MIDI editing

[hatusage]

Hi all. I posted a thread a few weeks ago about how how I was a convert from Ableton Live, but I've hit a brick wall with editing MIDI. I have a basic MIDI drum track to a project and now want to add a few more hits to it over the entire length.
I can not find a way to do that. I have tried all the copy and paste things that you can think off.. nothing works. I always end up with one instance (beat) of what I am trying to duplicate,not an entire copied. To have to edit the entire drum track is extremely counter productive, as I'm sure that you you all realise. In Ableton Live you just had to drag a bounding box over the things that were wanting to highlight, press copy&paste, and you were done.
This is a deal breaker for me. I've dug deep into the menu, but can find no way to do it!
Help please :-)
(EDIT) it seems that my time selection tool is disabled, and I can't find anywhere to re-enable it. I did NOT disable it!

[Kenny Gioia]

There's definitely a bunch of different ways to do what you're trying to do in REAPER. I just need to understand what you have now. Is it a few bars looped through the whole song? Is it copied and pasted throughout the whole song? One long linear MIDI item?

[hatusage]

I just had a load of bass drum kicks in the project, copied and pasted from the first bar, glued them after that.
I wanted to add a few side snares onto it. I had previously used copy and paste to extend the bass drum line. Impossible to do it with the side stick though.

One long sequence through the whole song.

[juliansader]

Originally Posted by hatusage

One long sequence through the whole song.

The simplest way would be to cut the item to the length of the part that must repeat, then enable Item setting -> Loop item source, and drag the item to the length of the entire long sequence.

The advantage of looping over copy/pasting of MIDI data inside a long unlooped MIDI item, is that changes that you make to one part will propagate to the rest of the loop. You can also use pooled MIDI items and "Propagate" actions to sync items that are scattered over the project.

EDIT: If you want to repeat notes or other MIDI events *within* an item, try the scripts in the thread Looking for Midi scripts....

[juliansader]

Originally Posted by hatusage

(EDIT) it seems that my time selection tool is disabled, and I can't find anywhere to re-enable it. I did NOT disable it!

There are multiple ways to create a time selection. Which one isn't working any more?

I expect that one of your mouse modifier actions was inadvertently changed. Go to Preferences -> Mouse Modifiers, find the appropriate "Context" for your time selection tool, and make sure that it is linked to the correct action.

BTW, many new users don't know this, but you can unlink the time selection and loop points, so that you can make edits using the time selection while playing the same loop.

[Kenny Gioia]

Originally Posted by hatusage

I just had a load of bass drum kicks in the project, copied and pasted from the first bar, glued them after that.
I wanted to add a few side snares onto it. I had previously used copy and paste to extend the bass drum line. Impossible to do it with the side stick though.

One long sequence through the whole song.

I would re-glue the MIDI item to the smallest size you need. Then you can loop it (trim the right side) to the size you need. Now you can add anything you want to the first section and it will exist on every loop.

[hopi]

here is another way I find easy

1- you have one midi file on track A... say it is your Bass Drum
2- on a new track create the midi item you want to add to that
...lets say it is a bunch of hit hat hits

OK
3-copy that HH track [just hold control and drag and drop] onto the Bass Drum Track...
4-select all items on that track [the Bass and HH items] and Glue

you get them merged together as one MIDI item...

There could be other variations on this but that is the basic idea
Let's say you want to add a snare on 1 and 3 to the Bass trak
and the Bass is 64 bars long
OK so on a new track, make a one bar item, put the snare hits in it
now drag it out for 64 bars...
now copy that onto the Bass trak and glue those two together..

Also you might want to look into Free Item Positioning so that you can
visually see each item you want to add or 'stack' onto the other items...

[hatusage]

Many thanks to all. Nothing suggested worked, so I just re-set to default. Luckily I hadn't gone down the customisation path too far...lol
All working as it should again. Happy camper :-)

[woogish]

just put some bits in, then sort them out with other bits, hit enter, and do some other bits...............