Martin Delaney continues his tutorial which analyses the conversion of Audio to MIDI (and then back the other way)
7: There’s another version of the clip with delays; Live interprets these as extra notes, requiring clean-up unless we retain them as an effect. The delay repeats also affect how Live handles clip length.
8: The speech sample is where things get extra-interesting. You can try all of those conversion options with a speech sample – it’s going to be weird either way. Let’s settle for ‘Convert Drums to…’.
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9: Now you’ve got a frankly off-the-wall drum beat, which probably won’t fit so well. We can fix this. Find the Scale MIDI effect device in the Browser and load the ‘In C’ preset.
10: Play the clip. We don’t need a kick, though, so use Scale’s Base control to shift those incoming notes up to F#. You should now be hearing a hi-hat part. Quantize it to 1/16ths.
11: The Convert to MIDI commands load default instrument sounds, which is really helpful but you’re not supposed to stick with those. Load different sounds and experiment – that’s the whole point!
12: There’s another variation of these commands. We can also choose ‘Slice to New MIDI Track’, which relates to these techniques. Let’s try it with the original drum clip for more options.
Turn Audio Into Midi
13: Choose 1/8ths for the slices. Tap Enter and another MIDI track appears. This time the audio remains with an instrument rack containing 1/8th note slices of the sample ready to trigger via MIDI.
How To Turn A Video Into Audio
14: When we do the same thing with the bass part we can restructure the notes entirely, apply different effects to each note/chain if we want to – just drag the effect onto the chain.
15: Slicing the piano part with the chords should give interesting results – you’ll get a chord on each key of your keyboard, good for a blatantly sampled chord sound. Add Auto Filter for extra cool points.
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16: Try slicing the delayed piano clip with the note values at 32nds, for a more samply/glitchy vibe as you play it across your MIDI keyboard. You’ll get 128 slices.
17: Same thing goes with the speech sample. To me sliced speech always sounds cool with those short notes. Put an arpeggiator in front of it for a nice choppy rhythm effect.
18: Our last command is actually two commands: Freeze and Flatten; use these on a MIDI track to convert everything in the track to audio clips, with instrument and effects baked into the samples.
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Live’s audio-to-MIDI conversion provides mind-blowing ways to create new musical parts. Martin Delaney shows you how separate the notes from the samples…
We’re looking at audio-to-MIDI conversion, which is one of the most fun activities in the Ableton World. Introduced in Live 9, ‘Convert…to MIDI’ gives us new ways of disrespecting samples and creating new sounds. Used with the ‘Slice to New MIDI Track’ and Freeze/Flatten commands, you can get amazing results.
These handy commands let us transform an audio sample or recording into an editable form, without having to do any programming; we can create a MIDI track from an original recording or we can create parts to play in parallel with the original part. We can even venture far deeper into substituting different instrument sounds and applying MIDI effects.
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The source material can be, well, anything. For more conservative uses, it’s typically drums or bass sounds, but it doesn’t take long to get into more left-field territory by converting field recordings, miscellaneous noise, and speech samples into rhythmic or melodic MIDI parts. Some complain that Live’s MIDI conversion tools aren’t as accurate or sophisticated as those in Melodyne, for example, but that’s missing the point.
With Live it’s all about immediacy and creativity; with these tools you’ll get results you wouldn’t have dreamed of – never a bad thing.
In this tutorial’s example Live set, we’ve provided a few audio clips that’ll give straightforward illustrations of how audio-to-MIDI conversion works.
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You should really start using your own audio samples as soon as possible though – that’ll be much more rewarding. One usage example that comes to mind is with drums.
You’ve recorded a beat that you liked at the time, but now you want to use different kit sounds while keeping the notes and timing of the original beat. Or maybe you’ve taken a beat from a record, and instead of using it as a straight sample loop, you just want the parts from the beat. You might also use it to create a second part that plays along with the original.
The conversion process can work very well, but it’s dependent on the quality and character of the source recording. If there’s a lot of sounds playing at once, audio effects in use or other influences like audience noise – anything else in the background – of course it’s going to be harder to get a clean clip. You might have to tidy the notes afterwards but the idea is this can still be faster than programming the part from scratch.
War of the five queens. It’s not dissimilar to Slice to New MIDI Track except that command keeps the original sample sliced across different chains in a rack, while this
discards the original sound altogether. Bass is typically easy to convert with the ‘Convert Melody to MIDI’ command, because for the most part, bass tracks are monophonic, and reasonably clean. Bass guitar can be harder to process because there’s variation in dynamics and clarity, as well as finger/fret noise.
discards the original sound altogether. Bass is typically easy to convert with the ‘Convert Melody to MIDI’ command, because for the most part, bass tracks are monophonic, and reasonably clean. Bass guitar can be harder to process because there’s variation in dynamics and clarity, as well as finger/fret noise.
