Performer Notes

Search's Metric Grid Settings.

Last month, I looked at the basics of Digital Performer's Search function, so now it's time for some more sophisticated stuff.

A powerful feature is Search's ability to use multiple criteria simultaneously, and to combine them in various useful ways. You may want to search for notes below C2, for example, but find only those with on-velocities of more than 40. Clearly you need multiple Search Event Attributes for this, and to get at them you just click the Plus button in the lower right of the Event Attribute pane (see the screen below). Set the first line to 'Notes, Pitch Value, Is Less Than C2' and the second to 'Notes, On Velocity, Is greater Than 40'. You'll also need to select an option from the new pop-up menu that's appeared. For the example I'm suggesting here, all the criteria have to be considered together, so choose 'Events Must Match All Settings'. If you opted for 'Events May Match Any Settings', Search would find all notes beneath C2 and all notes with on-velocities more than 40, which is a much less exact search (but still one that you might want to perform).

Any number of Time or Event Attribute criteria can be taken on board together in a single Search, and by clicking the 'brackets' button a criteria 'group' is created. If you can't really see a reason for groups, don't worry — this is power-user stuff at its geekiest — but there are some situations where it could come in handy, so it's worth a quick explanation. The 'Events Must Match All Settings' pop-up menu determines the logic of a search, but its two options don't cover all eventualities. Imagine the following search — you want to find all the notes in a track with an on-velocity of greater than 100 and less than 30 that fall on the note D4. Enter these three criteria as normal and you have a problem. With the pop-up menu set to 'Events May Match Any Settings', you'll find all the notes with an on-velocity of greater than 100, all the notes with on-velocity of less than 30, and all the D4s in the track. Switching to 'Events Must Match All Settings' doesn't help — Search understandably can't cope with finding notes that simultaneously have an on-velocity of less than 30 and more than 100! A way round this is to first enter 'Notes, Pitch Value, Is D4' and then click the brackets button to make a group beneath this line. Here you can specify your velocities as being above 100 and below 30 and set the group's pop-up menu to 'Events May Match Any Settings'. Then set the pop-up menu at the top of the Event Attribute pane to 'Events Must Match All Settings'. Now Search only looks for notes with the pitch D4 which also have velocities greater than 100 or less than 30.

Setting multiple Search criteria.

Turning to Time criteria, one of the most useful is Metric Grid. With this you can restrict a search to single beats in the bar, or even tiny subdivisions of individual beats. You might, for example, use this to find every MIDI event in a drum track that falls on the third beat of a bar. With all of them selected, you can then nudge them forward a few ticks en masse to change the feel of the music. In this and numerous other situations, you'd save yourself a great deal of time.

Using Metric Grid is pretty self-explanatory (see screenshot, left). First, you select the resolution of your search using the Grid Spacing box, then type in the number of 'grid points' necessary to cover the longest bar in your sequence — the Total Grid Time display will confirm your settings. Now select the grid boxes that correspond to the beats or beat subdivisions that you want to find. You can click as many as you like, or tick the box marked 'Pairs Of Checked Points Form Ranges' to quickly select lots of grid boxes. 'Restart Grid At Measure Boundaries' is a good option if you've used time signature changes in your sequence — it stops the Grid getting out of sync with bars of differing lengths.

Setting Reason's Preferences to access Reason plug-ins from DP3 via OMS Emulator.

With the window open, you select found events by clicking them or dragging over them. You then have two choices. Hit the Select button and they are selected ready for editing. Hit the Go button and the relevant Graphic Editor opens as well, which is a great time-saving feature when you're trying to locate a single event in a complex sequence. The function of the Go button is duplicated by the up and down arrow buttons; you can click on these to advance to the previous or next item in the list and have it displayed in its Graphic Editor. There are also two mini-menu items of note. Refresh carries out the same Search that led to the results you're viewing, regardless of whether you've since changed the uppermost editing window in the meantime. And checking the Group option ensures that 'clusters' of data (such as might be found with the Metric Grid option) stay grouped when using the mouse or up/down arrows to make selections in the Search Results list.

Although development of Opcode's OMS has long since ceased, it's still a part of everyday life for a lot of Digital Performer users, especially those using non-MOTU MIDI interfaces. Some get on fine, but many experience system instability caused by the interaction of OMS with FreeMIDI (which is still required).

It's particularly irritating to have to introduce OMS just to make a software synth work with DP. Although most now have FreeMIDI drivers, one or two — notably Reason — still don't. And this is made no easier by OMS's inelegant implementation of inter-application MIDI.

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To try it out, disable any OMS extensions you already have in your system folder. Then download OMS Emulator from www.unicornation.com/files/ OMS-Emulator.sit and drop it on to your System Folder before restarting the Mac. After booting up once more, you should find that all OMS applications now 'see' your FreeMIDI Setup as if it were an OMS Studio Setup, letting you make appropriate MIDI I/O configurations.

Getting an OMS-only software synth to work with DP is just a touch more complex. In the case of the excellent CellSynth (see www.cellsynth.com) for example, you need to start up DP first of all. Then boot CellSynth and select Choose MIDI Input from the MIDI menu (found in turn under the Options menu). You're presented with a list of all your FreeMIDI devices, along with an entry for Digital Performer v3.02 (or whichever version you're using). Select that, then back in DP, you'll find that CellSynth now shows up in MIDI Output pop-ups. Just select it (Channel 1 is your best bet), record-enable the track, and you can play it as you would a 'real' FreeMIDI synth. If you don't hear anything, make sure you've made appropriate settings to monitor CellSynth's Sound Manager outputs (v1.7 can also output audio to DP via Rewire).

To use Reason you need, again, to start it up after you've booted DP. As well as making Reason 'see' DP as a MIDI input source, this also configures its audio output to use Rewire. In Reason's Preferences (see left), select MIDI (or Advanced MIDI in Reason v2) and set the input for Buss A as Digital Performer. Then, in the MIDI In Device module, choose some of Reason's sound modules in the Channel pop-up menus. Back in DP, create as many Aux tracks as necessary to handle the Rewire inputs from Reason — you might need to go to Create New Bundle in the input pop-ups to find these. Finally look in DP's MIDI output pop-ups — 16 Reason channels should be available. Make your selection, record-enable the track, and away you go!

Current Version     Digital Performer: v3.02.