SD3 Grid Editor improvements

[taiowa4]

I really wish that the grid editor was a bit better. The sounds and mixer options in SD3 are amazing but that editor has some slow down happening.

1. Play from cursor or not. Would love to be able to leave the view on the notes I’m working on and have the stop and play back play from the cursor or play through the loop selection and have a button to turn on and off whether or not the view jumps to the cursor and follows or just stays where I’m editing. like most DAWs

2. Zooming the block zoom box from the block arrangement window is good. That would be better in the grid editor window for horizontal time and zoom than having that dynamic scroll bar and a separate zoom bar. Just a box you click and drag to zoom or click and slide it side to side to move the view. Getting around a beat to edit parts shouldn’t take so many clicks and mouse moves.

3 Vertical collapsing. Like ableton lives piano roll, it would be nice to have a button that collapses the Instruments/articulations that you are using down to a group with out all the unused ones there for you to scroll though just to get down to the other ones you are making a beat with. That way one can edit high hats and then move to snares then a tom and they would be right next to each other.
In fact if we could just rearrange the vertical order of the instruments and articulations so we can work on the ones we will use in a song close together and save presets. It would make this so fast. And I would personally worship you for 10 seconds of every day.

4. ALT clicking. When you have the tool set to regular pointer and you alt click it lags when transition to the draw tool then stays on for multiple clicks after you have released ALT. Would be nice to also set it to draw tool and ALT click to momentarily use the regular pointer tool.

5. Velocity starts at max but shouldn’t. Be nice if it started at a lower level by default that gave some headroom for making harder hits rather than having to bring them all down everytime I start a block. And that level should be a good starting place for the sample. I know you can turn down the velocity knob but why not just have unity on that knob be at like 80 percent velocity.

I know this may be alot but I have found editing in this interface super slow due to all the scrolling and zooming and view issues. To the point where I am looking into using studio ones piano roll instead. But I want to be able to edit in the stand alone and in your editor because so much of the controls are there and it could be amazing with some tweaks. I’m sure I’m not alone.

Thanks

Topic

[Henrik]

What version are you using? We released a 3.1.0 some days ago, with a lot of Grid Editor improvements.

@taiowa4 said:
1. Play from cursor or not. Would love to be able to leave the view on the notes I’m working on and have the stop and play back play from the cursor or play through the loop selection and have a button to turn on and off whether or not the view jumps to the cursor and follows or just stays where I’m editing. like most DAWs
 

I’m not sure about what you ask for here, but you can play, pause, and continue to play from that location by using alt + space (instead of just space). This is the same as pressing the play button while playing (which is pausing the song track).
To make the view stay where you are editing – disable Auto Scroll in the top right corner.

2. Zooming the block zoom box from the block arrangement window is good. That would be better in the grid editor window for horizontal time and zoom than having that dynamic scroll bar and a separate zoom bar. Just a box you click and drag to zoom or click and slide it side to side to move the view. Getting around a beat to edit parts shouldn’t take so many clicks and mouse moves.
 

We actually had the combines zoom and scroll bar in the Grid Editor from the beginning. However, it lead to lots of complications – depending of how long the track was and how much you wanted to zoom in. We chose the current solution since most users use either a scroll wheel, or a trackpad, to zoom.
But I agree it would be smoother with a combined zoom/scroll in the grid view. We’ll see what we can do about it in the future!

3 Vertical collapsing. Like ableton lives piano roll, it would be nice to have a button that collapses the Instruments/articulations that you are using down to a group with out all the unused ones there for you to scroll though just to get down to the other ones you are making a beat with. That way one can edit high hats and then move to snares then a tom and they would be right next to each other.
In fact if we could just rearrange the vertical order of the instruments and articulations so we can work on the ones we will use in a song close together and save presets. It would make this so fast. And I would personally worship you for 10 seconds of every day.
 

In the newly released version 3.1.0 you can just drag and drop the the rows to rearrange them 🙂

4. ALT clicking. When you have the tool set to regular pointer and you alt click it lags when transition to the draw tool then stays on for multiple clicks after you have released ALT. Would be nice to also set it to draw tool and ALT click to momentarily use the regular pointer tool.

Alt+Shift (on pc) and Cmd+Alt (on mac) switches tool to the not selected tool, as long as you hold those keys down.

5. Velocity starts at max but shouldn’t. Be nice if it started at a lower level by default that gave some headroom for making harder hits rather than having to bring them all down everytime I start a block. And that level should be a good starting place for the sample. I know you can turn down the velocity knob but why not just have unity on that knob be at like 80 percent velocity.

If you add a note and set it’s velocity to say 80, the next note(s) you add will get that last used velocity.

We have set the bar pretty high by trying to make Superior Drummer 3 a competitor for all the hosts that people are used to working in, since they all have different workflows. But as long as we get feedback like this we can continue to make it better 🙂

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

1

Thanked by: Kevin Dubois

[Author]

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