Editing MIDI can be a tedious task. Ardour allows using a connected
MIDI device like a music keyboard or pad controller, or use the mouse.
A third option, providing fine-grain control, precision and speed of entry
comes from using a custom note entry dialog.
The step entry dialog is accessed via a right click context menu on the
rec-enable button, because step entry is related to recording MIDI
data. Step editing and recording MIDI via the track's MIDI port cannot happen
simultaneously.
The dialog (quite 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 forward 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
More or less 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
not necessary even for complex data insertion.
The default key bindings for this (configured in step_editing.bindings) are: