Pro Tools has a brand new VIRTUAL MIDI KEYBOARD
Our new Big Sur compatability release for March 2021 comes with a nice shiney new addition – the Virtual MIDI Keyboard.
Virtual Keyboards have been a fixture of DAWs for a long time now – a feature that’s been noticably absent from Pro Tools so far.
The feature allows users to use the standard QWERTY keyboard to trigger MIDI instruments via a record enabled MIDI track.
The VMK is incredibly simply.
Letters A – K on the middle row provide access to a single octave of C to C.
Z and X modify the octave up and down and V increases the Velocity of the notes being triggered, considering QWERTY keyboards do not have the ability to detect how hard the keys are hit.
Letters W, E, T, Y and U trigger the #/ b notes.
Why so long?
We can see the YouTube comments already – ‘other DAWs have had this for years’!! So why has it taken so long?
To understand this, you have to acknowledge Pro Tools’ place in the industry.
For the longest time, Pro Tools was targeted at the professional user and commercial installations (HD / HDX), with light (LE) versions being commercially available for freelancers, smaller studios and finally home users.
How many in these classes of user do you think would need a feature like this?! Not many, I’d argue.
Over the past few years, Avid have been adjusting Pro Tools’ place in the market and making the app much more accessible to the newer user. As such, it’s just its time to recieve a Virtual MIDI Keyboard!
If you’d like to see it in action, Andy’s made a little video about it!
If you want to try it out, download version 2021.3 right now from your Avid account.
