Piano roll

The piano roll shows the score the way recording programs do: time runs from left to right, pitch from bottom to top, and every note is a bar as long as it lasts. Use it to check rhythms, registers and overlaps at a glance, to fix notes by dragging them, and to decide how strongly each note plays back. Everything you do here changes the score, and you see it straight away when you go back to Page View.

Opening the piano roll

• Choose View → Piano Roll (⌥⌘O, on Windows Ctrl+Alt+O), or the third button of the View group in the toolbar, next to Page and Scroll.
• To go back to the score, choose View → Piano Roll again, Page View or Scroll View, press ⌘E (on Windows Ctrl+E), or choose Back to Score in the right-click menu.

The piano roll opens at the measure you were looking at (or at the chosen note’s measure); going back to the score you find the chosen note, or the measure you were looking at in the piano roll. The navigator is hidden in the piano roll.

The piano roll is dark or light, like the system appearance.

What you see

• On the left a piano keyboard that stays put while you scroll sideways: every C has its name (C4 is middle C). Clicking a key plays it with the instrument of the cursor’s staff.
• At the top a ruler with the measure numbers and beat ticks, which stays put while you scroll up and down.
• The key rows: darker ones for the black keys, a line under every C. Barlines are stronger than beats and half beats, and every other measure is slightly lighter.
• The notes: a rounded bar in the instrument’s color (the one chosen in the mixer or, if you haven’t chosen one, a different one for each instrument), with the note name inside when there’s room. The louder the note, the brighter the bar. Ties are already joined: a note tied across the barline is a single bar.
• The notes of the cursor’s staff are drawn on top of the others; those of the other instruments are slightly dimmed.
• At the bottom, the velocity lane (see Note strength).

The measures are the written ones, one after another: repeats are not played out. Grace notes and cue notes don’t appear, because they take no time or don’t play.

During playback the green line moves over the notes, and the keys that are playing light up on the keyboard in the instrument’s color. Clicking the ruler starts playback from that measure (or jumps there, if it’s already playing).

Choosing notes

• Click a note to choose it and hear it. You can also choose a single note of a chord.
• Shift-click adds a note to the choice or removes it.
• Drag in an empty area to draw a rectangle: the notes it touches are chosen (with Shift, added to those already chosen).
• Click in an empty area to clear the choice, like Esc.
• Double-click a note to go back to the score with that note selected.

The notes chosen in the piano roll are also selected in the score and in the inspector. If you select notes in the score and then open the piano roll, they are chosen there too.

Editing notes

• Move: drag a chosen note (the other chosen notes follow it) up or down to change its pitch, left or right to change its attack. You hear the new pitch while you drag.
• Copy: drag while holding ⌥ (on Windows Ctrl): the original notes stay where they are.
• Lengthen or shorten: grab the note by its right edge (the pointer turns into two arrows) and drag.
• Create: double-click in an empty area. The new note goes in the cursor’s staff and layer, starts in the grid cell you clicked and is as long as the duration chosen in the palette (a quarter note if you haven’t chosen one).
• Delete: ⌫ or Del, or Delete Notes in the right-click menu.

With the keyboard, on the chosen notes:

Key	What it does
↑ / ↓	A semitone up or down
⇧↑ / ⇧↓	An octave up or down
← / →	One grid step earlier or later
⌫ / Del	Deletes the notes
Esc	Clears the choice

Every gesture is a single Undo step (⌘Z, on Windows Ctrl+Z).

The grid

When you move, lengthen or create notes, they snap to a grid that starts at every barline. Choose it in the right-click menu, Grid: eighths, 16ths (the default) or 32nds.

How it becomes notation

Every edit rewrites in notation only the measures it touches (widened if a tied note crosses the barline). Notes that stay where they were keep their spelling, articulations and lyrics; new ones are spelled in the measure’s key, and ties across barlines, rests and dotted values are worked out for you. A note that would end past the last measure is shortened. Grace notes stay too, in front of the note that starts at the same point (if you delete it they go with it), as do notes written on the neighboring staff, cue notes and tuplets (quintuplets, sextuplets, nested tuplets) whose rhythm the edit doesn’t change: you can change the pitches of a quintuplet.

