Logic Pro // Convert Audio to MIDI (2 METHODS)

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video i want to show you how to convert audio to midi and logic pro using flex pitch and as a bonus i'll also show you how i convert polyphonic audio to midi using melodyne so let's say that you find a melodic idea within a loop or a bass line or even a vocal recording and it's audio so you can't just transpose the notes and swap out the instrument something like this for example [Music] so this is just a loop from splice and the key of e minor and if it's pretty simple like this it might actually be quicker for some people just to figure it out by ear but if you're new to music theory and playing the keyboard or maybe you're just new to producing music in general converting audio to midi might be faster for you but it's not a perfect process now to do this you're going to use flex pitch so i'm going to just select this track solo it click here to turn on flex and then make sure to click flex pitch and this will analyze that melody and you'll see all the notes shown here like piano roll now flex pitch does have its limitations as of logic 10.6.3 which i'm on right now you can only do this with monophonic recordings meaning that the melodic idea here only plays one note at a time so chords are not going to work for this any sort of recording where more than one note is being played at a time will not work but like i said i will show you a little bonus at the end of this video showing how to convert polyphonic material into midi using melodyne okay so the next thing i'm going to do is just click on the top bar here of the region double click on it this will open up the file editor most likely we want to go over to the track editor and in the track editor make sure that you have flex pitch shown by clicking here then what you're going to do is go to edit and then go down to create midi track from flex pitch data now what this will do is it will create an audio region just below the loop or whatever audio you're trying to convert here it'll create a midi region based on the flex pitch analysis now it sounds super easy but there's more work to be done let's give this a listen [Music] it's really close but there are some additional notes in here that need to go so don't be surprised if you have to do some additional editing to get the melody the way you want it so i'm gonna get rid of these little ghost notes here ghost note down here sometimes notes will get cut up into multiple notes so you can just delete those drag them out another little ghost note and then there's one note here that's actually incorrect the loop has like a tape effect on the front end of it so the first note kind of scoops up so flex pitch didn't know what to do with this note as i mentioned the loop is actually an e minor so this is probably not e flat it's probably e natural so hold option press up so let's maybe pull that forward pull that forward and then let's quantize all this to eighth notes you'll just have to sort of observe the material and see what value you need to quantize it to there's like a little grace note here too so i'm just gonna pull this back a bit just to have that in there and then i'm also gonna hold option while i have all these selected and adjust the velocities so they're all the same so i'm going to do a couple things here i'm just going to sort of shorten this up same thing here it was sort of like a duh duh duh duh shorten this up a bit [Music] and now the great thing is i can transpose this to you know whatever key i like so my other loop up here is in the key of c minor so right now if i play these two together they're probably not going to sound too great so i could just transpose this from e minor up to c minor or up or down to c minor so here's the first note e just select all the notes hold option and press down till that first note is on c or you can go up an octave shift option up and pull it up to a higher register [Music] so that's the process of converting audio to midi in logic just working with monophonic material and flex pitch now like i said before logic cannot convert polyphonic material to midi because flex pitch as of now doesn't support polyphonic detection like melodyne does so when i have a loop or something that i want to figure out the exact notes and it's maybe something i can't figure out by ear i'll often use melodyne for this so on my lush piano loop up here i'm just going to load up melodyne and you could use it in just the standard mode or you could use it in aura mode i'm not going to use an aura mode because i'm going to assume that some people watching this video are not just logic users so what i'll do is i'll just set the playhead to the beginning click the transport for button and just press play and it'll sort of input this loop into melodyne now by default it's probably going to use monophonic detection so it's just it's just going to use one node at a time so what i'll do is go up to algorithm and set this to either polyphonic sustain or decay decay is for things like acoustic guitar it's also for piano actually sounds that start loud and then noticeably decay over time if it's a sound that sort of sustains for a while you can use the polyphonic sustain algorithm typically electric piano would be polyphonic decay but this one's sustained so much i'm going to use the sustain mode instead it'll ask to change the algorithm so click redetect and there we go there's all the chords now you could just use this for the chord analysis up here up top and you could just play in your own chords or you could convert this to midi but notice there's a lot of notes that are sort of broken up and we're going to have to correct that similar to how i corrected the first example so what i'll do is just go to settings and click save as midi then i'll just give this a name i'll call this chords2 save it to the desktop and now i can just drag in the midi file that it's created just drag it in from the desktop i'll open this up and you'll see there's a lot of doubled and duplicated notes but if it's chords it's relatively easy to deal with these so first i'm going to try to find any notes that i think are erroneous i think this is one of them there was also like a high note in the loop that was very faint in the background i'm gonna select that and delete it and then i think the rest is good so it looks like i've got two bars of one chord then one bar of another chord one bar of another chord two bars of a chord one bar one bar so i'm going to use the glue tool drag over all of these notes in this first chord glue them together and i'll do the same for these and the reason why it's cutting these up is because the original loop had like a tremolo effect in it and so the audio signal was pulsing and melodyne interpreted that as different notes and there we go just trim up this last note here [Music] and now i can integrate these chords into my composition i have two midi regions here both that i've extracted the midi from audio loops like i said before this is not a perfect process by any means it does take a bit of manual editing and as far as i know there aren't any easy ways to do this you still have to do some manual editing of the midi to get it in a format that's usable so i hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please leave it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this as always thank you so much for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 117,401

Keywords: logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic 10, logic x, studio, producer, audio, midi, audio to midi, monophonic, polyphonic, flex, flex pitch, flex time, tutorial, music tech help guy, musictechhelpguy, melodyne

Id: S1cLmBtla8E

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021