Phrase Drag‘n‘Drop (Player Mode only) Virtual Guitarist CARBON

Clicking on a drag handle...

... and dragging it onto a position in the CARBON track …

... creates an exported MIDI copy of the phrase. 

Note: This is an advanced and not necessarily easy-to-use feature. We recommend you only use it if you’re ready and willing to do manual editing in your DAW!

The easiest and fastest ways to create your own phrases are using Player or Instrument Mode and record them into your DAW.

What will usually end up in your Instrument Track are the MIDI notes that represent the actual notes, along with the phrase keys to go with them.

But sometimes you may like a Style in the Player Mode very much but want to detail-edit the notes, velocities or timing. This is where Phrase Drag’n’Drop will help.

You may have noticed that the keys in the Common and Play Range of the Interactive Keyboard show little handles with six dots at the top.

• By clicking such an handle and dragging it into your Instrument Track, you will create a MIDI copy of that particular phrase, pitch taken from the last notes you played in the Play Range, in your DAW track.

Mixing Instrument and Player Mode

A dropped MIDI phrase will resemble what you would have recorded if you’d played this phrase in Instrument mode.

In fact, under the hood, CARBON plays back these phrases in Instrument Mode while you can remain in Player Mode and even mix both modes in one track. The way CARBON identifies dropped phrases is by the note C-2, which you will see inserted in all your dropped phrases.

Make sure not to delete these note events, as that may mess up the result.

What to do with dropped phrases

Here’s what you can do by dragging and dropping phrases into Instrument tracks:

• Build a song structure by dropping multiple different phrases one after the other.
• Create a melodic or harmonic structure by editing the note pitches from F#3 upwards
• Change the articulations of notes by editing the note pitches below E3
• Change the timing of notes by editing note positions.
• Change the velocities of notes – e.g. lower them in intros, increase in verses. Velocities of select keys make no difference.
• Use the entire phrase as a toolkit for building an entirely new phrase.
• Use MIDI transformation in your DAW (double speed, half speed).

IMPORTANT: When you drag notes, always make sure to drag the corresponding select keys below F2, otherwise articulations might get messed up!

A typical MIDI export (here shown in Logic Pro X), with the MIDI region at the top, the note editor below showing both the notes and the select keys (below) and their velocity levels.