In this context, ‘Harmony’ refers to any audio sample with more than one instrument note playing at the same time: piano, guitar, synthesiser and so on. This is harder for software to decipher, but Live does a good job as long as it’s presented with a clean-ish recording. So as not to make things too easy, the piano clips in the example set include distortion, delay, and reverb so you can see and hear how they affect conversion. I’ve also provided a voice sample, but you can also use any sound.
If you’re the sort of person who likes to use their own sources for everything, but also favours MIDI programming over plain sample manipulation, then why not snag a few recordings using your iPhone or other recorder, and create an album’s worth of songs using MIDI conversion to create all of the parts?
Furthermore, it’s really unpredictable and exciting to take one original audio recording and apply all of the conversion options to it in turn, creating a beat, melody, and chords, from that single sample. If necessary you can use Live’s MIDI effect devices to squeeze the notes back into some kind of semi-organised timing and pitch. I dare you, go on, it’ll be good!
I included the Freeze and Flatten commands in the walkthrough because they complete the circle – you can use them to bounce your MIDI clips back into a purely audio format, for yet more processing, or for re-use in other live sets. Much as I like to work with MIDI parts for the original programming, I still put everything into audio tracks for live use – it’s just more robust and portable.
If you’re seriously interested in audio-to-MIDI conversion there’s no reason why you couldn’t use it as the basis for all of your sound design. Live has the commands I’m talking about here. There are hardware options as well, like the Sonuus products mentioned in our little sidebox and I also mentioned Melodyne at the top of this story, which is the king of audio manipulation – converting audio to MIDI is only part of what it does.
Give it a try (see www.celemony.com). But even without such extras Live, of course, has more than enough options to keep us happy and productive, and converting audio to MIDI is one of the most exciting of those options.
Focus On: Real Time Conversion
One thing you can’t do with Live’s wonderful audio-to-MIDI tools is convert in real-time i.e. create MIDI notes directly from incoming audio. I use a piece of hardware to achieve this: the Sonuus B2M bass converter (there’s also a G2M model for guitar).
One thing you can’t do with Live’s wonderful audio-to-MIDI tools is convert in real-time i.e. create MIDI notes directly from incoming audio. I use a piece of hardware to achieve this: the Sonuus B2M bass converter (there’s also a G2M model for guitar).
Connect your guitar at one end and a MIDI cable at the other, and you’re in business. It works pretty well and it’s a good incentive to clean up your playing technique. I also connect a microphone to it sometimes, to see what kind of chaos that generates, converting speech to synth parts.
Step-by-Step: Audio To MIDI
1: We’ve provided an example Live set so you can practice your audio-to-MIDI conversion techniques (called LID02) and it contains audio clips for drums, bass, piano (two clips) and speech.
2: The clip called ‘audio beat’ is a drum loop with acoustic sounds, compression, distortion and some reverb. Right-click on it and choose ‘Convert Drums to New MIDI Track’ from the Context Menu.
3: That’s all you have to do! Live creates a new MIDI track, containing a clip based on how it’s interpreted the audio. A default drum kit’s loaded, ready to play and ready to edit.
4: Now let’s do the ‘audio bass’ clip. This is a very simple part and a clean sound – just a little bit of reverb, that’s all. Convert it again but this time choose ‘Convert Melody to…’.
5: This is designed for monophonic sources such as (typical) bass parts or synth and guitar leads. You should hear that the bass converts to MIDI well, unaffected by the presence of that subtle reverb.
![Ableton live 10 how to convert audio to midi Ableton live 10 how to convert audio to midi](/uploads/1/2/3/7/123715764/772789629.jpg)
6: Use ‘Convert Harmony…’ for the piano clip – it contains chords. There’s also distortion and reverb present. This doesn’t provide a clean conversion so you will have to remove a few ‘spare’ notes.
![Ableton Convert Midi To Audio Ableton Convert Midi To Audio](/uploads/1/2/3/7/123715764/346216557.png)
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The Ableton Live digital audio workstation also functions as a WAV audio editor. Most audio samples in, for example, drum sample packs, use the WAV format. Load the samples into Ableton to start using them in your own productions. Once you've loaded a WAV file into the program, you can crop it, split it, reverse it, transpose it and even slice it into a MIDI track.
Double-click the Ableton Live desktop icon to open the digital audio workstation.
Click on one of the folder icons on the far-left side of the program window to open the Ableton browser panel. Navigate to the directory in which the WAV file you want to load is saved.
Click, drag and drop the WAV file from the browser panel onto the mixer track labeled '1 Audio' to load it into Ableton.
Repeat the process for any other WAV sounds you want to use. If you want to put each WAV on its own track, press 'Ctrl' and 'T' together to add a new audio track, then drop the second WAV onto this new track. If you want to put all the WAVs on the same track, drop the second WAV into the slot directly beneath the first WAV.
Tips
Click the 'RAM' button in the WAV's 'Sample' section to load it into RAM. You can also drag and drop WAVs from Windows Explorer directly into Ableton audio tracks.
Warnings
Only use royalty-free or appropriately-licensed samples in your productions.
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