.mid files in your library, searchable from a picker that auditions them through the selected track’s instrument before you commit one to the timeline.
Press ⌥P to open Stamp MIDI Shapes and Patterns…. It is the sibling of the sample picker on ⌥S: same idea, notes instead of audio.
One list holds two things. Above, the shapes Gridshift ships — chords, intervals, arps, bass figures, whole progressions — in their five groups. Below, under MIDI Library, the .mid files you have indexed. Every row is a name and a drawing of the notes; the rows you used last lead the list under Recently Used.
Picking a row arms it rather than inserting it. It then follows your pointer as an outline, and the click decides where it lands — which track, which bar, or a new track if you click below the last row.
How it works
Gridshift indexes.mid and .midi files from the same folders it scans for audio — the browser favorites in the sidebar. They are kept out of the sample picker on purpose: an audio file cannot be inserted as notes, and a pattern cannot be loaded as a track’s sample, so neither picker serves the other’s files.
A pattern arrives in your project rather than bringing its own context with it. Its notes are placed in beats, so it occupies the same number of bars at your tempo as it did at the one it was written at, and it is transposed into your project’s key. What you hear while browsing is what lands on the track.
Audition a pattern
The picker opens whatever is selected, but auditioning needs an instrument track: a pattern is played through that track’s instrument. With one selected, press⌥P and move through the results; each highlighted row plays as you land on it, looping up to eight bars.
Search matches each word you type anywhere in the file name or in the two folders above it, ranked by where the match landed: the start of the name beats the middle of it, which beats the folder. Every word has to match somewhere, so a second word narrows rather than widens.
Percussion is never transposed, and neither is a pattern whose key Gridshift could not detect — those play at their original pitch. Everything else follows your project’s key, including on a project whose key you have never touched.
Change the feel
A segmented control at the top switches the pattern between three readings, and the setting sticks between sessions:
This moves the notes, not the tempo — your project’s BPM does not change. Note lengths scale with their positions, so half-time turns sixteenths into eighths rather than leaving sixteenths with gaps between them. It applies to the shapes as much as to the files: an arp is spread over twice the bars, and a chord, which has no rhythm of its own, comes out longer. No row restates it — the audition is what plays what the click will write.
Place a pattern
Press Return on a row to arm it — the row’s icon turns to the accent colour, the picker closes, and an outline of the clip follows your pointer over the timeline. Click to place it, carrying the transposition and feel you were hearing. The new clip takes the file’s name and is selected for you.
Press
Esc to put an armed pattern down without placing it. One arming is one placement: after the click the pattern is no longer armed.
A placed pattern overwrites what it lands on: a clip already occupying that span is trimmed, split, or removed to make room, the same as dropping a clip there. Undo restores it.
Key, not scale
A pattern is shifted onto your project’s root and no further. Its mode is left alone, so a minor riff stays minor in a major project, and a note that sits outside your scale stays where the file put it — usually the reason the file was worth reaching for. If you want the project to follow the pattern instead, change the project key. Because of that, a placed pattern arrives with Pitch Snap off — otherwise the first time you dragged one of those notes it would be pulled into the key. The setting belongs to that pattern, survives saving, and travels with it through copies and splits. The Pitch Snap chip in the focus bar edits it while the pattern is open, and its Follow Session entry hands the pattern back to your session-wide setting. A stamped shape is different: it is built from your scale in the first place, so it has nothing to protect and follows the session like anything you draw by hand.Shortcuts
When the MIDI Library section is empty
The shapes always list, so an empty library never takes the picker down with it. In place of the files you get one row saying why:
See Sample Library for how folders are added and indexed.