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New options for the Ghost Track menu?

Now that the feature is well-tested and stable, what do you think about expanding it and adding such capabilities as selecting multiple ghost tracks at once and selecting all available ghost tracks? This would really come in handy.

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rncbc's picture

I guess that would be a great, but are you sure that the extra ghost layers would be any beneficial to productivity?
isn't one kinda enough and fit for most purposes?

byee

Yes, definitely beneficial, for example, in orchestral projects it isn't simply helpful, it's necessary to view the whole composition or particular combinations of tracks in the background as you edit notes.

bluebell's picture

When I have some cymbals played then a real drummer cannot hit the HiHat when it's played with both hands. So it would be helpful to see all the tracks with cybals when I edit the HiHat clips.

Qtractor supports overlapping clips. Create a midi track, call it "ghost", copy and paste all the clips you want to display into it. Would that work?

It's a simple process that takes seconds.

You could even save that "ghost" track as a template.

In other words, if you want to ghost edit multiple tracks, create one track that contains the information for multiple tracks.

When you're done ghost editing, empty the track for future use.

As a former drummer who has done tons of work in MIDI, my approach here is as follows:

  1. Create 1 track containing all notes. The primary purpose here is to address the "realism" aspect you've identified.
  2. Duplicate the track; one per instrument (or by group if that makes sense.... e.g. kick, snare, HH, Cymbals, toms is usually a decent start). Be sure to "unlink" clips.
  3. For each duplicated track, isolate the instrument by selecting only that MIDI note (click-drag) on the piano key and now invert the selection. Once all "other" notes have been selected, delete them.
  4. Now you have multiple tracks, one per instrument (or group) which can be better mixed (assuming your signal routing is setup to support it).

The process above is meant to essentially "get things going" in order to support mocking a mixing scenario which feels like mixing a kit using multiple mics. From there, I'll admit adding new fills, etc, is less elegant but that's the tradeoff we've bought into by separating across tracks. Of course, this all assumes you want to mix/process in Qtractor itself. Depending on your instrument, you may choose to just do it in the plugin itself. If so, you'd avoid all this "splitting across multiple tracks" stuff and just keep your data within the single track. I've found it more powerful to split though since, for example, we can start doing things like throwing the Calf Transient Designer onto only the snare in order to boost the attack, etc.

TIP: It may even be handy to keep the original "consolidated" track around for reference purposes and just mute it. Whatever works.

Random Thought: If anything, I may have just identified an area for a new feature which would eliminate the manual splitting. Some kind of "Split into multiple new tracks by note" thing? Like an unpacker of sorts.

bluebell's picture

I'd like to see 2 cymbal tracks as ghost notes when I edit a clip in the the HiHat track. It's a bit overkill to create a ghost track.

If the ghost track selection thing were extended to support multiple tracks, the key would be to keep the selection menu open until focus moved away from it. It'd suck to want to select a handful of things and have to open the menu each time.

bluebell's picture

To be honest I thought it was designed to display multiple ghost tracks because in the selection menu there are checkboxes instead of radio buttons.

Logical assumption.

Rendering colors of distinct tracks would get confusing. For example, you couldn't really say "just use the color assigned to each source" since they may actually be the same (which is totally sane for the view provided by the Arranger window but wouldn't be in this scenario). This would probably be the tricky (and potentially quite ugly) part. Just thinking aloud....

Not even sure if you wanted each track to be seen in a distinct fashion but even if you weren't thinking that, someone will surely come along and want them broken out. That would get into the color thing mentioned.

rncbc's picture

sorry to tell,

this is not going to fly so soon or probably ever before the end of the current fiscal year...

however, it is quite feasible in the short term, as always, just not my cup of tea ;)

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