount of semitones of course you could go down and get your synths midi pitch band range and calculate what a magical number in this thing will correspond to four semitones when you have 12 semitone range but isn't this exactly what computers are for that's why if i need some precise pitch slides i'm going to use portamento and if needed i will automate the portamento time instead of using pitch band but i'm still using pitch band automation for a few things first if i only need small pitch bands like only one or two semitones up and down i can manage that and it's often faster than using portamento sometimes i'll also make the pitch band range in my synthesizer 24 semitones up and down to use it for special effects with no regard to tune or scale one thing you'll definitely want to use is an option in ardor which is called ignore y axis position when inserting new automation points let me show you what you enable it go to edit preferences editor and here in edit behavior you see there's an option ignore y axis click position when adding new automation points enable this now and thank me later so what this does is when we insert a point is going to automatically put it between previously existing values now this is a huge help for bender automation because there is nothing that helps you snap back to the neutral position nothing if you have your points messing around there is no help what you have to do is right click click on edit and type in from memory 8192 hit enter and that's how you reset to neutral position so enabling this option that ignores vertical position of your clicks is is a lifesaver one very important thing that's going to save you a lot of pain also is locking the movement to horizontal only and you do that by holding shift before you click on your point this way you can move these points without changing their value so you don't have to right click select edit and type 8192 enter over and over again okay let's make a very easy and simple automation pattern here now i have a surge synthesizer on this track and let me disable this or even let's clear this track if you right click here you can clear the automation you can also hide the automation lane let's open it again bender channel one so this surge synthesizer patch has a pitch bend range of two semitones up and down all right let's insert two points i'm gonna click on the start and click on the end because we're snapping to 16th notes these automation points should play right on top now another problem with bender automation is that if you shorten your midi region so that the last point is on the edge the last point will just disappear and not show and if you copy the region and extend it it's not even gonna be there anymore so for that reason when you make this kind of stuff you should move your points a little bit to the left but unfortunately there is no snapping to prevent it from moving vertically when you move horizontally so after that you need to right click go edit and type again 8192 hit enter now i can shorten this region so it is just as long as the phrase and now if i copy this it's gonna look and work correctly even though we have a small gap here but if we don't have this gap it's just gonna break okay let's add a little pitch slide so this note starts with two semitone ramp down all right and let's do a similar thing with this one and just start from an upwards ramp now i want to interpolate between these notes so i'm going to add points emulating portamento with pitch bend is inherently a bad idea and it's not a tool for that so this is not gonna work well and now this note is two semitones higher than this one so i'm going to go all the way up then i will snap back and i will have to again right click edit and type 8192 i have done this hundreds of times and let's play it oh and it's broken uh yes you see bender automation messes up if you have points too close to each other so what you actually have to do is move this a little bit forward all right it seems it's correct now let's insert another point here and another point here and move this down and i'm gonna move it to the left a little bit i'm gonna hold alt to release myself from the grid and this should be more or less correct it's not correct by a long shot i don't know why oh it doesn't reset okay okay yeah see you see the automation uh bender automation is very picky and sometimes you just need to insert a bunch of extra points to make sure it actually plays them it's mostly okay but we are having these little clicks in here which are just the artifact of us not being able to do this fast enough pitch bend automation is not good for this kind of stuff yes it exposes a bunch of problems with the pitch bend automation but also it shows us that this is not the right thing to do if we want to achieve this effect what you really want to do is remove this note altogether and this one too just make it a single note delete move this up delete these points move this up or even just delete that point and then we can even delete these points because we don't need them anymore maybe even this one and let's play it this is what bender automation can do and what it can do well so yes automation in ardor is not great uh pitch bend automation is particularly nasty but with some stamina and clever tricks you can get it to do your bidding midi cc automation lanes have a setting called interpolation actually it's called mode and by default it's in linear mode if you create a midi region with a draw tool which creates straight ramps between points but you can also switch it to discrete which will create these stair step patterns and the discrete mode is by default used when you record something with your keyboard what else do we have there there is state you can disable an automation lane so it has no effect that's great