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.