Convert Just About Anything to MIDI in Logic Pro

hey a friend chris vandiver here from wyologyprorules.com the website that helps you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro today i want to show you how you can convert just about anything in logic into midi data and this is inspired by a reader question i received a little while ago via email and that question was hey chris is it possible to convert apple loops into musical notation and these two topics go hand in hand really because to be able to generate musical notation you need midi data that is notes in the piano roll that logic can then decipher into musical notation so i want to show you how you can do this in a bunch of scenarios from converting audio into midi drummer regions pattern regions record information from any sort of midi effects and even how to parse out chords or multiple voices in a polyphonic sort of arrangement using a third-party plug-in because in that particular case you're going to need some third-party tools to start how do you convert audio into midi now it's very important what kind of audio we're talking about and i'm going to start out with a guitar lead that plays one note at a time we're talking monophonic information not multiple voices not multiple notes in a chord anything like that so in this case we have a guitar lead let's take a quick listen to this guitar [Music] okay so one note at a time what we're going to do to start with is we're going to enable flex by clicking on the flex mode button right at the top here and under the drop down menu in the track header we're going to select flex pitch and if we open the track editor by clicking e or clicking on the scissors right up here we're going to make sure to enable you know flex mode within the track editor as well with the button right here so we have all our notes i'm just going to select all the notes and just set the pitch correction to 100 so everything's locked into place and now we're just going to go to edit and go down to create midi track from flex pitch data and now we have what we can see a piano roll with all those individual notes let's solo our newly created midi track and i'm going to set the instrument to just alchemy for now or even better let's pick a piano track just for easier identification so if we go right here piano perfect all right let's take a listen to what just the piano sounds like now sounds almost identical if we listen back to back so we can hear that the double note right here was not applied within the steinway piano midi generated information and this is an important point in certain circumstances when you're converting audio to midi whether it's logic or a third-party tool you might not get the exact same performance it's going to require a little finessing on your part so that's number one number two is to convert drummer regions into midi this is super simple i have a whole bunch of drummer regions right here we can take a listen to a little bit of it [Music] awesome we have all of our regions selected we're going to right click on the regions and go right down to convert and under convert we have convert to midi region you can also hold control and click the regions as well if you don't have a mouse with a right click button convert to midi and now we can see that our regions are now midi regions and if we open the piano roll editor i'm using key command e you can use the scissors right up here oh yeah we have all of our notes so let's keep moving here we now are going to change pattern sequence into midi as well we take a listen to these 90s techno chords sounds great once again you right-click and because it's a recent action of mine i have convert to midi region right at the top of the menu but once again we'll go to convert to midi region just like that we have our midi region of the step sequencer pattern but if we take a look at the piano roll here we can see that's only single notes being played but if we take a listen there's definitely chords in there and that's because we have the chord trigger and it's activating chords based on whatever notes are being played okay so maybe you don't want just single notes of a performance you want the chords or if you're using the arpeggiator and it's generating a whole bunch of notes up and down the scale several octaves you want all those notes as well well in that case we're going to take a look at the audio midi setup window if i use an app that i like to use called alfred we can look up the audio midi setup or much easier we can go to launchpad and just search for audio midi setup we're going to open it up this is what you'll be presented with when you open the audio midi setup window if we go to window and now go to show midi studio you get this sort of kind of you know dated look of all your midi drivers and if we double click on the iac driver we just want to make sure that the device is online by enabling this option just by clicking on it cool so we can close the audio midi setup window and now what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this instrument track with everything on it quick sampler chord trigger all that we're going to drag the original region to the duplicate track but we're going to swap the instrument and we're going to swap quick sampler for a utility plug-in called the external instrument i'm going to set it to stereo and we just want to set the midi destination to the iac driver that we just enabled basically we've enabled a pipeline for logic to collect midi data and send it elsewhere or from one app to another not just logic so we're turning on within this external instrument the midi destination to the iac driver and now that the midi channel is set to all basically you know as soon as we record to a midi track lane this information will be passed to any midi track lane in your project so check it out we're going to select that original track we're going to get rid of the chord trigger and we're going to record enable the original track and now we're going to hit record check it out oh yeah now we have all that court information parsed out across the piano roll take a look at the score editor kind of zoom in here there we go all right perfect now it's important once you're done using the external instrument just to power it down because if we leave it enabled we could hear these notes being applied elsewhere in the project if you select another midi instrument so let's just power it off let's dig into our drummer track here and we can see it's gavin with the brooklyn kit i'm gonna go right down here in the sound section and select his producer kit brooklyn plus and what this now has done is that