Convert Audio To MIDI and MIDI to audio - Creating Tracks

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Now, you can easily convert audio to MIDI these days, and vice-versa, and quickly deconstruct how an arrangement was put together or simply speed up your workflows. This tutorial shares how it's done.

It sure is great to live in a time when technology is evolving at nearly the same speed are our artistic trends. One always affects the other. They both drive each other. So it makes perfect sense that as we push the boundaries of both audio and MIDI in modern music production, that the lines begin to blur. In Logic Pro X, for instance, the Drummer feature seems to use both audio and MIDI interchangeably. But what about when you simply want to convert audio to MIDI? This lesson frames the question in a real-world scenario of having an audio recording you've captured, but wanting it to be played back through a software instrument you made for a specific project you're working on. It's actually a very fast and easy process.

To convert audio to MIDI, your DAW simply needs to be able to recognize and isolate two elements in a recording; transients and pitch values. Although Ableton Live is the one major DAW that actively advertises this capability, it can be done in others as well. And all DAWs can effectively convert MIDI to audio, by way of either bouncing (exporting, rendering, saving, etc) the sound as you normally would any project, or bouncing 'in place', which simply adds a new audio file to your project arrangement without having to export/import anything. You can do many things with audio that you cannot do with MIDI. This is also true the other way around.

If you convert audio to MIDI, you can grab that riff and play it back through any software instrument. You can make edits to the arrangement, adjust velocity, add parameters like aftertouch and pitch bend...the list goes on-and-on. If you convert MIDI to audio, you can take advantage of techniques like time stretching, resampling, advanced glitching, etc. So there are many reasons why you may want to explore these options for your own music. As with most things in this line of work, discovering a new workflow, technique or tool can change how you make music forever.

Cheers,
OhmLab
Http://www.creatingtracks.com

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Closed Caption:

today we're going to be talking about converting
audio to midi
and why you might want to do it
how to convert midi to audio
and just walkthrough not just the workflows
but some of the reasoning involved in some
of these decisions and some of the opportunities
which each workflow opens up for you
without further a do, lets just kind of walkthrough
our first scenario. I know that converting
audio to midi let's just get this out the
way right away.
I know that there's some negativity built
up around this topic with a lot of people
but there really doesn't need to be. Not everyone
taking audio and converting it to midi is
doing it through or for nefarious means and
here's a great example of how you can actually
implement this in your workflow.
Let's say you just spent days working on this
project and you've spent some time building
these beautiful keys and you've got all of
these really great elements built up for you
mix but you've been missing that one riff
that one hook and no matter what you do every
time you sit down at your computer, the inspiration
isn't there so you head over to your buddies
and you're maybe playing around on his piano
or something like that and you come up with
this riff. now of course you're not plugged
into your computer, maybe you have your phone
on you, so you grab a quick recording of yourself.
And what we're going to do is kind of emulate
this part of the process. ok let's pretend
that you have this recording.
what we're going to do is bring up that recording
into your project now. and we'll just use
this jazz piano riff here.
ok it's part of the logic prostock library
sounds so if you have Logic you can even use
this same piece of audio to follow along with,
if not no worries - you can use anything.
Jazz Piano Bar 05 - if you are wanting to
follow along.
And we'll just bring that into our project
and close our media browser there.
And let's just turn on our loop region so
we don't have to manage this. Again this is
what it sounds like. ok and its just a piano
you know, its not the sound that you built
for your project, lets get that into that
instrument you made.
First thing you do is just double click on
it, and you can actually do this from the
side bar as well. Might as well just do that
down here as that's where the rest of the
workflow occurs. and then click on this button
here which activates flex mode and you can
say yes to turn on flex.
This is a little bit different in each DAW,
but if you're unsure as to where find flex
or warp mode in your particular DAW go ahead
and run a quick google search or something
and I'm sure you'll find plenty of people
showing you how to do it.
We're just going to change this from Flex
time to Flex pitch and as you can see now
Logic has identified all these different notes
based upon the pitch values so now what we're
going to do is just ask Logic to convert this
into a midi track.
So now that creates a new midi region for
us in our project, and we're just going to
move that up to this really awesome instrument
we've made before for our project and see
what the riff sounds like and see if it really
was that great.
Alright so it came over alright actually the
timing for the most part is there, and you
know maybe you just need to adjust it a bit,
maybe drop this down to A or something, OK
so that's a good one.
Let's say that you wanted to do something
else to this.
Maybe stretch part of it in someway or something,
something that you cant actually do with midi,
so how do you convert the midi region to audio.
Well that's just as easy as right clicking
on it and selecting Bounce in Place - now
my Bounce in Place option is right here in
this quick drag area and the reason that is
in there is because it was recently used so
Logic actually puts the most recently used
tools or workflows up here so you can come
just down to here to Bounce and Join from
here.
Again this is different for every DAW but
go ahead and look it up for yours.
So we'll say Bounce in Place sure, we'll leave
the original track. We'll create a new track
for it. We'll include the audio tails so it
doesn't chop it off all weird like.
We don't have any plug ins running so we don't
have to worry about Bypass or Not Bypass.
We'll choose not to Overload and we'll choose
ok.
And that will create another new track. Ok,
so there's our new track. And we'll just go
ahead and listen to that really quick, make
sure that it came through ok.
Ok now, you cant use certain features like
flex or warp or time stretching on midi because
its not audio, there's no audio information
for it to warp so now that this is back in
audio you can turn on things like flex mode
or stretching of any kind. So that's one reason
why you might want to convert midi to audio.
Let's take a look at one more way, you can
actually convert audio into midi and why you
might want to do that.
Now in Logic specifically there's a feature
called Drummer. And what that does is it generates
these beats automatically for you which is
pretty cool, uses some interesting technology
and it lays this out in audio natively so
if we just listen to this.
ok so let's say we're really impressed with
that, and we want to convert this now into
midi because although we like the beat, we
really do not really care for the kit at all.
You know, this is a regular drum kit, and
maybe we want something electronic or digital
or something so lets go ahead and move that.
so we'll say here in our convert option, convert
to midi region. ok so now this is instantly
changed over to midi. And you'll see that
this still works with the drum kit but again
we wanted something else so, you know, let's
just say we had a drum kit of some sort loaded.
We'll just use the basic ultrabeat kit and
we'll drop our midi down there.
So you can hear what this sounds like.
ok, so there's plenty of reasons why you might
want to be moving between audio and midi fairly
fluidly in your workflows, there's a lot of
benefits and a lot of opportunities opened
up for your project and it can also make life
a lot easier for yourself. You can save a
ton of time using these tools so certainly
do not shy away from them.
And don't buy into all the negative talk about
some of these features because I'm not sure
that there's really such a thing as cheating
anymore in modern music production. I mean
let's be fair, this is all looking at a screen
and pointing and clicking and stuff. I know
that its still involves all of the same artistic
passions and knowledge and everything so it's
just great to open our eyes and minds to the
different tools that we have available to
us and use them to our greatest benefit while
we are here - why not - let's make more music.
Hope this makes some sense, hope it opened
your eyes to some stuff.
Maybe it's the first time you've seen a workflow
showing how to move from audio to midi and
if so, I hope you can put it to use in your
very next project - thanks as always for swinging
by it was good to see you and give us a shout
in the comments below.
let us know what you thought of this tutorials,
let us know what you want to see next.
cheers folks, take care.