GarageBand: Needs ‘Group Notes’ and ‘Ungroup Notes’ commands

Posted by Pierre Igot in: GarageBand, Music
December 17th, 2004 • 5:50 am

In essence, GarageBand is a tool that lets you visually edit music. As such, GarageBand is, in several aspects, a drawing tool. It lets you select notes, move them around, adjust the distance between them, etc.

Because of this, when editing a loop, I often find myself looking for a command that is not there in GarageBand: a “Group Notes” command that would be select a group of individual notes and “group” them in the same way that a Group command groups objects in a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator. The idea would be that, once notes are grouped together, moving one of them would move the whole group. Applying a change in duration or velocity to the group would apply the change to every note in the group. And we could have a “Fix Timing” command that only applies to a group of notes rather than to the entire loop.

You can already achieve some of these things “manually” by dragging a rectangular selection box around a group of notes or using Shift-clicking to select non-contiguous notes. But this manual selection is lost as soon as you select something else. A “Group Notes” command (and its corresponding “Ungroup Notes” command, of course) would be a natural extension of these “drawing” capabilities that are already part of GarageBand as a visual editor of music.

Maybe something for GarageBand 2.0?


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