GridVista: More time for music

“I want the machine to wash the dishes so I can create, not have the machine create so I can wash dishes.”

That distinction sits at the heart of Richard F.W. Davis’s approach to music technology. The composer, producer, and longtime MetaGrid Pro user is not interested in software making musical decisions for people. He wants it to handle the repetitive work that gets between a musician and those decisions.

GridVista, his new template organization and control software for MetaGrid Pro and Cubase 15, applies that philosophy to a problem familiar to many composers: navigating an increasingly large and unruly template.

A modern orchestral template can contain hundreds or even thousands of tracks. That access is valuable, but it creates its own friction. The right instrument may already be loaded and ready to play, yet remain buried beneath folders, alternate libraries, unused sections, and sounds waiting for the right project.

Richard knows the problem well.

“I have a problem buying string libraries,” he says. “I have way too many, and by that I mean I don’t have too many. I just have some that are waiting for their moment in the sun. If I can’t find one, then I may as well not have it.”

GridVista organizes those instruments into a custom MetaGrid Pro control surface, allowing composers to reveal the tracks they need without continually scrolling through the rest of the template. The result is not a generic orchestral layout or someone else’s idea of how a template should work. It is a visual interface generated from the user’s own Cubase project.

“This is all about you, your stuff, what you want to see, and how you want to work,” Richard says.

Beyond the list

Most sequencer templates are organized as lists. Folder tracks make those lists easier to manage, but the basic interaction remains the same. Instruments live in specific locations, and reaching them often means opening folders or scrolling until the right track appears.

GridVista takes a different approach.

“It strips away the list metaphor,” Richard explains. “It doesn’t matter where anything is in your template. You can make groups of anything and see any combination of anything.”

A composer could call up every woodwind, a single favorite string library, or only the instruments associated with a recurring theme. Tracks do not need to appear together in the Cubase project to become part of the same GridVista group.

This is especially useful for composers who regularly combine libraries. The woodwinds for one cue may come from one developer, while the brass, strings, and percussion come from several others. GridVista allows those choices to be organized around the music rather than the template’s underlying folder structure.

Richard describes it as assembling an ensemble from disparate elements as quickly as possible.

“When you’re sitting down to do a show, you need to grab the things you think are going to work, try them, and find out quickly whether they do.”

From track names to a personal control surface

GridVista can analyze track names, identify shared abbreviations, and organize instruments into groups and subgroups. Standard orchestral instruments can be divided into sections such as flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and strings. Users can also create their own naming conventions for synths, drones, sound design elements, percussion, or anything else in the template.

Once those conventions are established, new tracks can join the appropriate visibility groups without requiring the entire control surface to be rebuilt.

The point is simple: composers should not have to look at everything they own every time they sit down to write.

After the template has been organized, GridVista generates a custom control surface and sends it to MetaGrid Pro on the user’s iPad.

The finished grid reflects the categories, priorities, and visual choices made during setup. Frequently used instruments can be placed closer to the user’s hand. Related groups can share colors, with lighter and darker variations distinguishing different ranges or sections. Themes provide a starting point, while MetaGrid Pro remains available for deeper customization.

A smaller world inside a large template

GridVista also supports scenes, which collect instruments that may be scattered across several categories.

A composer working on a recurring theme might use cello, felt piano, muted strings, and an unusual sound-design element. Instead of recalling each group separately, those tracks can become a scene and appear together whenever that theme returns.

In practice, this creates smaller, focused working environments inside a much larger template. One grid might expose the full orchestral palette during the early stages of a project. Another might contain only the instruments selected for a specific score.

For users who want to get started quickly, the basic path is direct:

1. Import the Cubase template

2. Analyze and group the tracks

3. Arrange those groups into categories

4. Choose a layout and visual theme

5. Export the completed control surface to MetaGrid Pro

From that point forward, changing the visible tracks becomes a matter of reaching for the iPad.

A lifetime of making the work flow

GridVista may be a new product, but the thinking behind it developed across Richard’s career.

He grew up in New Orleans and attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where his piano teacher was Ellis Marsalis. He remembers the depth of musical knowledge he received there, and the particular authority with which Marsalis played.

“There’s a lot of that culture embedded in me,” Richard says. “I still have a special place in my heart for drummers from New Orleans because the way they play things is just the right way to me. It’s so familiar.”

Richard’s first professional session came at 15. By 19, he was directing the music department of an advertising agency, writing jingles and working as a recording engineer. He later programmed the Synclavier, created sound for film and television, worked on the second season of Twin Peaks, and spent years as a music editor, producer, and Pro Tools specialist.

His work eventually included projects with Wendy and Lisa, Alanis Morissette, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and the Eagles. He toured with the Eagles on keyboards and background vocals, contributed to their recording projects, and received an Emmy for his work on the History of the Eagles documentary.

For Richard, music never separated neatly into a career and a personal pursuit.

“The things I do with my life are what I would do anyway,” he says. “Except sometimes people pay me to do them.”

Across those different roles, one problem kept returning. Professional work had to move quickly, and every project required preparation. Sounds needed to be organized, commands learned, and systems configured before the creative work could flow.

