drawing notes in abelton

ok so for all you abelton live heads out there,

i have a couple questions,

i saw on this video that you have to switch between to the draw tool and the pointer tool to draw notes and drag notes in the piano roll.

in logic im used to being able to click a note (with my pencil tool), then (go back to my pointer tool) and hold option and drag and the note and it will copy that note to another space when i release option.

if i want to highlight more than one note i just lassou them and option drag the selection to my new place and it works like that also.

this enables me to draw many notes by only switching to my pencil tool once instead of every time i want to draw a new note.

can drawing notes in abelton be similar to this?

it seems like a lot of extra button clicks to do a simple thing like draw some midi notes in abelton with cycling through the draw tool and pointer tool; but im hoping that they have a workaround for this and the guy was just doing it like that for tutorial reasons.

also one more question,

say im makng a 2 bar loop and laying drums down..

i push record and it starts my 1 bar count in, and when it starts cycling my 2 bars i lay down all my snares with my midi controller.

after it cycles over will all the snare hits i just did still be visible to me when im laying down my kick or hihat pattern?

in logic every other note disappears when it cycles around and i find this really annoying for some reason.

thanks alot everyone!

There's a keyboard shortcut at least, I think it's ctrl+b (might be option b on a mac)

I don't usually draw notes in but I'm pretty sure you can just do it by double clicking to create a new one and then stretch it out to the correct length, no need to change tools at all.

You can then grab them all by dragging a little box around them all at the same time, move them around etc... You can change the velocity of each one underneath on the section that looks like a bar chart.

My favourite shortcut in all instances is that you can hold down "Alt" I think on a Mac, and it gives you a little "+" symbol so once you've highlighted a selection you can simply grab and drag it to wherever and it will create a copy immediately and leave the original in place.

Works with audio and midi notes I believe.

As for the loop, if everything is being triggered on the same MIDI track and each hit is on a different note of the piano roll you should just be able to build them up like musical Jenga. Unless you've got the option next to the transport controls highlighted, then if it's looped it continues to record and overwrites but does in fact save it as one long block. But visually it looks as though it's being re-recorded each time it loops over.

This might not make sense.

scoobylol wrote:I don't usually draw notes in but I'm pretty sure you can just do it by double clicking to create a new one and then stretch it out to the correct length, no need to change tools at all.

But visually it looks as though it's being re-recorded each time it loops over.

This might not make sense.

hey scooby, could you check the drawing feature next time you fire up abelton for me please?

and your saying that when the loop cycles over, you can still see all your previously recorded stuff (all the ohter notes on the piano roll that you have already played in) on the second cycle, like in a maschine?

in logic it will still play your prevously recorded notes, it just wont show them on the second pass which frustrates me. are you saying it shows them all the time in abelton?

thanks guys.


***edit, maschine loops over and shows everything the way that i like. so if youve ever used that, you could tell me if abelton does or not.