for testing out if one midi cc lane is doing something funky you don't want now a bit more interesting is the non-standard midi cc automation you can access the list of all midi ccs by clicking on this a button and selecting controllers now the names of these controllers as well as of their amount is defined by this drop down here some plugins for example the stock general midi synthesizer plugin will provide ardor with a list of midi ccs that it supports that's why we have this nice list here with all the numbers being named if i go to a different track say the surge one you can see that there is no plugin provided drop down here and when i click on the a button and select controllers you can see that we have basically everything that the midi standard supports and we have the names for general midi standard midi ccs so the first one is modulation breath etc and this might not necessarily correspond to what you're gonna have in the synthesizer now if we create a midi track which has no plugin at all for example we want to use it with a hardware synthesizer of course by default it goes with a general midi setup but if we click on this drop down there's a whole bunch of different synthesizer vendors and each one is going to give you a list of instruments if i select for example wildorf blowfeld and hit the a button and go to controllers you can see we have a list of controllers which are specific to the blowfeld hardware synthesizer which is very nice because you can select the stuff you need and write your automations without looking up a spec sheet i wish i knew how to get back to this generic one mma generic what is mma generic is this the generic one yeah that's the generic why why is it an mma if we open the track automation menu again you can see that i've covered bender i've covered controllers i haven't cut touched on pressure or polyphonic pressure and honestly i have nothing to say about them because i don't really know how they work i think that they're just another midi ccs maybe they have something to do with mpe and yeah never use them if you'd like to learn more about automation in general and specifically automation in ardor i have given a live presentation about this on sonic convention 2018 you can click on the card right there to watch the whole thing a new and a very useful feature in ardor 6 is that it can automatically route a midi keyboard controller or a dance pad to the currently selected midi track this removes the need for constant manual managing of your connections when you just want to hear what your track will sound like or tweak your patch i think this greatly improves ardor midi workflow to use this feature let's go to edit preferences midi now for this feature to work the midi input follows midi track selection global setting has to be enabled like this is the switch that makes this all do nothing or do something and you can see we have two tables we're only interested in midi inputs for now now i have a bunch of stuff here because of my recording setup normally you'll only see physical inputs and maybe midi through and the virtual midi keyboard the virtual keyboard we've talked about earlier has all of that's enabled by default which i think is great because you don't have to come in here and enable it and it's going to just follow any midi track to select in the editor all right let's find my midi keyboard here it is let's select music data and also where did it go and also follow selection i think this is scrolling something weirdly okay i have enabled it now let's test this i'm going to create two midi tracks with a default general midi synthesizer on them and i'm gonna pan one to the left and one to the right now let's play a note on the keyboard as you can hear when i play on the midi keyboard the midi input is being automatically assigned to the currently selected midi track and if we click here or rather right click on the routing grid you can see our oxygen 49 keyboard is being connected to it and also our virtual midi keyboard is being connected to it remember that if you ever want to disable this feature the last grid connection will remain active and you will have to remove it manually now one problem the automatic midi input routing may cause is that if you hit some notes and then change the track the midi note on the first track will never end because the midi off message has been sent on a different midi track for a naturally decaying sound like a piano this isn't that big of a problem because it's going to get silent anyway but for a sustained synthesizer patch this might be a problem because if i play a note change the track now this note will stay down forever unless i select it and play that note again and when i release it the original stuck note is going to go away too but there's an easier way to deal with this kind of problem let me just show you this is the perfect time to talk about the midi panic midi panic is a function that silences all currently playing midi notes you can trigger it by clicking on this button with the exclamation point on the left part of the transport toolbar or by hitting control and tilde if i play a chord if i hit the midi panic shortcut it silences my chord even though even though i'm still holding the keys down have this handy in case you're going to need it all right let's now talk about general midi control surfaces and recording automation with a midi controller it is possible to assign a midi cc input to various controls in order interface what that allows us to do is to control faders buttons and automatable plug-in parameters with physical sliders or knobs like these ones here there's a bunch of different control surface protocols but i'm going to only cover the midi part in this video for obvious reasons this could be used for recording fader or plug-in automation