“Every moment I’ve spent under the gun, when it’s time to do something really quickly, there’s always prep time spent asking, ‘What can I do to make this go faster?’”

That experience now informs the tools he develops through Articulign.

“Everything I’m doing now is kind of a backlog of things I wish I could have been doing when I was doing those projects.”

The idea that started with track visibility

The immediate inspiration for GridVista came from an animated series Richard scored in Pro Tools. The project combined full orchestra, rock band, synthesizers, and world instruments inside one session.

Pro Tools allowed him to save track visibility as part of its memory locations. Instead of scrolling through the entire project, he could recall the woodwinds, brass, percussion, or another section with a command.

“It sped me up insanely,” he says. “I realized I never wanted to work any other way.”

Richard later moved more of his composing workflow into Cubase. He appreciated the way Pro Tools stayed out of the music, but Cubase offered considerably more depth for MIDI composition and control.

“When I opened Cubase, I thought, ‘You can control that?’ It is really deep. From there, it became a question of what the system would let me do.”

GridVista combines the immediacy Richard discovered through visibility memories with the control available in Cubase and the adaptable interface of MetaGrid Pro.

The result goes further than saving a fixed collection of visibility configurations. Groups can overlap. Categories can follow the user’s own logic. Scenes can change from one project to another. A control surface can contain everything in the template or only the sounds relevant to the current score.

It also helps users rediscover instruments they already own.

Richard describes the experience as “going shopping at your house.” Libraries that might otherwise remain buried become visible and accessible again, without requiring composers to stare at every available track throughout the day.

Why MetaGrid Pro

Richard began using MetaGrid Pro several years ago and was immediately drawn to how quickly it could solve specific workflow problems.

MetaGrid Pro allows users to build control surfaces from buttons, faders, gesture pads, XY controllers, labels, and other interactive objects. Its workspaces can change with the task, and Dynamic Focus can display a relevant grid when a corresponding track is selected in Cubase or Logic.

Select a string library in Cubase, for example, and its dedicated MetaGrid Pro controls can appear on the iPad without additional navigation.

“The design is consistent, but it’s very flexible,” Richard says. “When you apply it to whatever situation you’re in, there’s an organizing quality to it.”

That flexibility made MetaGrid Pro a natural platform for GridVista. A conventional hardware controller remains physically fixed. A bank of faders will continue to be a bank of faders, even when the current task would benefit from a completely different interface.

“A fader box is going to be a fader box no matter what,” Richard says. “It’s not going to grow an XY controller, and it’s not going to suddenly appear with a ton of controls when that’s useful.”

MetaGrid Pro can change with the work. It can provide visibility controls while composing, articulation controls when an instrument is selected, and faders or channel functions when mixing. GridVista adds a way to generate part of that environment directly from the structure of a Cubase template.

Importantly, the generated surface is still a MetaGrid Pro workspace. Users can begin with what GridVista creates and continue adapting it around their own habits.

That balance between immediate usefulness and deeper customization is central to the design. Richard has worked with systems that required extensive programming, dedicated computers, or large touchscreens. GridVista and MetaGrid Pro offer a more approachable path to a personalized control environment.

“You might be able to buy something prebuilt,” Richard says, “but it’s not your system. It’s going to be someone else’s concept of what you might want to do.”

More room for creative choices

GridVista is part of a wider family of Articulign tools focused on template management, articulation access, performance, and timing. Although the products address different problems, Richard sees them as expressions of the same idea.

“It all comes from the same impulse to remove unnecessary barriers from the process,” he says. “I want to make parts of it less cumbersome and leave time for people to do something unique, something that shows individual personality.”

That last point matters. Richard is wary of tools that make production faster by taking meaningful control away from the musician. Saving time should create more room for personal decisions, not make composers sound more alike.

The repetitive actions performed hundreds of times a day are where he believes technology can help most. Finding a track, recalling an articulation, compensating for timing, or preparing a workspace does not need to interrupt the creative process.

The musical choices should remain with the musician.

“I want people to have more time to make creative choices instead of searching for a sound, picking an articulation from a list, or choosing something with a baked-in emotion because they don’t have time to shape it themselves.”

This is where the opening image of the dishwashing machine becomes more than a memorable line. It defines the boundary Richard is trying to draw between useful automation and creative substitution.

The machine should organize the template. It should recall the right tracks, expose the necessary controls, and keep routine operations from breaking concentration. It should leave the composer free to decide how the music moves, breathes, and responds.

Richard hopes GridVista ultimately produces a simple reaction.

“A sense of relief,” he says. “Maybe users aren’t thinking about how cool it is because they’re thinking about their music instead of their gear. They’re making it better and moving it forward.”

That may be the clearest measure of a successful creative tool. Not how much attention it attracts, but how effectively it returns that attention to the work.

Get started with GridVista

GridVista is now available as a separate premium purchase in MetaGrid Pro. Designed for Cubase and Nuendo, it creates custom grids from your template rather than supplying grids to download.

On your Mac, install MetaServer 6.1.5 or later, then open Integrations → GridVista. In MetaGrid Pro, open Presets, search for GridVista, and purchase the integration.

Learn more at Articulign.