John Powell - Solo: A Star Wars Story - piano roll midi

[peter5992]

For all you film music fans, here's a fantastic video of one of the cues of Solo: A Star Wars Story, scored by John Powell.

The piano roll view is great, makes it much easier to look at the entire cue rather than looking at hundreds of tracks of which only a few may be used.





Follow up question is: how do I do something like this in Reaper? I can record midi easily enough, and edit everything on single tracks, but how do I create a single piano roll view like this?

[xpander]

There is no such single view-it-all screen in MIDI editor, but you could fake something similar e.g. like this:

1) Create a new track with an empty MIDI item covering the whole length of the project. In MIDI editor, select this track/item as a target for inserting events. This will be your empty background where all the other items/events will show up.

2) In MIDI editor Track Selector, make all the tracks/items which you want to see visible and editable by clicking the eye and lock icons.

You'll have to have One MIDI editor per project and Open all MIDI in the project set up in the MIDI Editor preferences.



https://imgur.com/jm54rDu

[peter5992]

Originally Posted by xpander

There is no such single view-it-all screen in MIDI editor, but you could fake something similar e.g. like this:

1) Create a new track with an empty MIDI item covering the whole length of the project. In MIDI editor, select this track/item as a target for inserting events. This will be your empty background where all the other items/events will show up.

2) In MIDI editor Track Selector, make all the tracks/items which you want to see visible and editable by clicking the eye and lock icons.

You'll have to have One MIDI editor per project and Open all MIDI in the project set up in the MIDI Editor preferences.



https://imgur.com/jm54rDu

Excellent, thanks!

[xpander]

You're most welcome Peter, and thanks for the link to the cue. Forgot to mention that you could also try different note coloring options from the bottom of the MIDI editor. Perhaps coloring e.g. by Track would make sense in this case.

[peter5992]

Hm ... follow up question: is there a way to get the midi items displayed more clearly? By default they appear as half greyed out.

(On a site note, my computer appears to have severe performance issues when trying to display multiple midi items in one track, maybe due to its age.)

[xpander]

Unfortunately the notes will not be fully clear, because the item selected for the note insertion (our empty background item) is in full focus and everything else is just showing through it.

Switching the insert focus to any other of the individual items would bring the given notes fully front, but at the same time make the others less visible in comparison. So this here is a compromise to get the same visibility for every item.