Guitar Chords and Melodyne 5

[pbognar]

46 minutes ago, John Vere said:

The whole point is I need to convert a whole lot of already recorded tracks. Having to re play them is not something I'm that interested in. As long as I can make this work with minimum editing required it will be a huge time saver. 

Got it.  What I was suggesting was a little unorthadox i.e. to "play" the recorded audio with the MG2 vst on the track and capture the MIDI - but that is assuming MG2 would do a better conversion than Melodyne (unlikely).  But as I mentioned above, you might want to EQ and compress to really make the note fundamentals pop, so audio pitch analysis has an easier time.

[treesha]

John, yes i use the melodyne created midi files from guitar ( or anything really) on other instruments. Like the guitar part from the older song i midied i have changed the strum pattern a bit and am using that to play a kontakt organ. I shortened the midi notes and am triggering a kalimba for some short melodic sounds behind the rhythm guitar. I play guitar some, mostly rhythm a little lead and my electric guitar is old and needs work so i got ample strat and generation and several free guitar vsts to play around with. I like ample best. I use melodyne in some creative ways and really love it. Like i just melodyned the bassline and made it more interesting by creating different phrases here and there. I may midi it because my real bass is so low it might not cut through, so then i will create a second bass with higher tones or just a completely new bass vst bassline. I am just a hobbyist so just making music for my own fun. 

[John Vere]

I use Ample P bass Lite on everything.. Probably over 300 tracks by now.  I have been Tempted to buy the full version just to get the lower notes. I'm a bass player and  I am fussy about bass. I sometimes forget that I swapped my Yamaha Bass audio track for the Ample P bass. Hard to hear a difference in the mix. And I don't even EQ it. Just a little hi pass and a touch of compression. And ya I love that I can then change things around a bit with the midi. The results for a real bass player are close to achieving a perfect take. Something that used to require hours and a lot of drooling. 

Anyhow here is a short sample of what I got. I put the Original in the Left side and the Strum Session on the Right. There is no processing and I didn't edit the midi yet so you can get a better idea of the results. The Original guitar part is a rough take I put down as I was writing this song so is probably a direct into the interface track.  

I think this is sort of exciting that this works with the cheaper and possibly the free version that stays in Cakewalk. At this point I think Cakewalks Melodyne is version 4 so tonight I'll fire up my laptop and check. My Laptops is all free stuff and I don't have a licensed Melodyne installed, so we'll see what happens.  

Melodyne to MIDI.mp3

[John Vere]

On the laptop running with what ever is left of Melodyne 4 after the demo expires . The big difference is there are no algorithm choices. It just pops up the second box telling you it might take a while.  

But it did create a polyphonic midi track which surprises me. The results are definitely much worse than what I got with version 5. It’s there but more editing will be required. Lots of missing notes and pitch issues which didn’t happen with 5. So my $99 was well spent to upgrade. 
 

Thanks to all who answered,   it was all valuable info. I think I’ll edit my OP to list what my conclusion was.  

[treesha]

John the mp3 sounds good to me, I like ample bass too. Its funny I never get the box with the algorithm choices before it renders just the one telling me it will take a while, and I have studio 5,  never explored why not and i can always change it later. Look forward to your conclusions. 

[Glenn Stanton]

i guess the essential or assistant versions support poly-midi conversion but not the actual poly editing. that's good to know.

one trick is to copy the part to be converted, into a new clip, and cut the LF and HF so you get mainly dull notes without rumble and squeaks (unless you need the harmonics which may need more HF to properly "appear as notes"). then commit the EQ to the clip. then drag to midi track or create a region fx. this generally helps the algorithm find the notes better which seems to create cleaner midi.

[John Vere]

@treesha   When you open Melodyne as a regional effect and check in the Help dialog .. does that show your using version 5? 

The box actually has both the choices and the warning.  

[treesha]

John, yes when i apply melodyne as a regional fx and check my help for version it says studio 5 point something. But i only get the this may take a while box no algo choice. Odd i know. 

[Craig Anderton]

18 hours ago, pbognar said:

Got it.  What I was suggesting was a little unorthadox i.e. to "play" the recorded audio with the MG2 vst on the track and capture the MIDI - but that is assuming MG2 would do a better conversion than Melodyne (unlikely).  But as I mentioned above, you might want to EQ and compress to really make the note fundamentals pop, so audio pitch analysis has an easier time.

MIDI guitar is always a YMMV kind of thing,  but I've found MG2 to be quite effective at converting audio to MIDI - once you use some global de-glitching, which Cakewalk does well (e.g., eliminate notes below a certain velocity or duration). So yes, it requires a lot of editing, but doing global edits makes the process much less painful, because it gets rid of the most egregious problems.

You can download a free trial of MG2, so there's no harm in checking it out. However, I do think it's more of a Mac-centric program. I had a hard time getting it to work well with Studio One. Running MG2 stand-alone, and using loopMIDI to create virtual MIDI ports, improved performance dramatically. Cakewalk is more MG2-friendly than Studio One, but still benefits from the approach I wrote about in the PreSonus blog entry, Make MIDI Guitar 2 Work with Windows.

[John Vere]

Sounds like the hard way to do it to me. 

[Byron Dickens]

This won't help you with this project, of course, but I have everything written out in notation before I ever start recording.

[Craig Anderton]

7 hours ago, John Vere said:

Sounds like the hard way to do it to me. 

If you're referring to my post and using loopMIDI, a lot depends on whether you need to do pitch bending. Dragging a file analyzed by Melodyne into a MIDI track is pretty efficient, but there's no pitch bending or slides, so it's best for chords. MG2 can handle pitch bending quite well, so it's a better choice for single note solos. 

[John Vere]

21 minutes ago, Craig Anderton said:

If you're referring to my post and using loopMIDI, a lot depends on whether you need to do pitch bending. Dragging a file analyzed by Melodyne into a MIDI track is pretty efficient, but there's no pitch bending or slides, so it's best for chords. MG2 can handle pitch bending quite well, so it's a better choice for single note solos. 

That's right, Excellent point.   I have a GR 50 and a Godin with the Hex PU so Midi Guitar for me is much more work but for those that don't have the luxury of a guitar synth Midi Guitar is best thing since sliced bread. It's almost free, The GR 50 was close to $2,000 when I bought it and in todays money  that would be----

 from Google- $2,000 in 1980 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $6,626.29 today, an increase of $4,626.29 over 41 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.96% per year between 1980 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 231.31%.   If I tried to sell it I'd be lucky to get $50. 

Funny thing is when I first got the GR 50 in the 80's I was excited about using it to lay down bass parts instead of struggling with playing them on a keyboard. At that time I was terrible on the keys. But the amount of data generated by the GR50  filled a floppy disk in sort order!  So I had to disable all controller data. That really sucked back then. The Bass parts had way to many wrong notes so it wasn't worth the bother.  We are most certainly spoiled now with not being restricted by 1.44 MB of data for a song.