QUESTION ABOUT MIDI TRACKS IN PRO TOOLS LE

[wyldout]

What up y'all

so heres my question...

do i actually have to record my midi tracks to audio? or can i just make an aux track for each one and run my effects that way???

will this slow my computer down? and... is it going to be acurate? because when i tried recording the midi tracks down to an audio track, they seemed a little bit off.. and there was even a little bit of clock drift towards the end...

let me know what you think...

thanks

[Cliffy_Boy]

No, you can keep midi tracks as midi and use inserts on the aux track. BUT...if you are using VST soft synths or soft samplers, these eat a lot of CPU so bouncing down to audio lets you remove the resource intensive inserts. Also, midi is a bit starnge in its serial method of sending data. As you pile up midi tracks. they will all start to drift apart and the be noticeably out of time. Bouncing to an audio track sztops the midi timing build up issue.

What I do is get the midi scratch tracks and bounce to audio as a refernce track. As the song develops, I may go back and change the midi performance or add a chorus ( very easy and clean with midi) and rerecord the audio again. When I am ready to bounce to disk, I record each midi track to audio, nudge as necessary to compensate for midi offsets and insert plug-ins as required.

[wyldout]

thanks for ya help...

but...

do you know why my audio tracks are not in sync when i bounce from midi to audio?

thanks agin

[Steevp]

do you know why my audio tracks are not in sync when i bounce from midi to audio?

Because of latency.. or "Time"

Obviously the software has to send the msg to the midi sound source to trigger the sound, then the sound itself has to travel back to the PC for encoding as audio, all this take s time so by the time the midi sound is recorded it's a bit behind the rest of the track, you can set a midi "offset" to correct this (Get your head in the manual!) or do what I do and just look at a peak that should be on a beat and nudge the whole thing into time..

Confused? I am.

[wyldout]

i see what your saying with the offset stuff...

the thing is, i tried the thing where you pull the audio back.. but... it lines up at the beginning but not at the end...

and say, after the audio is recorded, i have a hihat track... if i copy the first hit from an 8 bar phrase, and paste it underneath the last one, the are both off the grid by different amounts..

whats my problem there?

[wyldout]

i still can't get them to sync up.. even with the offset...

if i record the same midi channel twice to audio, neither are ever the same.. every hit is off just a little bit

[wyldout]

heres an example of what im talking about::::

ok... i have a midi track set up so that it is triggering a hihat off my drum machine...

and i now have an audio track setup right underneath it...

i solo the two tracks and press record on the audio track...

i do the exact same thing again with another audio track...

this is what the two audio tracks look like (keep in mind that they are both from the same midi track... the "1" represents a hihat hit "0" represents the midi hit "." is just used as a spacer "|" is also just a spacer)

the layout is like this:

midi track.....:|||| 0...0...0...0...0...0...0...0...
hihat track 1:|||| .1..1..1...1.....1..1..1....1...
hihat track 2:|||| 1..1...1....1...1....1..1..1...

its not that drastic.. but its there to a smaller scale... any idea why?

thanks again

[Steevp]

I hear what you're saying..

I've had minor problems like this, where drum kits won't stay in time with themselves, I solved it by going to the midi event list and removing all the crap that's not doing anything, controllers, patch changes, etc..

Then when I record my midi to audio I make sure I'm only transmitting midi on the one channel I'm recording, for instance, some times I'll have piano's drums, strings, etc all being triggered at once, I've noticed that if I have them all quantised my sound source can't cope with doing so much at the same time so it starts to "share" things, like "time"!, it has 64 note polyphony, but it's only human.. so, if I'm recording hi hats I have one midi channel active and let the machine concentrate on hi-hats.

Since I started working like that the problem has gone away.

Also have you checked that your drum machine is set to external clock?

Give Roy Howell a shout, he's the midi king around here

[wyldout]

""I've had minor problems like this, where drum kits won't stay in time with themselves, I solved it by going to the midi event list and removing all the crap that's not doing anything, controllers, patch changes, etc.. """

so you mean in the input filter section? what should i really keep in there... just volume, panning and notes right?

""so, if I'm recording hi hats I have one midi channel active and let the machine concentrate on hi-hats. ""

so does that mean you're soloing the hi hat track and the audio track its being recorded to?

the way i have it setup is that each drum sample is on a different midi channel.... so hi hats are channel one, snare channel two... etc...

is there a better way? this only allows it to record the one sample on that midi track right?


thanks for your help man.. this been plaguing me for eons!!!

[Steevp]

so you mean in the input filter section? what should i really keep in there... just volume, panning and notes right?

No, look for the midi events list, it's a window you open from the midi menu, it lists everything that happens for each midi track, you'll be amazed whats going on in there..

so does that mean you're soloing the hi hat track and the audio track its being recorded to?

No again .. it means I change the midi assignment from say digi001 channel 1 to .. "none" I completely disable midi on all channels except the one I'm copying to audio..

the way i have it setup is that each drum sample is on a different midi channel.... so hi hats are channel one, snare channel two... etc...

Same here, then I record them to audio one at a atime with allthe rest disabled completely.

thanks for your help man.. this been plaguing me for eons!!!

Don't thank me til we've cracked it

-Steve