or for live performances so due to the fact that this feature is quite underdeveloped in order i would rather recommend you go for something like karla if you want to play music live and control your plugins with a physical controller okay let's go on and enable the generic midi control surface protocol to get this to work go to edit preferences select control surfaces find generic midi in this table and enable it now we need to edit the protocol settings we can do it by double clicking on its name or by using this little button here here we have two drop-down lists where we can select input and output midi devices if i click here you can see i have oxygen 49 which is my physical midi keyboard now i'm not going to use outgoing midi because this keyboard has no feedback that means its faders are not motorized nor any of the other controls have any way to reflect the state of these controls if i change them in a dawn some controllers do have these features and in such case if you select your device and also enable feedback and enable motorized you should be able to get your faders and rotary encoders move along with your automation in ardu I haven't tested that however because I don't have appropriate hardware let me know if you have all right so let's disable these features because i'm not going to use them now an important thing here is we can select default midi bindings from a list of available presets and my keyboard is listed here as m-audio oxygen 49 even so my model is mark 4 it works now an important thing to change in here in my opinion is this smoothing parameter which by default I believe goes on the value of 10 now the name of this parameter is very misleading because it's not really smoothing anything what this should be called in my opinion is smooth takeover as it behaves exactly like a parameter in mix called by the same name so in the mix this feature is disabled by default so what this is is a threshold of difference between the physical controls position and the control in ardu if the difference between your physical fader and the fader in ardu is greater than 10 your movements will be ignored why is this important if you want to record automation with fast movements it's going to be pretty easy to make a move where between the time ardu gets information from the midi device that this difference is already going to be greater in which case the automation will just stop following you I find this very annoying and I guess it's made to prevent sudden volume spikes when for example your gain parameter was at negative 20 decibels but you've been using your knob for something else and now you're moving it when it's assigned to this thing and suddenly it jumps to plus 20 decibels and blows your speakers but ardu doesn't have any pagination features that I know of and I know quite a lot about it so this doesn't really make sense what I recommend you to do is set this to maximum value of 127 as you probably know midi ccs are encoded as 7 bit digital numbers which gives them a possible value range between 0 and 127 so if I set this to 127 what that means is no matter how fast you move the fader this threshold is still going to let it through and ardu will react now I'm going to demonstrate this to you in practice and let's record fader automation now to assign a control to a physical midi controller what you need to do is hold control and middle click on a widget in ardu's ui now we have this little dialogue window saying operate controller now and what this does is it's waiting for us to touch a controller on our physical device so it can learn what that controller is and assign it so now if I move my control you can see that the fader is moving to and we can record our automation like this if I change this automation lane state to right we can play our transport and now if I move my control we can record automation let's zoom in let me now change the smoothing value to the default 10 and let's do this again as you can see by the way the automation lane changed its state from right to touch what touch does is it's a blend between play and right and that is if you're not touching the control it's going to play back what's already there but if you're going to touch it it's going to overwrite what was there now look what happens if I do a fast movement my fast movements are completely ignored only the slowest portions of my movement were as registered and that's because of this smoothing being set very low let's try this again now if I do some fast movements you can see that even the fastest movements have been registered completely and this is what I think is usually better so I recommend you keep this at 127 all right now if you want to record this for a plugin let's maybe take this surge patch and go to automation processor automation or we could use a filter one cutoff I'm going to control and middle click on this and now I'm going to move knob okay move my control and here we are now this filter I believe is not enabled yeah now I have control over this filter and if I set this to write and also record my midi we can record both our notes and the automation at the same time again ardo automatically switches the automation lanes that had the right state to touch state after you stop the transport to prevent you from accidentally overwriting your automation however I like to switch them to play mode so there is no way I'm going to overwrite my automation by mistake let's close this dialogue because we don't need it anymore and let's play this and see how it works well basically it has captured our performance nice now this midi control surface protocol also supports transport controls what that means is I can use the transport buttons on my controller to control transport in ardo and how I do it with my controller is I need to switch it to