Ableton has a very flexible approach to audio and MIDI. As you saw when we were sampling, we're taking audio, creating virtual instruments out of it, and playing it back via MIDI. So in a lot of ways the lines are blurred here and we're just going to take it one step further here and take our audio files and directly convert them to MIDI. So this isn't a new idea necessarily, this is how pitch correction works. But being able to do this inside of a DAW like this is extremely powerful. So before actually you perform the conversion, let's just talk about why you might want to convert audio to MIDI. Let's say you are not a proficient instrumentalist but you can hear melodies or ideas in your mind that you want to use as, let's say, a baseline or a lead line of a motif inside of your song, we can easily just sing them right into the software and then convert them into MIDI, which will give us the performance and then we can drop any instrument you want directly onto it. So let's do exactly that. I have these vocal ideas. I've created other patterns and concepts with them that I like a little bit more than the original audio, but I think that this would make for a really great baseline. So what I'm going to do is, I've got the audio clip selected and I'm just right-clicking here. As I scroll down this drop-down menu, you can see that I have a bunch of options and what we're going to do is look at these three on the bottom. Convert drums to new MIDI, convert melody to a new MIDI track, and convert harmony to a new MIDI track. So this is really similar to picking the proper warping algorithm. We're just going to choose the proper conversion algorithm. So harmony, again, would be for a polyphony or more than one note played at a single time. Melody would be for a single note and drums would be for a percussive file or that breakbeat would be a great opportunity to use that conversion algorithm. This is just a single note coming out of my mouth. So I'm going to choose this convert melody to new MIDI track. The computer jumps into action here and then directly next to it I'm given a new track and it takes a look at your file and says, "All right, I'm going to drop this instrument on it and see what's going on." So if I open up the clip, if we look here you can see this is the MIDI performance of that audio. It's extracted the notes, the length of the notes, how loud those notes were, and it's now displaying this as MIDI data for me here. So let's take a listen and see what came of it. I'll play the other one as well. So it got everything, including all of the pitch imperfections when I was singing. So what I can do now is just go in and clean this up. This belongs down here, get rid of these ones and we should be close enough for rock and roll. I forgot one. Perfect. So it's not going to be perfect every time and it totally depends on what file you have, but I was able to really quickly go in there and edit out the wrong notes, if you will, and get something that was a lot closer to what I wanted it to be. So I'm going to turn this off now and I'm going to select all of these notes and I'm going to quantize them a lot. It is going to edit quantize settings, turn this up a lot more, maybe to 90 percent, and we'll do this to the eighth note. Lets drop a base on it and see what happens. So I'm taking this instrument that it chose for me, deleting it, going into sounds, going to base, and there is a sub-sine wave, A, B, C, D, E, F G. Here we go. Taking all the MIDI, transposing it down, and now this has become a baseline for me. It's really coming together quite nicely. Let's just quickly do this to this Hi-Hat pattern as well. We'll do it to this breakbeat so you can see what happens when we convert percussive file as well. So back to this drop-down menu, convert drums to a new MIDI track, I'm selecting it here, and we'll see how well it did with these two files. I'll stop all the clips here. So it's done a much better job with this percussive file. So I have this drum kit that it's chosen for me, but I could very well go into Live's browser under the drums, hit section here, and swap in any sample that I wanted. So if I'm in this kick drum category, I could go down and grab a new kick drum. I could take this one, just drop it right on top of that 606 pad, and we should have a completely different pattern now or a different sounding pattern. Swapping out kick drums for symbols. You can really do anything you wanted. Actually it sounds pretty cool. So I've gone from one iteration of these clips and created something completely differently just by swapping audio and putting them into simpler instruments and resequencing them, taking audio that I sing, converted it to a MIDI sequence, and then edited it and dropped a new instrument on it. Very flexible, it's very fun and interesting to play with these concepts. So to just take this full circle, we can also take these MIDI sequences and convert them to audio as well. So here I have that sub-base idea that I was playing with. Let's say I want to convert this to audio and I want to warp it and do something more playful that you can only do with audio inside of those editing capabilities. So again at the top here, I can right-click and I have the option to freeze this track. So what's going to happen when I do that is that it's basically rendering all parameters on this track except for panning left and right or sends amounts, it's just track parameters, everything else has been rendered useless to us. It's frozen in place, which is why we call this freezing a track. So if I create a new audio track. Insert audio track here. Now I have audio three. I can take this and just pull it over into an audio clip. So I've taken a MIDI clip and I'm dropping it on this audio track and here's the audio right there for me, which I can then do all sorts of really fun, cool stuff too. I can transpose it back up if I wanted, go even lower. So there's a ton of flexibility and again, with this concept, it's really just limited by how creative and inventive you can be with this flexible relationship between audio and MIDI.
