Converting Melody To MIDI

Madeleine Bloom
Madeleine Bloom

Lesson time: (4min 42sec)

Learn how you can quickly get a bass line out of your head into Live with the Convert Melody to MIDI feature.

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This lesson is part of the course Sonic Bloom presents: Ableton Live 9 Essentials
Watch a preview of the full course below.

Lesson transcript:

Lesson 3: Using the Audio to MIDI Feature in Life 9

Hello and welcome to my third video of the series about my favorite Life 9 feature, the Audio to MIDI feature.

In the last two tutorials, I've shown you:

  • How to make beats with the drumster MIDI feature.
  • How to create pads out of an audio sample using the Harmony to MIDI feature.

In this video, I want to show you how you can add a bass using melody to MIDI. For this, I'm going to sing something for the bass.


Checking the Input

All right, check the input. Right. Okay, so that's working. Now, let's turn that on and play what we had before.


Converting Audio to MIDI

Now, we've got an audio sample. I started a bit late, so let's just move that to make four bars again. You can listen to this.

"Okay, not exactly exciting, but let's convert it and see what we can do with it."

So, convert melody to new MIDI track. Here we go. As you can see, it has both an analogue and an electric option included.

"Right, so turn that off and play this."

Now, I'd say it almost sounds worse than before.

Quantizing and Adjusting

Let's select all and quantize first. I'll also drag everything down by an octave, simply because I don't get as low being a woman. Let's put that here instead.

"That can't work. That sounded off as well."

Okay, let's just get rid of it. And probably this should not be here either. Make this one a bit longer and this one a bit longer. I'm not happy with this one.

"Probably about here. No, let's start that with G again."

That's quite a bit better already!

Now we'll take it down a bit as well. Well, you know, it's definitely not perfect and could be tweaked quite a bit more. But you can see, even with a badly sung bass line an octave too high, you can do something.


Conclusion

All right, see you in the next tutorial! Bye.

About the instructor

Madeleine Bloom
Madeleine Bloom

Madeleine Bloom is a classically trained musician, producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer from Berlin, and founder of the label Quixotica Records. She studied electroacoustic music at the Franz Liszt Conservatory under Prof. Robin Minard, and brings those methods to her own blend of electronica pop. Her music has earned praise from producers Guy Sigsworth and Rupert Hine, and a personal invitation from Imogen Heap, whose tour she opened.A former Ableton technical support agent, she founded the online platform Sonic Bloom in 2012, where she teaches Ableton Live and music production through courses, workshops and one-to-one classes. She has helped people around the world with Ableton Live, Push and Max for Live, as well as audio engineering, music theory, composition and sound design. read more

What's included?

36 lessons (5h 28m)
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