So far, we've only looked at the main window, and have not really edited anything. Rosegarden provides three different editors, each with its own unique view of the data. You can view the raw Rosegarden events with the Event List Editor, you can work with a piano roll metaphor with the matrix Editor, or you can see your data as notation with the Notation Editor. Each of these editors works on a segment level, so you must have at least one segment selected in order to open one. If you wish to start with an editor from scratch, you must first create an empty segment with the pencil tool, as I described in chapter 2, and then select it.
The event list editor is for editing the composition at the event level. This is the most raw of the three edit views, and the most difficult editor to use.
Rosegarden is not a pure MIDI sequencer, and it does not store raw MIDI events; instead, it uses its own internal format, which is both more powerful and more flexible. There are many kinds of events in Rosegarden. As you would expect, MIDI notes, controllers and the like are events, but so are hairpins, dynamics, performance directions, clefs and key signatures, etc. Each class of event has its own set of unique properties.
Here are just a few examples of types of events with a few their properties. All of these can be edited from here in the event list editor, although you probably will find little occasion to tear an event apart and rearrange its insides.
Out of the box, the notation editor is the default, but that editor is a chapter unto itself. For the moment, let us begin with the simplest of the three. Pick a segment, and then right click on it. Choose "Open in Event List Editor" from the resulting context menu.
If you've started with a blank segment, as I did, there's not much to see here:
You can change the way Rosegarden displays the timing of events using
the 
buttons, displaying time as Musical, Real, or Raw.
If you have a more complex segment than the one depicted above, you may wish to use filters to focus in on the classes of events that most interest you. Simply check or uncheck boxes from the Event filters box.
You can also use the selection event filter 
. Make a selection of events, then use the filter to weed out unwanted
events from the selection. Everything the filter misses will still be
selected after it has been applied.
The truly brave among you might want to experiment with creating something entirely from scratch.
If you click on the 
icon, you'll be presented with a dialog like this that
allows you to make your own event out of whole cloth:
You may edit existing
events using either the simple 
editor...
..or the advanced 
editor.
You may delete events
using the 
icon.
I have elected to demonstrate only those uses which I judge are most difficult for you to figure out on your own. While I am only covering a select few types of events, the process for creating (or changing) all of them is similar.
One thing that can only be done from the event editor is the insertion of a mid-track program change. This might be useful, for example, if you wish to switch a string part from playing normally to playing pizzicato and back without having to write the parts on different tracks to assign them to different instruments.
In version 1.0 of Rosegarden, the facility for entering program changes is rather crude and unwieldy. It may see improvement in future versions, but for the moment, the only mechanism provided is the entry of program changes by number. There is no facility for changing the bank anywhere except at the instrument level, so any program changes you insert directly into segments will be done within the same bank the track's instrument uses.
If you want to change a "strings" instrument to play using a "pizzicato" program at a particular point...
The easiest thing to do is move the playback pointer to the desired insertion point. In this example, I've done it using the transport in beat:bar mode to ensure I'm in exactly the desired spot to insert a program change at bar 2, beat 1, tick 0.
Remember that the 
button changes display modes on the transport.
If you right click on this segment and choose to open it in the event list view, your cursor should already be at the right spot to insert a program change at the desired time. In this sample, there happens to already be a note at that particular time, but that will not prevent you from inserting a program change event here at the same time. In fact, if you are inserting a program change into otherwise empty space, you will have to set its time manually.
Click on the icon to insert a new event.
The dialog will open out to a default event type of "note." You want to
dial "programchange" into the "Event type" combo box to make this event
into a program change.
Now you should have a dialog like this. Except, of course, I have already twiddled the settings in this particular example.
Now you need to dial in the program change by number. Unlike the numbers used elsewhere in Rosegarden (which appear out beside the name when changing programs in the Instrument Parameters box, for example), these are zero-based, rather than one-based. If the program "Acoustic Grand Piano" shows up as program 1 in your studio, you'll have to subtract one from that and use 0. I've included a zero-based list of General MIDI program numbers in Appendix C for your convenience. In this case, "Pizzicato" is program number 45.
You may have some occasion to change the time of the event.
Click on the 
button out beside "Absolute
time" and you will be presented with a dialog that allows you to
re-assert the fact that you want this event at 2:1:0. You'll need to
dial in the Measure (2) beat (1) and 64ths (0) to get the event to come
in at the desire time. If this does become necessary, at least you
already know what time to aim for, having used the playback pointer and
transport to get the "address" of this particular moment in time.
