Entering notes in Ardour can be done by using a connected MIDI device like a MIDI keyboard or pad controller, or by using the mouse. A third option, which provides for fine-grained control, precision and speed comes from using Ardour's Step Entry dialog.

The step entry dialog is accessed by right-clicking on the ● (Rec-Enable) button of the MIDI track to be edited and selecting Step Entry from the menu that appears.

Step editing and recording MIDI via the track's MIDI port cannot happen simultaneously.

The dialog (closely modelled on Logic's) contains:

• Chord entry switch (successive notes are stacked in a chord until it is released)
• Note length selectors
• Triplet toggle
• Normal, single, double and triple dotted note selectors
• Sustain button
• Buttons to:
  • Insert a rest of the current selected note duration
  • Insert a rest of the current grid step size
  • Move back to the last inserted note
  • Move forward to the next beat, or bar
  • Move to the edit point
• Dynamics controls from pianississimo to fortississimo
• Channel selector
• Explicit numerical velocity selector, for more precise control than the dynamics selectors offer
• Octave selector
• Buttons to add bank or program change events
• a full 10 octave virtual keyboard

Almost all actions in the step entry dialog can be driven directly from the keyboard, so that moving back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse is typically not necessary—even for complex data entry. The default key bindings are: