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Midi Effects

Some of the other midi effects included in Sonar can be applied to tracks after they’ve been recorded in a non-destructive manner and others can be applied as plugins similar to audio plugins. This article will concerned with the non-destructive effects and the next article will deal with the plugin type.

Transposing a track (or tracks) is very convenient when changing keys but you can also transpose individual notes or a selection of notes in one track or in multiple tracks. Simply choose the note(s) you want to transpose and the amount to transpose up or down in half-steps and the selection will be transposed by that amount. If you check the “Use diatonic math” check box, it will move the selection up or down according to the key the song is in. Let’s use A as a single note selection in the key of D as an example and we’re going to transpose it by –3. The A will change to an E, whereas if the diatonic math box was unchecked, the result would be F#.

Stretching and Shrinking midi is important when trying to make a passage fit into a certain amount of time. The “Process—Length” option works by stretching or shrinking the selection by a chosen percentage and does this by altering individual events. So if you choose a percentage of 200 percent, the length of the selection will double as will and the durations of the individual events. Quarter notes become half-notes, and 16th rests become 8th rests, etc.”Process—Fit to Time” stretches or shrinks the selection so the it ends at a particular time designated by measure, beat and tick(MBT) or hours, minutes, seconds, frames (STMPE). Applications include changing the tempo of background music so that it fits with a prerecorded voice over or changing the midi date to match a drum groove without changing the audio. There is an option to stretch or shrink the audio as well but keep in mind that it may introduce some artifacts

Process—Retrograde sounds like something from NASA but in actuality all it does is reverse the order of the notes in a selection.

The “Process—Scale Velocity is used for adding crescendos or decresendos by increasing or decreasing the velocity of selection. It has a starting velocity value (0-127) and an ending velocity value (0-127). You can also take a selection and make every note in that selection have the same velocity by having the starting and ending values the same. This can very effective for drum tracks when you want the snare or kick to have a consistent feel.

Next Month—Midi Plugins