the auto mode and then these buttons do work as proxy for my transport controls now I have tried to map them manually without using the the keyboard preset in the midi control surface settings but I wasn't able to do that so I guess if you have a device that has transport controls but you don't have a preset in ardo contact the developers and I'm sure that will help you out in getting your device to work now if you'd like to remove an assigned physical control from a virtual control in ardo let's say I don't want this filter cutoff to be controlled by this knob anymore what you need to do is again hold down control middle click on the control and now click on the button what this will do is remove the assigned link and that's pretty much it for binding physical midi controllers to controls in ardo there's not much to it there isn't a list of all the controls you've assigned modulation matrix or any way to review what's there or alter it or temporarily disable it or or save presets like it's very very simple it's okay if you want to record some automation but I wouldn't recommend it for live performances it's really not designed for that I guess you could get some more stuff out of that if you were to hack the project file and try to see what you can do there but this is not a video for hackers but for musicians so I'm gonna pass export the midi data from ardo only works for single regions to do that you need to right click on the midi region like this one choose its name and choose export there's also a shortcut for that control alt E what this will do is show you a file select dialog where you can select the location and the name of your file to be exported and that's pretty much it if you wanted to for example export your whole session I think what you could do is separate all your midi tracks and give them different midi channels and then consolidate every single track on its own for the whole length of the project and finally drop them all into a single track and consolidate this so that all of the midi data from all the tracks on different midi channels are in one single region and then you can just export it now that's not convenient and I haven't tried that because I never needed that but I think it's the only option right now to export midi from ardo if you want the whole project usually people ask for stems anyway now importing midi data is pretty simple what you can do is right click on a midi track and select insert existing media what you can do then is select your previously exported or otherwise midi region and hit import of course there are settings you can import to select a track to a new track or just to the source list which is on the editor list you can also select the timeline position of the selected file for example at playhead and we can also import the midi tempo map if it's defined in the file let's do this and it seems we have imported a midi tempo map which kind of messed up our project I don't really know where is our region so let's try this again I'm gonna insert a mystery midi region uh where is it oh there it is all right I imported a mystery midi region I think you recognize it now another way to import a midi region is simply to drag and drop it from your file manager onto the track you want and in which case it's going to insert it at the mouse position what you can also do is scroll down to your session and drag in a midi region below the last existing track in which case ardor is going to create a new midi track for the new region before importing it we're almost done there's very few things left to talk about what's really awesome about ardor is that you can easily extend its functionality with the luas scripting language and ardor comes packed with a few scripts out of the box some of them can help you with midi stuff in the top right corner of ardor's interface you can see these four buttons with numbers they're great out but when you click on one of them a dialogue appears where you can select what script that launcher button will trigger when you click it I'm going to select polyphonic audio to midi yes now I'm going to click add and you can see that the first button has changed its look and now it has a note icon on it so what this does is it takes an audio region and produces a midi region with midi data analyzed and produced based on audio data I've read that it's working best with piano and guitar music so I've prepared a little test midi part for piano which I'm going to now record to audio and then we're going to reproduce the midi back from audio so this track feeds audio into this audio track I'm going to record it make sure that you leave some empty space in front of the audio region because otherwise we may lose a few first notes okay now we need an empty midi region and I've prepared an empty midi track for this purpose right there let's go to the draw mode and create a midi region now it doesn't have to align with the audio region at all it can be whatever let's switch to the grab mode I'm going to select the audio region now hold control and select the midi region as well now I'm just going to trigger the script and there's our midi let's listen to the generated midi now it's not perfect there are a few mistakes for example this note here is an octave and also it messed up right here somehow but the tonality is okay and this can be useful there are other scripts that can help you with midi stuff and you can find them if you go to edit louis scripts script manager and here there's a bunch of actions these actions 1 2 3 4 are what these buttons here do and if you select one of them and click add set you can select any of the scripts for example there's a script that turns midi cc to plugin automation but I am going to leave all of that for you to explore later we wouldn't want this beautiful head of