{"id":7439,"date":"2015-11-20T02:10:22","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T02:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/?p=7439"},"modified":"2015-12-06T11:13:34","modified_gmt":"2015-12-06T11:13:34","slug":"ableton-live-9-tutorial-how-to-convert-audio-to-midi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/ableton-live-9-tutorial-how-to-convert-audio-to-midi\/","title":{"rendered":"Ableton Live 9 Tutorial: How To Convert Audio to MIDI"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"fb-root\"><\/div>\n<p>Ableton Live 9 has introduced a really handy feature where <strong>you now have the ability to convert audio to MIDI<\/strong>. In this video and article, I&#8217;ll show you how to easily convert the Harmony and Melody of an audio sample to MIDI format.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/YzI-SC8lsJg\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/ableton-live-tutorials-2\" target=\"_blank\"><button class=\"btn btn-large btn-primary\" type=\"button\">More Ableton Live Tutorials &gt;&gt;<\/button><\/a><\/h3>\n<p>[Video Transcript]<\/p>\n<p>Today I want to focus on converting harmony and converting melody. And I am going to be using these three tracks as an example. These are actually excerpts from a previous beat that I created and uploaded on <a href=\"http:\/\/tcustomz.com\" target=\"_blank\">my site<\/a> a couple of months ago\u00a0entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/new-school-beat-melodic-hip-hop-new-day-download\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;A New Day&#8221;<\/a>.\u00a0Keep in mind that the convert\u00a0audio to MIDI function\u00a0is not going to be perfect, even if it&#8217;s just for a simple isolated\u00a0melody or instrument.<\/p>\n<h4>Converting the Rhodes Piano\u00a0(to Harmony)<\/h4>\n<p>Before we get into the conversion, I first\u00a0want to play this rhodes piano loop just to give you a sense on what we are working with, and we&#8217;ll\u00a0do the conversion and compare the two. (Music playing)[1:23-49]<\/p>\n<p>You can hear that there is a little bit of processing done\u00a0&#8211; automated panning, etc. Now what we are going to do is, <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">right click on the audio<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0<strong>convert the harmony to new MIDI track<\/strong>. We are going for harmony because these are actually chords that are being played. If it were\u00a0a single melody being played, we may want to convert the melody.<\/p>\n<p>That conversion may take some time depending on how long your loop is and how fast your processor is. You&#8217;ll see all of the extra MIDI information that was included. Ableton also\u00a0loaded up a grand piano instrument for me automatically. I am going to play this MIDI track\u00a0through,\u00a0and you&#8217;ll\u00a0notice it&#8217;s\u00a0not perfect. There are some accidental notes that are thrown in, but I\u00a0just want to play this so you can get a comparison of what you just heard versus what it converted that audio to.\u00a0(Music playing) [2:42-3:08]<\/p>\n<p>It is very close with a lot of the same harmonies and the same notes from the audio, however there are numerous accidental notes that appear. You may notice that it did not convert some of the connector notes either.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Why does this happen? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Well it basically comes down to the Ableton algorithm, how it&#8217;s\u00a0programmed\u00a0&#8211; what information it\u2019s taking in to do this conversion and calculation. For whatever reason it is possibly detecting some harmonics or some extra\u00a0notes that appear in the higher register. Another thing that this algorithm will take into account, as far as detecting a change in the audio are the\u00a0transients.<\/p>\n<p>You are probably already familiar with the white markers added to your audio called the transients, where Ableton detects a change or\u00a0different inflection in the audio. It will most likely use this information to tell where new note is coming down or where something is changing.<\/p>\n<p>Keep in mind, this is only a single Rhodes piano instrument \u00a0being converted into MIDI.<\/p>\n<p>Think about what could potentially happen when you start\u00a0introducing more instrumentation for this conversion. If you were to introduce a sample, that has a string section, and horns, and a\u00a0vocal, etc\u00a0&#8211; you just have to be more careful about what to expect from this function.<\/p>\n<h4>Converting the Bass Line (to Melody)<\/h4>\n<p>Now with the bass line I&#8217;m\u00a0actually do a <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">conversion to melody<\/span>. This is going to tell Ableton that I do not need multiple notes at a given time, rather it will find the best note to be played at that particular transient or that particular timing and will give me that note instead of a\u00a0chord. First I just want to play this back in audio format and then we will do the MIDI conversion.\u00a0(Music playing) [4:57-5:23]<\/p>\n<p>To convert, we\u00a0are just going to <strong>right click, then Convert melody to new MIDI track<\/strong> and\u00a0see what we got.\u00a0(Music playing) [6:15-40]<\/p>\n<p>As you can tell, it did a pretty damn good job. There were a couple places where it did not register particular notes.<\/p>\n<h4>Converting Multiple Instruments (to Harmony)<\/h4>\n<p>Next I&#8217;ve got a single audio track with\u00a0a lot of the main instrumentation from my beat- additional synths and may other layers were added. We&#8217;ll play\u00a0back this last audio track and then convert that to harmony.(Music playing)[7:04-29]<\/p>\n<p>After the conversion, Ableton\u00a0went ahead and gave us a grand piano as a\u00a0a default\u00a0instrument like before. <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">There is a lot of information in here that we do not want or need<\/span>, but now I am going to play this back and you will hear what it sounds like in MIDI.\u00a0(Music paying) [7:50-8:15]<\/p>\n<p>You should be able to tell\u00a0right away that there is a lot of extra, unwanted notes in here.\u00a0T<strong>he main thing I want to point out is that the\u00a0convert audio to MIDI process in Ableton Live 9 is not perfect.<\/strong> You have to be more considerate and more careful, especially when you start introducing more instrumentation. Nonetheless, this tool definitely can be useful at times. It&#8217;s inherently going to be more effective if you can convert an\u00a0isolated instrument\u00a0or melody line.<\/p>\n<h3>\u2014 LET\u2019S CONNECT! \u2014<\/h3>\n<p><strong>I\u2019m very reachable on the following:<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/\">Official Website<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/youtube.com\/tcustomzdotcom\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/facebook.com\/tcustomzproductionz\" target=\"_blank\">Facebook<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/tcustomz\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/soundcloud.com\/tcustomz\" target=\"_blank\">Soundcloud<\/a> | <a href=\"http:\/\/instagram.com\/tcustomz\" target=\"_blank\">Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n<h5><em>PLEASE LIKE, COMMENT &amp; SHARE IF\u00a0YOU LIKED THIS VIDEO<\/em><\/h5>\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/ableton-live-tutorials-2\" target=\"_blank\"><button class=\"btn btn-large btn-primary\" type=\"button\">More Ableton Live Tutorials &gt;&gt;<\/button><\/a><\/h3>\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/tcustomz.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><button class=\"btn btn-large btn-danger\" type=\"button\">DOWNLOAD Hip Hop Beats &amp; Sound Kits &gt;&gt;<\/button><\/a><\/h3>\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/tcustomzdotcom\" target=\"_blank\"><button class=\"btn btn-large btn-primary\" type=\"button\">SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE &gt;&gt;<\/button><\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ableton Live 9 has introduced a really handy feature where <strong>you now have the ability to convert audio to MIDI<\/strong>. In this video and article, I&#8217;ll show you how to easily convert the Harmony and Melody of an audio sample\u00a0[&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1159],"tags":[2154,2197],"class_list":["post-7439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ableton-live-tutorials-2","tag-ableton-live-tutorials","tag-convert-audio-to-midi","post-1","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7439"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7453,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439\/revisions\/7453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcustomz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}