Grayed Out Notes In Event List

[Michael McBroom]

First thing I did was do a search here on this topic and I got zero hits.

I'm currently editing a MIDI track that I laid down with my Roland GR-33 guitar synth -- it tends to add spurious notes to the playback, so getting rid of them is a regular enough occurrence. When doing this before, and when viewing the info in the Event List, I've occasionally noticed that some of the notes were grayed out, while others were black. I found that the grayed out notes made no sound. They were usually the spurious notes, so this made editing much easier. 

But just now, I've run into an annoying occurrence. I'm trying to lay down three beats worth of notes -- two eighths and eight 16ths -- using the Staff View, and I'm seeing that the Event List is showing these notes grayed out. I tried adding notes into other sections of the piece and results were mixed. Some were black, and sounded when I played the piece, and others were gray and were silent. So anyway, I have these three beats worth of notes that I need to get sounding -- and any other future occurrences, should this happen again, and I haven't yet figured out a way to convert these notes such that they will make a sound. And yes, I did make sure that all the time values were correct to eliminate any overlap, which can sometimes choke off a note's sound.

So do you happen to know what I've done to cause CW to begin misbehaving, and what I need to do in the future to prevent this?

[57Gregy]

I can't solve the mystery, but I can offer a solution to the silent notes.
When this has happened to me, I have put the silent notes on another track whose output is set to the same synth.

Perhaps there is some overlap on the notes which prevents a note on from being sent. Check and adjust the durations of the notes or just drag the ends/beginnings of the notes in the PRV so there is a visible gap between the events.

[RobertWS]

Could you attach a sample midi file with the problem notes to your posting?

[Michael McBroom]

Greg, as I mentioned in my opening post, I was very careful to eliminate any duration overlaps because I'm aware they can present problems.

I have arrived at a solution -- one I don't particularly care for, but it works. Greg, I gave your solution a try -- putting the notes on another track that wasn't being affected, double checking with the event list that they weren't being grayed out. But then what I did was copy and paste the notes into the original track. Fortunately they translated over as valid notes -- black in the event list -- and so now I have sounds where previously I had none. I would just as soon find out how to correct the problem in the track that's being affected, but this solution at least works.

Robert, give me a moment. I've prepared a clip on another computer, so I'll have to post this message, then come back and edit it from the other machine.

Okay, I'm back. This is a short clip -- 9 measures. The anomaly occurs at the beginning of measure 5 and lasts for three fourths of the measure. After creating the clip, I loaded it back into CW to make sure the grayed out notes were still there. They were.

An observation I made, but didn't report, is that these grayed out notes don't show in the track window -- it's as if nothing is there. Which is kinda curious too.

 

f1clip1.mid

Edited May 26, 2020 by Michael McBroom

[RobertWS]

None of the notes you sent were grayed out.

The Pitch Wheel events are gray, but they can still be edited.

 

I'm guessing the Guitar/Midi transducer is trying to reflect slurs, pitch bends, vibrato, etc. in your playing.

You can see a visual representation of them in this view:

 

 

[Michael McBroom]

Yeah, that's the GR-33 guitar synth recording finger vibrato and pitch bends. The instrument I'm using, incidentally, is a Hammond B3-sounding patch, so I think it's kinda cool being able to bend pitches on a B3.  

As for no gray notes, why don't I find that surprising?  My copy of CW shows those notes as being grayed out and, not only that, but they don't appear in the track window.

One possible explanation has occurred to me, but it doesn't entirely fit. When I first started laying down tracks, my setup was set to record in "Comp" mode, which apparently is where one track is laid down on top of another. By the time I'd realized what was going on, I'd laid down three or four tracks on top of each other. Then I went in and changed it to delete the old data during recording. It was after this, when I was examining the event list, and trying to puzzle out which lines of melody to keep that I noticed that some of the notes were grayed out and that when I deleted those, it removed the spurious ones from the Staff View. As I dimly recall, they weren't making any sound so they weren't cluttering things acoustically at least. But even after I'd removed all those grayed out notes, they were appearing when I would write in new ones. So maybe something got stuck somewhere, I dunno.