Viewing Pitch Bend Events in the Notes Display

Viewing Pitch Bend Events in the Notes Display
To see how Pitch Bend events affect the individual notes in a track, click the Pitch Bend Note View button in the Graphic Editor window.

The Pitch Bend Note View button toggles the Pitch Bend view in the Notes display on and off. When it's on, Metro changes the way the Graphic Editor displays MIDI notes. Instead of displaying notes as straight lines on the editor's piano roll, notes instead curve up or down in pitch to reflect the effect of Pitch Bend information within the track.

Insert some pitch bend data into a MIDI track (see Editing Pitch Bend Events) and then click the Pitch Bend Note View button to examine the results.

Notice the numbers at the left of the Pitch Bend window; these numbers show the Pitch Bend range in cents. One hundred cents equal one semitone, or half step, so a bend range of 200 cents lets you bend by one whole step. 400 cents would be four half steps (a major third), 500 cents would be five steps (a perfect fourth), and so on. If you're a MIDI expert, you already know that Pitch Bend data is really defined as raw numbers (from -8192 to +8191, where 0 is "center"), not as cents or musical intervals. Under the surface, Metro also stores these raw numbers - when pitch bend is "all the way up," Metro stores a value of 8191.

Of course, we humans often think in more musical terms, not raw numbers, this is why Metro shows you the effect of Pitch Bend data in a more musical context. Note that the sound you hear from your MIDI gear actually depends on the MIDI device's Pitch Bend range; many devices let you set this range yourself. One thing you might want to do for convenience is to make sure that Metro and your outboard MIDI gear agree on what "all the way up" or "down" means in Pitch Bend; if you've set your MIDI gear to +/- 5 half steps, set Metro's Pitch Bend range for that Output to display 5 half steps, too.