The Smart Tool and the Timing Tool: It's a winning combination.

This'll probably be boring for the long time users and I'm not asking a question so only read for pleasure. Some of the new guys might find it neat though.

So I got bored of reading the manual and figured I'd put some of the stuff I've been learning into practice. I really needed to get a hang of the PRV and working with synths and my keyboard controller. I wrote some cool drum parts inputting directly to the PRV and then played a synth bassy kind of track using the controller. Sure enough my keyboarding performance ended up all being ever so slightly out of time (not a keyboard player) and figured I'd try to correct stuff in the PRV. I've tried using the auto quantize feature before but because of the hectic nature of my stuff it generally just throws notes all over the place and it caused a crash one time IIRC. Besides, it's so much better to see what's moving where just to make sure something isn't screwing up and I need the practice anyway. After just dragging notes in time one by one I decided to try the Timing Tool. I started lassoing a bunch of notes and dragged them up/down with the Timing Tool. Problem was sometimes they'd move in opposite directions and then I'd have to fix the ones that went the wrong way. Then I thought "AHA!" and changed my grid resolution to a larger value (in this case 64th notes to 16th notes). All was well after that and I got my synth track all in time very quickly. Very cool.

The point is I've got a very nice workflow happening and figured I'd share. So here goes...

I should mention this was two MIDI tracks recorded simultaneously so all the notes were doubled up in the PRV. Just selecting notes by clicking with the Smart Tool wouldn't work because it would only move the top note but lassoing would snag both. 

1) In Track Pane select MIDI clips to be edited.

2) Select View from the main Sonar menu > select Piano Roll View. Selected MIDI clips will open in PRV (if other MIDI track notes show up just hide that track in the PRV Track List Pane to the right of the PRV)

3) Place your left hand over F5 (Smart Tool) and F8 (Edit tool: press F8 until Timing Tool is selected)

4) Press F5 (Smart Tool)

5) Right Click + Drag to lasso a selection of notes

6) Press F8 (Timing Tool)

7) Hover over one of the selected notes and drag up or down until the start of all the selected notes snap to the grid

8) Click + drag left in the top half of the Time Ruler to move to the next set of notes (up/down to zoom)

9) Repeat steps 4-8 until all notes are corrected

If some notes are moving in the opposite direction try choosing a longer note value in the Snap Module of the Control Bar. If some notes are still not moving in the right direction just allow the notes that are to snap to the correct location then move the ones that didn't one at a time (it'll still be far less work).

There ya go. Not anything super impressive but man did that ever save me a lot of time while keeping my eyes on the details. It was a nice little flow once I got going. Maybe it'll benefit someone else too.

Cheers.