MIDISketch

In most DAWs, pitch bend is automation. You draw it separately from the notes, and it affects the entire channel at once. DAWs with MPE support can give each note its own envelope, but it still lives in a separate view, relies on linear breakpoints, and feels more like editing automation than writing music.

MIDISketch puts the curve directly on the note, using the piano roll’s own pitch axis. A semitone up is literally one row up. Shape curves with Bézier points and tangent handles, exactly where you can see what they’re doing. There’s a browser demo on the site if you’d rather feel it than read about it.

And pitch is just the start. Pressure, slide, CCs, parameter lanes, and one-click vibrato all use the same points and handles. You only need to learn one control system.

MIDISketch also brings per-note expression to DAWs without MPE support, including FL Studio. It hosts your synth inside MIDISketch and sends audio back to the DAW, opening up per-note expression where it otherwise isn’t possible.

Ideas can come in however they happen. Sing a melody and keep the pitch nuance, play an MPE controller and get a few editable points instead of thousands, or trace pitch straight from any audio spectrogram.

That is the core of it. There is a lot more in the app. MIDISketch is available now as VST3, AU, CLAP, and standalone on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Nobody had made the note itself the thing you shape. Other tools put expression beside the notes. MIDISketch puts it on them, changing what a note can be.

Sing into it and your pitch maps 1:1, so the bend you sing becomes the bend on the note. Mouth shape, sibilance, and brightness can drive MPE or CC in real time, while tuning keeps notes in key without flattening the performance. Your voice becomes an expressive controller.

Notes also show what they contain. Width and color can reflect expression, so louder notes look wider and brighter notes look different. Instead of identical rectangles, the piano roll starts to look like the phrase sounds.

MPE is the starting point, not the final form. MIDISketch is built for MPE today, but its continuous per-note curves were designed with MIDI 2.0 in mind. The same model that works within MPE now maps naturally to MIDI 2.0’s native per-note expression, making it a clear next step rather than a redesign.

The most inspiring use is the simplest, getting an idea out without losing what made it expressive. Stamp a chord, sing the melody, use beziers to shape your bends and sculpt the vibrato until it feels right. Map phrases to triggers and fire them back polyphonically, so a sketch can be performed live or remixed into something else. MIDISketch makes expression something you can play with, not just program.

That leads to happy accidents. And when pitch is a continuous surface, you start exploring between the keys too. Set the grid to 19 or 31 tones per octave, or switch to just intonation for pure ratios.

That’s the idea behind “Sketch.” Start with something, play with it, and find something you weren’t looking for.