we have that brooklyn kit but we have a track stack with all of the individual drum tracks parsed out so you can you know mix individual tracks but also bounce individual tracks or export so in that case let's take a listen to just the kick channel because we're going to replace or double the kick channel now of course we have midi data already this is assuming this would be an audio file so let's create an audio file right now we're going to select the kick track go to file go down to bounce and we're going to bounce the track in place we'll take a minute but we'll have now an audio region of this kick track that will be generated there it is let's drag it out of the track stack here we'll solo it take a listen perfect now we need to generate midi data from this kick drum so let's go up to track and we're going to go down to replace or double drum track in this case we're just going to focus on replacing or doubling and now we can see that logic has analyzed the transients of this kick drum and has generated a midi note based on where it deems there's a transient so we can preview these two kick drum tracks side by side [Music] sounds good to me so let's just hit ok and now we have a new sampler instrument with a kick drum sound that we can check out [Music] now this kick drum is pretty quiet logic has decided that the velocity of the original kick drum was not that loud so let's bump up the velocity in the piano roll and we'll take a listen again next up we're going to dig into drum loops if you have a drum loop with all the drums just in one single audio file what do you do then so in this case we have an apple loop let's take a listen [Music] cool we have snare we got kick we got hi-hats how do we you know kind of parse each of these individual drum tracks out in this case it's going to require some work on your end but i'm just going to select this region drag it down to the bottom here in the track header area and from the create new track using dialog i'm going to pick the quick sampler optimized and now logic is going to open up quick sampler in slice mode and if we zoom in here we can you know take a listen to each of the individual drums where logic has placed a slice marker and let me just make sure to solo that track now in your particular case you might need to fine-tune the results maybe you won't have a marker and you need to place one there maybe you need to move where the marker is you can also use the snap modes to make sure to snap to zero crossing or transient in note so it snaps right to the note but at this point once you have everything parsed out the way you want it you have a slice marker for each individual drum hit you hover your mouse pretty much in the bottom half of quick sampler we get this sort of you know shaded line across the whole performance if we drag it right into the tracks area we now have a midi region with each of the notes parsed out based on you know how quick sampler works with samples now obviously this isn't going to quite work if we let's say let's open drum kit designer and if we drag this region onto drum kit designer it's not going to exactly work that way you know it's just working its way up the individual drum sounds but now at least you know where each drum hit is and you can you know finesse each of the hits you can figure out you know c1 is always a kick you know let's look at d1 that's a snare center so you can basically take that performance that the quick sampler has generated and move the notes where they need to be and then you can drag and drop it to whatever instrument you want to apply that particular performance to now last case scenario how do you take an audio file or region that has multiple notes or voices being played at the same time simultaneously and convert that into midi or polyphonic information at this time logic doesn't have a solution in-house or native to logic you're going to have to take a look at some third-party options in my case i'm going to use melodyne from celimony but it's one of the more advanced versions of melodyne you're not going to be able to do this with essential but something like assistant that's the next tear up and that's going to be the least expensive option and we're going to hone in on this disco delight piano performance that's an apple loop take a listen okay so we're going to try to turn that into a midi performance if we open melodyne in the first slot in the plugin section in the mixer or inspector we're going to select melodyne ara which would be under your audio units under celimony but because this is an apple loop logic is not going to allow us to process the apple loop so let's get rid of melodyne here let's just bounce the region in place and now we should be able to process this with melodyne awesome so i'm just going to hit play because melodyne is the first slot here with the ara instance we just hit play and then stop melodyne has detected polyphonic information great so let's now go to settings within melodyne and go to save to midi or save as midi and on the desktop we'll just call this piano we're going to save it we'll close this down and i'm going to open a new instrument track software instrument track we'll open just an empty channel strip and we'll go into the library and just select a piano we're now going to go to the finder find our piano midi and drag it right onto that track lane and we'll just ignore that and let's take a listen and see how close it came to the original performance and if we hear it side by side with the original piano and i'll just turn on stereo pan and pan both of these and we'll take a listen to how similar or different these are so melodyne almost got it as well but it requires a little more finessing on our part to get you know the exact performance but there you have it there are all those scenarios where you can convert so many files regions into midi be able to use some more complicated processes so i hope this was helpful for you if it was as always i highly recommend subscribing to the youtube channel why logic paroles we're subscribing on the website itself ylogicprorules.com every week i'm posting new videos new emails and posts to help you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro thanks so much

Channel: Why Logic Pro Rules

Views: 7,474

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, audio, audio production, apple, mixing, audio mixing, recording, audio recording, Convert Just About Anything to MIDI in Logic Pro, Audio to MIDI, Convert to MIDI, Drummer to MIDI, Pattern to MIDI, Celemony, Melodyne, Why Logic Pro Rules

Id: 12uTgg4CDMk

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021