I don't have time to do a proper job of discussing this rather involved and arcane subject at the moment, and I may remove this before publishing the final draft of this book. In the meantime, here is a message from Pedro Lopez Cabanillas, author of most of these features, on the subject of sysex in Rosegarden:
> Would you mind giving me a rundown?
About your question: System Exclusive messages can be recorded, played, exported to Standard MIDI Files and imported from them as any other MIDI event. It's not worth to mention that, IMO, as that's what everybody expects from a MIDI sequencer. But you know that was a hard way to reach this place.
You need to use the Event List editor for any editing on System Exclusive events.
To create a new SysEx event from scratch:
insert Event (star button, or menu Edit->insert event)
select "systemexclusive" in the event type combo.
3. fill the "Data" field, write some Hex values starting with "F0" and ending with "F7". Alternatively, you can use the "Load Data" button to import the payload from a "SYX" file.
The load function only imports the first sysex block from the file, if there is more than one. SYX Files created with Cakewalk can be loaded into RG.
Use the "Save Data" button to store the payload of an existing SysEx event into an external "SYX" file.
The matrix editor is based around the familiar piano roll metaphor you have probably seen in other packages. It is useful for taking a hands on approach to tweaking notes where their performance is more important than their visual appearance as notation. The matrix is my preferred method of sequencing percussion parts, and I use it whenever the notation editor is simply unable to cope with my data, and needs a bit of a brute force shove to get things to come out right. There hasn't been a quantizer written yet that can make consistently good decisions in the face of the kind of mistakes I tend to make while playing my keyboard, and I spend quite a lot of time flipping back and forth between matrix and notation views.
It is important to note that Rosegarden is not purely a MIDI sequencer, and at no time can you ever directly edit raw MIDI events. It stores events using an internal meta format that includes quite a bit of information about each note. Rosegarden's events do of course cover the fundamentals of pitch, velocity and duration, but they also include such attributes as stem direction, beam state, accidental state, ties, slurs, slashes, accents and so forth. Of special note, every Rosegarden event maintains independent duration values for performance and display. This makes it possible to create a composition that looks good printed on paper, and yet preserves all of the slight human imperfections that give a performance its character.
In version 1.0, the matrix can only edit performance attributes. This can create interesting challenges both for performance and notation. If you are working on a human performance, and you draw notes to their full length here in the matrix, you may damage the character of the performance slightly. On the other hand, if you draw slightly long or short notes here, or knock the timing off the grid lines intentionally, you will create ugly notation in the process. In either case, you can make adjustments to massage away these differences from the Notation Editor, as I will explain in the next chapter.
One particularly noteworthy side effect of the way Rosegarden stores events is that tied notes are a series of discrete dashes here on the matrix. It is really not possible to determine whether a series of notes at the same pitch will sound as one note or several without looking at the affected area from the Notation Editor.
Let's start with an empty segment one measure long, and I'll show you the basics. Draw your segment, select it, and then right click on it and choose "Open in Matrix Editor" from the resulting context menu. You'll see something like this:
I will go into more detail about the local cursor in the notation chapter, but it does have its uses here in the matrix as well. If you take a second look at the rulers, you should see that the one toward the top of the screen has a magenta cast. This ruler is for controlling the local cursor, which is a magenta version of the playback pointer. You can set it in the same fashion you set the playback pointer, and the two cursors function independently of each other. The local cursor's main function here in the matrix seems to be to set the destination location for paste operations.
Now let's do a little one bar loop for demonstration purposes. Just
like on the main view, the 
cursor is used to
create something new from scratch. In this case, of course, we're
entering a note. Let's pepper this thing with a few well placed random
pitches:
You may have noticed that those came out as quarter notes. In order to control the default length of new notes, you must change the grid setting. Let's enter eight 8th notes. First dial in the 8th note on the grid button:
Now new notes you enter will take this duration by default:
It's obviously a bit tedious, but you can enter an entire composition this way if you desire.
You can move notes around with the 
cursor.
You can resize notes with the 
cursor, by clicking on a note and dragging it.
By default, resize operations snap to grid lines. If you wish to drag the note to some arbitrary length, do so by holding the shift key while dragging the note.
All of these operations can be performed on more than one note at a time. In order to do so, you need to make a selection.
