Any tips for reading sequencer piano roll notation?

Question

I'd like some hints reading piano roll notation in Cubase LE. At the moment when I see the vertical piano keyboard on the left-hand side of the window I'm sort of turning my head, imagining it horizontal.

Seems that everything that's on a stave can be represented in piano roll, e.g. note pitch, duration, bends, articulation and so on. I'm comfortable with using visual cues in stave notation, so for instance if a three note chord has notes on three adjacent lines (or three adjacent spaces) I know it's probably a root position triad. Or I can see if two notes are a third or a fifth or an octave apart. And so on.

What should I be concentrating on when I'm reading (or writing) piano roll? Are there corresponding visual cues that I can use to speed up my reading. It's really slow at the moment.

Answer 1

One thing I find helpful it to think in terms of interval classes. This allows me to focus on the guide lines rather than the absolute pitches, thus largely ignoring the piano keyboard.

I found it fairly quick to train myself to see intervals in terms of the number of grid lines lay between pitches. So a major chord would look, vertically, like <0,4,3>, and a minor chord would be <0,3,4>. It takes a little while to get used to thinking of chords this way, but one starts to see "stacks of thirds", even when inverted, in a manner analogous to the way one learns to see them on a keyboard.

Octaves are especially easy to see, since each note will be equidistant from the "C" markers above and/or below. And seconds (1s and 2s) are also an easy starting place.

In general, I found harmonic intervals to be the best starting place. Once I began to see them more easily, my feel for melodic intervals followed.