Muting odd-numbered or even-numbered bars

[cornutt]

Bear with me for a moment, because I need to explain what I'm trying to accomplish...

I have a pad part that I want to perform using an Oberheim Matrix-6. The part consists of 4- and 5-note chords, each one bar long. I've got the part in a MIDI track. What I'd like to do is to be able to play the part so that the chords overlap when played (the patch has a fairly long release time).

The problem is, the Matrix-6 only has six voices. So the way to get the chords to overlap is to do a recording pass where I play back only the chords in the odd-numbered bars, and record that to an audio track. Then, I play back only the even-numbered bars while the audio of the odd-numbered bars plays back. Presto, twelve voices out of a six-voice synth. To do that, I want to move all of the even-numbered bars to a second MIDI track so I can mute either the evens or the odds, whichever one I don't want to hear at the moment.

The difficulty is that it's tedious to split up the part. I have to select each even-numbered bar, cut the notes from it, and paste them into the second track. So I wind up with two MIDI tracks: one containing only the notes of the odd-numbered bars, and one containing only the notes of the even-numbered bars. And if I decide I want to change something, I have to punch in the bars I want to replace, play it, and then split those bars up again.

My question is: is there an easier way to do this that I'm overlooking? I don't know of any way, right off hand, to tell Metro to "select all of the even-numbered bars in this track".

[Jerm]

Well there may be.
1. You could try the selection filter with select n of n events if you have the same number of events in each measure or
2. What I would do is to command-click on the black measure numbers of each odd measure this will non-contiguously select those measures. Then one cut will remove all of them.

[cornutt]

The selection filter! I should have thought of that. Here's what worked: The chords I'm playing are two bars long. So I cut the tempo to 1/4 time, so that the chords are now a half-bar long; "even" chords start on beat 1 of a bar, and "odd" chords start on beat 3 of a bar. I set up a "template" track (which stays muted) which has a single note at the start of beat 1, and in another bar it has a single note at the start of beat 3. I assign the selection filter by selecting one of these bars from the template track. Now, I can use the selection filter and tell it to only select notes that start on/near the beginning of beat 1 for the evens, or beat 3 for the odds, and it does what I want. Thanks!