Using Time Formats In Digital Performer

DP’s Edit Grid is an editing aid available in the Sequence Editor, MIDI Graphic Editor and Drum Editor. You can turn it on and off, even temporarily during an editing action. Its role is to constrain the movement of events like MIDI notes and soundbites to grid divisions, making it easier to make musically relevant copies and drags, but it also affects other things, like limiting the use of the Scissors tool, the placement of the I-Beam cursor or the location of time-range selections to grid divisions only.

Control-G (think ‘grid’) toggles the grid on and off.

Hitting Control and the left or right square bracket (next to the ‘P’ key) narrows or widens the grid.

Also of immense use is the Command key. Hold it down while dragging a MIDI note, say, and the grid status toggles, so if it was on it temporarily turns off, and vice versa. This is brilliant for when you’re working predominantly with the grid, but need to quickly move an event by a non-grid amount, or make an extremely precise time-range selection. Some editing actions, like soundbite edge-edits, won’t snap to grid regardless of whether it’s on or off, but you can force them to snap to the grid by holding down Command as you drag.

Before we move on, bear in mind two potentially confusing situations associated with the edit grid. The first is that sometimes it can disappear but still be active. This could be caused by a setting in the Edit Windows pane of DP’s Preferences: if ‘Show edit grid lines’ isn’t selected, you’ll never see the grid. But it can also disappear when you have a relatively fine grid (for example, sixteenth notes, in a Measures time format) and you’re zoomed out quite a long way. Then DP chooses not to display the grid rather than have it appear as a meaningless mush of lines. The second potential confusion is when you’re zoomed quite far in, but the grid is wide (for example, a whole note). It can then seem as if notes or soundbites get stuck in place. They’re not, but they appear to be because the next grid division is further away than you can drag. If this happens, zoom out horizontally, narrow the grid, or increase the size of your edit window, and try again.

The edit grid is tremendously useful, but one of DP’s weirder aspects is that there’s no option to truly ‘snap to grid’ any events you’re working with. Instead, moved or duplicated events maintain their positions relative to the grid rather than actually aligning directly with it (unless they did to begin with, of course), which is the standard behaviour with many other DAWs. I hope that one day this might be addressed, but in the meantime the only solution is to use the Quantize function to move events onto grid positions, or do it manually by Command-dragging or entering a new location in an Event Info display.

Careful selection of time format, ruler displays and edit grid settings can be very helpful in most types of day-to-day editing actions, but there’s also a couple of specific techniques you can use in conjunction that are well worth learning. Try this slicing idea:

With Snap To Grid turned on, select the scissors tool and drag over a longish soundbite. The soundbite is split into grid-sized segments.

Try selecting the mute tool and clicking on some of the segments. You’ll get an instant stutter/glitch effect.

If you’ve got beat-analysed audio in your project, you can try the same scissors drag with Snap To Beat enabled instead. This results in a bunch of musically relevant soundbite segments which, because they’re anchored to their position in the measure, allow sequence tempo to be sped up or slowed down, Recycle-style.