You can use the 
cursor to select individual
notes one by one while holding down the shift key.
If you wish to select a broad range of notes, you can select every note of a given pitch by selecting the arrow cursor and shift clicking on the individual notes on the piano keyboard. Each click will select every note of the desired pitch, and you can select any number of pitches in this fashion.
It is also possible to select a band or several bands of notes by sweeping the arrow cursor across the keys while holding shift.
Finally, if you have some need to select ranges of notes within an area less than the entire segment, you can use the selection event filter. Start by making a broad selection, and then click on the filter icon to summon the dialog. You can then dial in various criteria for the notes you wish to remain selected after the filter is applied. I'll demonstrate one use for it later on in this chapter.
NOTE: If you ever find a good use for this dialog's ability to filter on controller or wheel events, please let me know. I implemented this dialog before Rosegarden had control rulers, when the only way to get to these outside the event list editor, which didn't actually work at that time, was to manipulate them as little question marks in the notation view. I'm not convinced these last two event categories are actually still useful, and I expect to remove them from the dialog for Rosegarden 1.1 unless I get feedback requesting otherwise.
Velocity is a MIDI parameter that describes how hard a note was hit on the keyboard or other device. It allows for finer expression of volume than what can be accomplished merely by adjusting the volume parameter for the MIDI channel. If you have a velocity sensitive keyboard, this parameter will be recorded as you play. Under certain other circumstances, you may end up with events that have no velocity property at all, or a default velocity of 100. Regardless of how it did (or didn't) get there, it's a simple matter to tweak it to suit your needs.
If the events you're editing have velocity properties, you can edit them with the Velocity Ruler. If it's not visible, turn it on from the View menu with View -> Show Velocity Property Ruler.
In this example, all the events have a velocity of 100, and they show up as orange bars on the ruler.
They can be changed by dragging them up and down, and the bars change colors to reflect their value. Here I've arranged them so that you can see each bar. Notice that the notes on the matrix itself change to reflect these same colors.
NOTE: It can indeed be somewhat tricky to know which note you're adjusting if there are several notes of the same duration at the same time. When multiple notes occur at the same time, use the [ and ] keys to flip through the available choices, then watch the matrix above for the color change that reveals which note you are adjusting.
It is possible to adjust the velocities for an entire selection of notes. Adjust -> Velocity -> Set Event Velocities presents you with a dialog box that allows you to choose from several different patterns. The Value ranges from 0, which is the softest possible key strike, to 127, which is the most forceful.
TIP: If you find that you have notes that don't have velocity properties for some reason (there are no bars on the velocity ruler for those notes), you can also use Set Event Velocities to create new ones.
It's possible to transmit controllers from here in the matrix with the various control rulers. Let's add a Modulation ruler. Choose View -> Add Event Ruler -> Modulation Controller and you should now have a new tab at the bottom of your matrix.
If you right click on the ruler you can insert a controller event, or even an entire line of them.
In this example, I have elected to insert a line of controllers. It's impossible to capture X cursors, and I'm far too lazy to try to draw that little pointing finger, so I will instead describe what I did. After making the selection from the menu, the cursor changed to a pointing finger. I picked a start point with this finger, and continued to hold the button down while dragging the resulting line up and to the right. After I released the button, it produced this line of controllers:
You can move individual controllers up and down, or you can select and move them in groups. It's rather less obvious than selections elsewhere, but if you look closely, you can see that selected controller bars are each outlined in red.
If you hold down shift and drag these up and down as a group, they all move at once.
I find it rather difficult and tedious to do drums with the notation editor for several reasons. It does not yet support standard percussion notation, and it is yet very well capable of handling multi-voice parts with different rhythms in different lines within the same segment. For this reason, the matrix is my editor of choice for drum parts.
NOTE: For more complicated parts, I favor doing them with Hydrogen, and then importing the patterns. However, this can present special challenges too, as Hydrogen's drum kits rarely map out to the General MIDI standard. That leaves me with the hard choice of rearranging the patterns to play on my GM and GS equipment, by physically moving all the notes to different places, or assigning affected tracks to an instrument that's connected to Hydrogen, and letting it do the playing. In this last case, there is no way to change the drum kit Hydrogen is using without manipulating its GUI, so it isn't really possible to save a Rosegarden composition whose Hydrogen drums are guaranteed to play correctly without manual user intervention. Muddying the waters further, Rosegarden doesn't really provide any good , built-in facility for my letting others know what they need to go do to Hydrogen in order to play my files. As a result, I do tend to do most of my drum work with Rosegarden's admittedly less capable facilities, if only for the sake of convenience in distributing the results to others.