yours exploding from information over node would we the last feature I want to talk about is something that probably no one besides developers has ever heard about let me know if you knew about it before I mentioned it because that means you're amazing step entry is an interesting feature for classically trained musicians if you right click on the record button on the midi track you get this little context menu and on the bottom of it you can select step entry it's going to do two things it's going to create a midi region for you which is this weird black color and also a special midi entry input dialogue appears similar to the virtual keyboard so it has a bunch of classical musical symbols in it now what you could do with it is input midi data as if you were doing so in a program like mu score for example let me give you a breakdown of all the controls we have here starting from the left now by default this interface will insert one node at a time and then jump to the next one but if you click this chord button it's going to stack all the nodes you insert creating a chord now if I release this button you can see that it advances the input cursor all right with this next section of buttons here we can select the length of the note we want to insert for example quarter notes next up we have six buttons up here the first one inserts a pause instead of a note and the blank of the pause is of course determined by this note length selection here now g rest inserts a rest note there's also double dotted so a quarter note would become a quarter note plus an eighth note plus a sixteenths note and there's even triple dotted notes I don't know who uses them I don't know who uses them but someone probably does and needs it right here now if you use the sustain button what it's gonna do is make the note you inserted before be extended for the duration of the next note so we can overlap your notes next up we have six buttons up here the first one inserts a pause instead of a note and the blank of the pause is of course determined by this note length selection here now g rest inserts a rest of the units of the grid's unit length right now my grid unit length is a 30 seconds note if I make this a bar we can make a bar long rest here oh I think it doesn't work like that actually yeah I think something is not right we can also go back by the length of this note so I can go back a hall note or forward there's also ways to insert a rest until the next beat if we go to quarter notes or the next bar or to the edit point which can be whatever we select for example the mouse cursor position oh I think the edit point was somewhere else let's maybe try and get our cursor back here okay let's snap it to the bar and there we go now after that we have a section where we can choose the dynamics of our notes by default we are using mezzo forte which corresponds to 64 velocity we can go to forte fortissimo fortissimo and forte and piano pianissimo pianissimo piano mezzo piano etc all the classical terms and all of them are actually mapped to different midi note velocity numbers as you can see here and that brings us to the last section to the right you can see we have all the very all the various parameters of midi notes and we can directly verify and affect them we can change the midi channel the notes are inserted on if we for example are driving multiple instruments with this single midi track we can change the note length by using this note length division number so one by four is a quarter note of course one by one is a whole note so I don't know why this is not a whole note 14 seconds later oh it's because I'm using this triple dotted one okay let's reset it to undoted and now the whole note should be an actual whole note let's snap it to the bar yes we have a whole note we can also change the midi bank and program numbers I have never used this so I don't know what it does honestly and we have these two plus buttons which are used to insert the actual midi messages at the given point to change the bank or the program and that's pretty much all there is to the step entry that's all congratulations on reaching the end of this video I know it's been very long and it's been forever since I announced I'm making it but it was a really huge project and yeah it wasn't easy to complete I hope this video was worth your time even though it was really long I wanted to make a single undivided complete tutorial for midi and ardor so that anyone can just watch it all and know what they don't know have place to reference they what they forgot or thank you for sticking with me through the process of making of this video and for your great support I really want to thank all the people who are supporting me financially if you dear viewer would like me to make more of this kind of stuff and would like to join these people please go to patreon.com slash anfa or liberapay.com slash anfa where you can support me with a monthly donation and this is greatly appreciated now I am aware that this video will slowly and inevitably become outdated and I think I might revisit it once ardor seven is out but well it depends on how this video is received if you'll get enough attention and if just basically I I'm gonna see if it's gonna be worth the effort also you can find the complete script for this video which is kind of like a written tutorial and the link is in the video description also feel free to join my community on chat dot anfa dot xyz there's a lot of great things happening there and a lot of helpful people who are sharing their ideas and inspirations and also solving issues for each other and I'd love to see you there too now go and make some music with ardor midi can't believe I'm done it's time to edit this beast I'm gonna have like four hours of bloopers the power of strong coffee for this one