A few things don’t survive the piano roll, and it’s worth knowing:

• If you move a note of a tuplet in time, or add one inside it, the tuplet is rewritten on the normal grid (triplets stay triplets). A note moved from the neighboring staff goes back to its own.
• Two notes can’t overlap within one layer: if you lengthen a note up to the attack of the next one, it stops there. For two crossing voices use two layers.

Note strength (velocity)

The velocity lane, at the bottom of the piano roll and fixed while you scroll, has a stem for every note, at its attack: the taller it is, the louder the note (from 1 to 127; the lines mark 32, 64 and 96). A hollow dot means the strength comes from the written dynamics (p, mf, f, hairpins, accents); a filled dot means you set it.

• Drag a stem up or down to change that note’s strength. If several notes are chosen, dragging one of their stems changes them all by the same amount.
• Drag in an empty area of the lane to draw: the notes you cross take the strength of the mouse height. It’s the quickest way to shape a crescendo or lighten an accompaniment.
• Double-click a stem, or choose Velocity from Dynamics in the right-click menu on the chosen notes: the note follows the dynamics again.
• Velocity Lane in the right-click menu hides or shows the lane.

The strength you set is for listening only: playback, MIDI export and audio. Nothing is written in the score, and it replaces both the dynamics and the playback style. It’s saved in the .maestro file and stays with the note when you move, copy or transpose it; in tremolos and ornaments the top note’s strength counts. Earlier versions of Maestro open the file but ignore it. In MusicXML files it’s written on the notes (the dynamics attribute, which other programs can use for playback), and Maestro finds it again when reopening them; it isn’t read from MusicXML written by other programs, because there it would replace the dynamics. It isn’t carried into Finale files.

Notes as played

On top of the written notes, the piano roll also shows how playback actually plays them, where it differs: thin strips in the lower part of the row, in the instrument’s color. That way you can see staccato (a shorter strip inside the bar), trills, mordents and tremolos (many short strips on the neighboring rows), grace notes (a short strip before the note), arpeggios (the notes coming in one after the other), swing and the playback style chosen for the score. Where a note plays as written there’s no strip.

The strips are only for looking: you can’t choose or move them. Notes as Played in the right-click menu hides or shows them.

Drums

When the piano roll shows only percussion instruments (for example if you choose the drum part in View → Parts or in the Score and Parts menu in the toolbar, or if the score has only percussion), it becomes a drum editor: instead of the keyboard there is one row for each sound of the instrument (bass drum, snare, closed hi-hat…), with the bass drum at the bottom, as on the staff.

• Clicking a row’s name plays the sound.
• Dragging a note up or down, or ↑ and ↓, moves it to the sound of the next row.
• Everything else works as for the other instruments: double-click to create a hit, the grid, the velocity lane for accents and ghost notes.

When the drums are shown together with other instruments the piano roll stays the normal one, but their notes carry the name of the sound instead of the note name.

Zoom

The window zoom (⌘+, ⌘-, ⌘0) enlarges everything together. In the piano roll you can also zoom time and pitch each on its own, to see many measures without the key rows getting thin:

	Mac	Windows
Time zoom	⌥+scroll wheel, or ⌥ and pinch on the trackpad	Alt+scroll wheel
Pitch zoom	⌥⇧+scroll wheel	Ctrl+Alt+scroll wheel

The point under the mouse stays put; the keyboard, ruler and velocity lane don’t change. In the right-click menu, Time Zoom and Pitch Zoom also have Zoom In, Zoom Out, Actual Size and Fit Whole Piece to Width (or Fit All Keys to Height), which fits the piano roll to the window. Each window remembers its zoom, and new ones start from the last one chosen.