you can use your computer keyboard as a midi keyboard in tracktion waveform free
and waveform pro and in this tracktion waveform tutorial i'll show you how i'll also show you how
to record it i'm zane welcome to audio tech tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech
so you can unleash your creativity and i do this by providing easy to follow audio tech tips
tutorials and reviews now let's jump into tracktion waveform as you can see i'm using tracktion
waveform pro but you can do this exactly the same way in tracktion waveform free the two programs are
essentially the same thing pro just has some added instruments and a few extra advanced
features so don't worry if you don't have waveform pro you can do this in the free version now
go into your settings and then you want to go down to midi devices and you can see right here it says
create new virtual midi input so click on that and then you want to give it a name i'm just
going to name it qwerty click ok and you can see we have our virtual input here which is
called qwerty or whatever you named yours and that's it for this part now let's go to
our project or create a new project if you need to and you can see i have an instrument on here
and i want to control that with my computer keyboard and it's already
set to qwerty as my input because that's the only thing i have connected at the moment but
so you came here and there's no input on the track you want to click in this area right here
and then you want to go down to qwerty and that sets your computer keyboard as the midi input but
if you were to press your keyboard right now you wouldn't get anything so i'll just press something
it's actually controlling the scroll over here so what i want to do is click down onto this
piano down at the bottom and if you don't see this area at the bottom
your screen looks like this just click on this arrow right there and that brings this up so
i want to click down here on a key and now it puts the focus onto that and i can control it
so you can now use the a through to the semicolon keys on your computer keyboard as the white
keys and the w through to the p as your black keys and one thing to note is that every time
you click out of the track so you just click anywhere here or even click the record button
it takes the focus off of this keyboard so you'll have to click on the keys again so
one thing you might want to do is click on this lock right here and now that locks this screen
and if you plan on recording which we're going to do in a second you can use the computer keyboard
shortcut to start the recording and that way you're not taking the focus off of that and
you can start recording so let's give that a try right now all right before we get into recording
your computer keyboard as a midi keyboard i just want to ask if you're enjoying this video so far
and getting some value out of it can you please give it a thumbs up it really helps my channel
out and i appreciate it so much now back into this tracktion waveform tutorial all right i just need
to arm this track for recording now i'm going to click down here make sure we're focused on that
we are and to start the recording from your computer keyboard just press the r key
and you can see we have some midi that we just recorded and if you're done recording you can
unlock this screen so then that way you can get to the other properties that you might need to get to
and of course you can edit your midi however you need to now one thing you're probably wondering
is can you change the octave and the answer is no so if you want to use this and change the octave
you can record in whatever the current octave is which it starts at c4 and goes up to e5 but
you can record it like this and then just highlight all of the notes and drag it down
just drag it down an octave like that and now you've changed the
octave it's kind of the only work around to that at the moment unless they decide to put in a
feature where you can change the octave on the computer keyboard and another thing to note is
all the input velocity is all the way to the top so it's full velocity so you may want to
go in and manually change the velocity give it a more human type of feel but
of course that's not necessary it's just something you may want to do as you can see it's not a
perfect replacement for a midi keyboard but it is a decent temporary solution until you get one or
maybe you don't need a midi keyboard and this is all you need for even more tracktion waveform
tutorials click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you like this video
please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this
thank you so much for watching for simple green tech i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon