Cakewalk by BandLab is a full digital audio workstation with many features, such as editing
both audio and MIDI.
Audio tracks record sound as sound waves, and MIDI tracks record events that are then
converted to sound by a virtual instrument plugin.
Converting MIDI to an audio file is very easy, but converting audio to MIDI is a lot trickier.
In this video, we’ll cover how to convert an audio file to a MIDI file that can then
be played by a virtual instrument.
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To get started make sure you have Cakewalk by BandLab installed and setup on your system.
This is a fairly simple process, but we have done an extended tutorial series on this channel
demonstrating how to use this software if there are any problems.
For our audio tracks, we’re going to look at a few different scenarios.
The first is a simple bass line, all with single notes, no slides, and no slapping or
popping.
Then we’ll play an electric guitar with single notes at a slow pace.
Finally, we’ll finish the video off by converting an isolated drum track, such as a kick drum
and snare drum to a MIDI beat.
Once we’re in our project, we need to record or import the audio file that we’ll be using
to convert to MIDI.
If we’re recording an audio file, make it as clean as possible, so that would mean recording
a direct input or isolating the drums as best as possible.
Also, make sure to have a good solid signal level.
Let’s start with the bass line.
We may want to do this to record a bass and then convert it to a synth, or we can even
combine our bass recording with the synth to give it a little more bottom end.
Either way, we need to match it to a MIDI clip.
To do this, create an instrument track with a synth on it.
For now, I’m using a basic piano as the sound.
That will just give us as clean of a representation of the MIDI as possible so we can really hear
how well it tracked it.
Then click and drag the bass audio clip onto the MIDI track.
Cakewalk will then convert this file into a MIDI clip.
To convert audio to MIDI, Cakewalk is using Melodyne for the pitch recognition, which
is the included pitch correction software.
There’s a limited version of Melodyne in this program that can do some basic pitch
recognition and correction.
The pitch recognition in Melodyne is usually very good on vocals, but getting it to accurately
pick up notes from different instruments, their timings and lengths, and ignore things
that are not notes is quite a challenge to get to work well.
Now let’s play back the MIDI clip to see how well it matches up with the bass line.
Even with the bass, it’s not unexpected to have some issues when it converted to MIDI,
even though this is probably a best case scenario for converting audio to MIDI.
We had some missed notes in here for sure.
We can manually edit all this after if we need to, since the missing notes can be added,
extra notes can be removed, and mistimed notes can be adjusted.
This is all done from the piano roll for the MIDI clip.
So even though this was a simple bass track, it didn’t detect it too well.
I’ve found audio to MIDI conversion to be very hit or miss and usually involves a lot
of manual editing after.
The next track is the electric guitar with a simple slow pace melody.
We should expect this to convert very well, but let’s see what it does.
Immediately we ran into a problem with this clip, and Melodyne detected it as percussion
instead of melody.
To fix this, apply a Region FX to the clip and select Melodyne.
Then force the Algorithm to select Melodic instead of Universal.
Now it will redetect, and we can see that the notes are captured.
From here, we can delete that first MIDI clip, close Melodyne, and drag and drop the audio
file onto the instrument track again to convert it.
Even at that, the notes are all over the place, and we didn’t really get a good capture.
It’s not even detecting the right note values even though the guitar signal is as clean
as it can be, so we wouldn’t be able to use this MIDI clip after, and we’d probably
be better off just to program MIDI manually.
Since this is such a simple clip, don’t expect more complex audio tracks to convert
to MIDI at all.
You can try it and the results may vary based on the specific recording, but usually this
is the result I’ve ended up with.
Notes either don’t get detected when they play, or they’re detected at the wrong pitch,
and that just makes it completely unusable.
So now that we’ve determined that audio to MIDI doesn’t work great on a melody,
let’s take a look at what it can do for drums.
As we said earlier, this will only work for isolated drums where you’ve placed a dedicated
microphone on the kick or snare drum.
It’s basically just detecting the volume change for the drum in a particular frequency
band.
The software can’t figure out what’s going on in the overheads and differentiate a crash
cymbal from a ride or a hi hat, so that doesn’t work.
To start, import or record a kick and snare track into your project.
I’ll start by adding a Region FX for Drum Replacement to the isolated kick track.
We did a full video on drum replacement in Cakewalk previously, but this time, we’ll
get it to export to MIDI, that way we can use a drum instrument plugin to play it back,
like the built in SI Drums plugin in Cakewalk, instead of the sound samples from the Drum
Replacement program.
With the region FX, use the power button to select a drum type, in this case the kick.
Use the dropdown for ones that aren’t shown here, and this changes the MIDI event number
that’s associated with it and will correspond to the MIDI event in the plugin.
Adjust the threshold so that all the kicks are captured, and no extra kicks are added.
You’ll see the indicators at the bottom below the wave.
We’ll get this threshold set as best as possible, but keep in mind that we’ll have
to manually add or delete some kick drum beats.
To add one, click at the point in time below the line and it will create a yellow indicator.
Yellow means it was manually added.
We can click it again to remove it.
To remove auto detected beats, click on them and they will change into a half height bar,
showing us they are disabled.
Go along the whole track to do this.
Now listen to it set at 50/50 dry wet mix, or whatever settings lets you hear both depending
on the volume.
This lets you test out that all the notes are in time, not missing, and not doubled
by mistake.
Once done, drag and drop the MIDI clip onto the instrument track with the SI Drums plugin
and it will use the Drum Replacement Region FX to convert to MIDI instead of Melodyne
like we were using earlier.
Unlike the free version of Melodyne, we can accurately set up the triggers here before
converting it to MIDI, so it actually ends up being fairly good in the end.
The limitation though is that we’re limited to isolated drums, so we won’t be using
this to convert the full kit to MIDI, just the kick, snare and toms.
But, this process does still allow for good drum reinforcement.
After converting the kick drum to MIDI, we can convert the snare to MIDI as well in the
same way.
This will give us two MIDI clips.
Drag the snare and kick drums onto the same track so they overlap, hold control and click
them to select them both, then right click them and select Bounce to Clip.
Now you’ve converted both the kick drum and snare drum to a single MIDI clip that
can be played back on one instrument track using a single SI Drums plugin.
So overall, what can we say about converting audio to MIDI in Cakewalk by BandLab?
The functionality is there in a very limited way for audio tracks that have a very clean
recording and simple melody without any sort of bends, palm muting or percussive notes.
Even at that, it requires a lot of manual editing to fix any mistakes the software makes.
For drums, the situation is a little better, but we’re limited to isolated drums on the
kick, snare, and toms, and can only trigger these parts of the kit.
Everything else that would come from the overheads would have to be manually programmed.
Drum audio to MIDI conversion should be looked at more from a drum reinforcement point of
view, where we add a little bit of samples in to improve the sound, but it’s not a
full replacement of the whole drum kit.
Thanks for checking out this video on converting audio to MIDI in Cakewalk by BandLab.
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