Efficient chordal voicing in 4-part strings

wing said:

I personally can only do this within a score view.

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Me too. When I first got into DAWs I was astonished to find that people somehow managed to do everything in the piano roll, and I still can’t. That’s why I would always do this sort of thing in Dorico.

Wensleydale said:

Me too. When I first got into DAWs I was astonished to find that people somehow managed to do everything in the piano roll, and I still can’t. That’s why I would always do this sort of thing in Dorico.

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In general I find working in piano roll isn't hard, even writing counterpoint or scoring full orchestra straight into piano roll. I can "read" piano roll more or less fluently, and find it not much different from reading and writing notation, at least locally. But the overlaps in the midi make it much harder to get a sense of the musical whole, especially if I've had to step away from a piece for a period and then come back to it. Piano roll is just much slower getting the music back into the head. It's one of the main reasons I want to find a work flow where I can also have access to notation.

Ron Newman said:

Is there a way to use a digital pen on a tablet displaying score paper and have it immediately rendered in the DAW?

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The closest I know of is Staffpad:


It's not rendered in the DAW automatically, but it turns your handwriting into notation. Staffpad can render it with a bunch of libraries that you can buy for it. Or you can export the midi and import it into your DAW.

Ron Newman said:

Is there a way to use a digital pen on a tablet displaying score paper and have it immediately rendered in the DAW?

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@muk already replied on this, I personally have a little music notebook always ready on my desk to write voicings or counterpoint lines etc. It's easy then to record in the daw (cubase in my case) the various voices as I keep referring to the written sketch.

The best way to start with voice/channel assignments is IMO to look at Explode Polyphony and Staff Styles. Using one or both of these functions, one can switch between two ore more ways to view the same music:





When using the lowermost mode above, entering a note in eg. the viola clef will ensure that it gets the same channel as the violas (MIDI channel 3 in my case), but when switching to the piano staff style, you'll get the look in the uppermost image.

danstein said:

Totally agree with your post, I too have not found a better way to create new notes other than option-dragging.

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Sure, it's too bad that Logic after decades with development still miss a key command for Create Note.
The best solution right now is IMO to assign the pencil tool to the Command key:

Make sure that you have activated Right Mouse Button Is Assignable To A Tool:


After that, assign the rightmost tool to the Pencil tool:




Having done that, a mouse click together with using the Command key will change the mouse tool so it's a Pencil tool (as long as your command key is pressed). Use this tool to create notes wherever you want.