# What is midi note "stacking/overlapping" used for?



## nogills (Mar 8, 2021)

I am curious as to how midi note stacking/overlapping is used. What I mean by that is having a note, lets say C#0, playing from bar 1 to bar 4, and at bar 2 have another C#0 come in too. The second note is literally playing at the same time as the first note, and it is like "behind" the first note in the same midi clip on the same track.

Not being used to it, I'll always drag a midi note on top of an existing note thinking it will replace it, but they just stack.

So I'm just curious, how is this used in a creative sense?

I use Studio One 5, I assumed you can do this in most other DAWS (besides Ableton, almost positive you can't do it there).


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## pmcrockett (Mar 8, 2021)

It's generally not used, and virtual instruments sometimes respond strangely to it. The only reason I can think of that every piano roll editor allows it is because it's not prohibited by MIDI, and the editors need to be able to do the things MIDI allows.

And MIDI allows it because note on and note off events are separate pieces of data that aren't strictly connected to one another -- the MIDI editor visualizes an on/off pair as a connected time span, but in the MIDI data itself, there are just freefloating note ons and note offs which can be sent completely arbitrarily. So it's theoretically possible, for example, to have a bunch of note on messages that are never even closed by note off messages (stuck notes, in other words), and it's up to the receiving instrument to make sense of that data.


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## nogills (Mar 9, 2021)

pmcrockett said:


> It's generally not used, and virtual instruments sometimes respond strangely to it. The only reason I can think of that every piano roll editor allows it is because it's not prohibited by MIDI, and the editors need to be able to do the things MIDI allows.
> 
> And MIDI allows it because note on and note off events are separate pieces of data that aren't strictly connected to one another -- the MIDI editor visualizes an on/off pair as a connected time span, but in the MIDI data itself, there are just freefloating note ons and note offs which can be sent completely arbitrarily. So it's theoretically possible, for example, to have a bunch of note on messages that are never even closed by note off messages (stuck notes, in other words), and it's up to the receiving instrument to make sense of that data.


Great answer - thank you!


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## b_elliott (Mar 9, 2021)

nogills said:


> So I'm just curious, how is this used in a creative sense?


I got to wondering about this after your comment then stumbled across this music example shown in Wikipedia's article on voice leading which might shed some further light: 





A 4-part harmony from Bach, which on the 4th displayed beat, the tenor and bass overlap one another on "b". But I like the @pmcrockett midi breakdown as well.


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## FrankieD (Mar 9, 2021)

I am also studying some more advances aspects of voice leading and when I put a tenor note in the same grid box as the bass note, they play on different virtual instruments so I hear both notes. 

@pmcrockett is correct. Note on and note off are independent messages. A midi note, the rectangular image you see, is a bit of code with the following data: note on commend, duration and note frequency (C#0, etc.), and note off command. You can send note off commands independently. So, when your DAW is snagged and a midi note plays continuously most DAW's have a keyboard command to end all notes playing.


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## mussnig (Mar 23, 2021)

As detailed in this article from Spitfire, one reason why one might want to do something like this is to stack/layer articulations: https://spitfireaudio.zendesk.com/h...01951793-What-is-UACC-KS-and-how-do-I-use-it-

But then again, I would probably use regular keyswitches before using a method like this ...


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