/ Examples / Notestreams / Note Grid

Wherein we demonstrate the simple conveniences of Note Grids.

Right-click to copy this example to your workspace

NoteGrid Node

The NoteGrid node is reponsible for performing Note Grid files produced by the Grid Editor. Note Grids are the cousin of Session Grids and are focused, curiously, on individual note events rather than session events. The NoteGrid node is in the family of NoteStreams and, as such, requires a companion Player for most uses.

Here is a simple graph, noteGrid.chg.

And here is the NoteGrid Node inspector.

Controller is an optional connection point for an upstream Session Grid Node. When connected you can "inject" the notes from this node anywhere in your composition.

File is the name of the .fgrd file to perform.

Layer is the layer id in the associated file. -1 means play all layers.

Arrangement If your note grid contains sections you can arrange them with an expression like: ((A2B2)C)2 where letters are section identifiers. Numbers represent repeat counts so this example produces AABBCAABBC. Square brackets and | can be used to introduce randomness into your arrangement like: ((A2[B|C2])C)2.

SessionMode assigns an interpretation to incoming Program requests when an upstream SessionNode is connected. The options are pretty self explanatory:

• Program Is Layer
• Program Is Section

The two NoteGrid nodes refer to two different .fgrd files, scale.fgrd and oneOctave.fgrd. After copying this example to your workspace you can click on these files to examine them in the Grid Editor.

Below you see scale.fgrd. Note that there are two different colors of cells. This implies that there are two layers in this file. The NoteGrid node allows you to perform a single layer or all layers in a file. Layers are identifies by their order/index (from 0-N) in the Layers Panel.

Also note that there are 3 Sections in this file. These are identified by their both an index and a letter. When the letter is entered into the NoteGrid arrangement it constrains its performance to the associated time period(s). Sections can also be used to navigate the file. Push the highlights button to navigate to that region of time.

Here's oneOctave.fgrd, zoomed in both horizontally (in time) and vertically (in "note-space"). Here we see that the individual grids display internal detail in the form of a "bar chart". Each note includes a Velocity value that can be edited via the Cell Panel or directly on the canvas in Draw Value mode. In this example, the darker color represents the velocity on a scale of 0 to 1. Higher velocity notes play louder and this is one aspect of MIDI note expression. Going farther, you can create/edit arbitrary expression channels within a note. These channels are referred to by a variety of terms but in the MIDI context, the term MPE is currently in vogue. You can use the Layers Panel. to activate, select color, and add sub-event channels. Only the active channel on the active layer can be edited in Draw Value mode.