Generate Midi track from Audio

[chriscalyx]

Hi,

can someone please tell me the best way to generate a MIDI track from an audio one?
I have a live kick drum track that I want to beef up with a sample triggered from BFD. I'd like to automatically generate a midi track for the BFD kick drum from my live kick drum take. Can beat detective be used to do this somehow?

thanks

Chris

[jstunner]

You can do this with Melodyne. I wrote this in the BFD forum

Here's something new (maybe) that I've been successfully able to do using BFD instead of soundreplacer. Using Melodyne I was able to create a midi file from the audio of a snare track. This is what I did.

BTW, I'm a PTLE user and I am using version 7.3.

Melodyne is a POWERFUL tool. After much thought, I decided to process a snare track to convert it to midi. I was very surprised by the results. Melodyne picked up about 99.98% of the hits with an awesome representation of velocity too! I only had to "fix" 2 of the snare flams, as Melodyne picked up the first stick but not the second, so a little pencil action was needed.

Here's my method for this: (this may work for other audio to midi programs too)

Step 1) Clean up a snare track first. Use an aggressive gate and audiosuite it to the file. The track does not need to sound "good" all you need is hard peaks from the strike for timing purposes The less noise and bleed the better.
Step 2) Consolidate the track if not already done, make sure the start point is at 0
Step 3) Import the track into Melodyne and use control+shift+T to bring up the transport bar. Enter in the tempo from the session.
Step 4) Under the File menu select "save audio as midi", this will create a folder with the midi file in it. ( you don't even need to play the track, just scroll through and make sure all the hits are there.)
Step 5) Import the midi file into the PTLE session, transpose all the notes to D1 or note of choice, set up your sound mod and play through.
Step 6) Check flams and odd ball snare rolls and pencil in notes if missed. ( I found Melodyne to actually be pretty accurate, I only had to fix a few hits)
Step 7) Your done! Process snare samples as an actual track from your sound mod of choice, ala BFD, etc!

This method was a heck of a lot faster than using Soundreplacer. I don't know about you guys, but I can only do small sections at a time with Soundreplacer, for snare rolls I actually process each hit separately by using beat detective to separate the hits into single regions. Once I had the midi file I just took advantage of BFD and the Andy Johns detailed library. With the variance in velocity and the depth of the full install of the AFJ pack, BFD never played the same snare sample. The other cool thing, is I was able to "audition" different sounds too.

Hope this was helpful or gives ideas to others.

This works great for kick, tom and snares. You can get it to work with overhead tracks, but you really have to clean up the audio file a lot. The kick and snare hits will show up in the midi file as random notes, and one may have to separate the regions where hats, and rides are different. It can be done, but bottom line, it takes a lot of work.

[chriscalyx]

thanks for the comprehensive reply I look forward to trying this method out on my next track.

Thanks again.