Preparing MIDI for Orchestration Inside Logic Pro X

90% of the time you're going to receive MIDI files from composers to work from. Unless these MIDI files have been perfectly quantized with no overlapping notes, your preferred notation program will have a field day trying to re-notate and fix all of the errors. Fortunately, The Score Editor in Logic Pro X makes the task of cleaning up MIDI and correcting notation quick and easy. Afterward you can either import the MIDI or MusicXML file into your preferred notation program and get to work with no more errors.

MIDI in the Piano Roll 

For this Example I've isolated just a single melody to work with. The smallest note value we can see played here in the Piano Roll are 16th notes.

Quantization Mistakes

If we quantize to a 16th note value, we will lose our quarter and 8th note triplets and that would be a grave mistake in the end! Even if we quantize the triplets separately we still have many overlapping notes to deal with as we can see below. If you ask me, this is already taking too long. Let’s learn a much easier method. 

Step 1—Correcting Notation Quickly 

Most of the time the Score Editor Parameters won’t need to be adjusted as they are set by default to include both checked boxes. You can easily get the correct notation to display by the "Quantize Settings" inside the "Score Region Parameter” on the left.

Here I have chosen 16,12 to display the intended mixed notation values of 16th notes and Triplets. I now can export a MusicXML file and be done. That took one step!

Step 2—Correcting MIDI The Easy Way 

As you may have noticed in the picture above, the notation appearance has no bearing upon the actual MIDI performance. If you’re still interested in Quantization and correcting overlapping notes in the Piano Roll, you can do so while still inside the Score Editor. Highlight the notation and inside the Score Editor and 

Go to “Functions”→“Quantization”→“Fix displayed Note Positions and Durations”. 

All notes will not only be accurately notated in Step 1 but precisely played as well. 

In future tutorials I’ll dive deeper into how I manage large consolidated MIDI regions with multiple parts as well as rewire in Logic Pro X to play back stems while I orchestrate or compose inside Sibelius (my preferred notation program).