In order to have some place to put the drums, create a new segment four bars long.
NOTE: I'm leaving this mistake in for the amusement value. I was about to submit a bug report documenting how I created a segment four bars long, opened it in the matrix, and could only edit three bars. Can you spot the reason why that happened? :)
In order to hear drums, you need to route this track to a percussion instrument from the main window. If you have General MIDI-compliant equipment, all that should be necessary is to route this track to the instrument #10 belonging to a suitable device.
In this particular example, I want to use the TR-808 drum kit that's part of the soundfont I'm using on my Sound Blaster Live!, so I need to dial up bank 1 0 (where the extra drums are) and set the program to "TR 808." (Notice that I do not have the [x] Percussion box checked. That's because I'm not using a GS device that has drum kits in the same 0 0 bank as the General MIDI programs. Instead, this device has the alternate drum kits in bank 1 0.)
Now that the track is routed to play using suitable sounds, head back to the matrix window. It's probably a good idea to pick a finer resolution than the standard quarter note for the matrix grid. For this part, 16th notes were convenient, so I dialed 1/16th into the Grid combo box.
To make it easier to get the pattern right, set the first bar to loop using the ruler on the bottom. (Notice that the ruler on top has a purplish cast. It's for controlling the local cursor, which I will discuss in the notation chapter. The ruler at the bottom is for setting loops, and moving the blue playback pointer.)
The rest is trial and error. Set the main transport window to loop
mode 
and hit play. Use the edit tools to insert, remove, and move
notes until you get a pattern you like. Rosegarden provides no facility
for labeling which keys play which drums, so you may need to putter
around a bit before you figure out where they are. This example uses a
bass, a snare, and a couple of hi-hats, and I have completed my pattern
in this snapshot.
Select all the events and paste them three times. Use the top ruler to set the local cursor to the destination for each paste operation. You should wind up with something like this:
Now set only the last bar to loop, then adjust the pattern to make a little fill.
TIP: I found it a trifle fiddly using copy and paste to make these copies. I didn't get the placement of the local cursor quite right, and I had to quantize the results. The next time I had to do this, I started with a segment one bar long, looped it, then when the time came to copy it three times, I marked it as repeating in the Segment Parameters box, then double clicked on three of the copies, selected all four segments, and used Segments -> Splint and Join -> Join to join them back into one; then I finished by un-checking repeat for the segment. It's a toss-up whether method B is faster, but it's definitely more precise.
One place where the selection event filter shines is in its ability to quickly focus in on a particular range of notes within a selection. In this example, I had an arpeggiated part that I entered with flat velocities, and I wanted to add some life to the performance by accenting the top and bottom notes, while bringing down the velocity in the middle. As the part cycled up and down through several chords, it was impossible to use the click-on-the-keyboard method I described earlier in this chapter to select only the events I wanted.
The first step is to select all the events in the four bars of the
first chord using the tool.
Next, I wanted to catch the middle notes notes, so I used the icon to summon the event filter dialog.
Then I used the icon to pop up the pitch
chooser for the from: pitch. In this case, E3.
TIP: I find it a bit tricky to use the pitch picker in this dialog from the matrix view because I'm comparing a constantly changing clef and staff to a pitch on a piano keyboard. I find it error prone, personally, and so I have taken to looking at the status bar at the bottom of the window as I hover over notes. It shows the absolute MIDI pitch, and makes it a breeze dialing the values I want straight in.
I repeated the process for the to: pitch, selecting B#3. Since I wanted to select the notes in between these two extremes first, I left the associated combo box set to "include." This caused it to include all the notes between E3 and B#3. Since I wanted to grab notes irrespective of duration or velocity, I left these filters at all-inclusive settings.
After clicking OK to apply the filter, the following selection resulted:
NOTE: If you didn't get quite what you were after, hit the filter again. It remembers the last settings you used, and you can fine tune it on subsequent runs until you get it just right.
Now that I had filtered the selection to the range of notes I wanted to affect, I used shift+down to lower all of these velocities at once, producing the following result:
I could have used the filter the other way as well. By setting the combo box to "exclude" the range, I could have selected and adjusted the high and low notes to a higher velocity...
With the following result...
