Matching Note Events to a Musical Scale

You can select a musical scale that is based on all or selected note events in the Key Editor and match note events to it.

Procedure

  1. Open a MIDI part in the Key Editor.
  2. Open the Scale Assistant section of the Inspector, and activate Use Editor Scale.
  3. Do one of the following:

    • Select some note events in the note display if you want to get suggestions of musical scales that match those notes.

    • Deselect all note events in the note display if you want to get suggestions of musical scales that match all notes of the MIDI part.

  4. Activate Show Scale Note Guides.

    This changes the background of the event display according to the selected scale so that pitches that do not belong to the scale are shown with a darker background.

  5. On the Key Editor toolbar, set Event Colors to Scale/Chords.

    This changes the colors of the note events in the event display according to whether or not the pitches match the selected musical scale.

    Note

    To view the color scheme of the selected color mode, open the Event Colors pop-up menu and select Setup.

  6. Open the Scale Suggestions pop-up menu, and select one of the options.
  7. Optional: On the Key Editor toolbar, open the Select Pitch Visibility Options pop-up menu, and select Show Pitches from Scale Assistant.

    This filters the note display and the piano keyboard display so that they show only the pitches that match the selected musical scale.

Result

The coloring of the event display background and the note events gives you a visual guide for editing note pitches.

After Completing This Task

If you need more assistance to match note events to the nearest pitches of the selected musical scale, you can click Quantize Pitches to quantize pitches of already existing MIDI notes, activate Snap Pitch Editing to snap the note pitches of MIDI notes while editing, or Snap Live Input to map the note pitches of incoming MIDI.