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Audio and MIDI: Editing techniques
Audio or MIDI? That is the question. Jono Buchanan looks into the importance of
understanding the inherent strengths and weaknesses of both, and the many ways to
extend the relationship between them.
Nearly all DAWs offer the chance to work with two types of data, region or block, as nearly all provide both MIDI and
audio capabilities these days. Whether you're looking to fire up an instrument and doodle away with your controller
keyboard until creativity strikes, or recording, chopping up and editing "real" sounds onto audio tracks, these two data
types can happily exist side-by-side within one arrangement.
However, through this article, we're going to look at ways to extend the relationship between these data types further,
exploring techniques which cross from MIDI to audio and vice versa. The ways in which we can interact with audio
differ from those in which we can with MIDI. This suggests that the editing processes for each will also be different. By
learning what these differences are and how they can benefit your work in progress, it's easy start thinking along the
lines of "if this MIDI part was audio, I'd be able to..." or "if this audio file was mapped to my MIDI keyboard, I could..."
Switching back and forth, converting one data type to another so that techniques can be applied more creatively is a
weapon top producers use every day.
Converting to audio
Let's start by looking at some examples of when converting MIDI parts you've programmed for synths, drums or other
plug-in instruments might benefit from being bounced down as audio files. From a purely administrative point of view,
the first benefit comes if you're sharing the parts of your track with a co-writer or remixer who is working in a different
DAW or with different plug-ins. To ensure an absence of compatibility issues, bouncing stem mixes of groups of files
or, better still, individual tracks with each part rendered as audio, means that DAW-swapping problems are a thing of
the past. However, the benefits of bouncing MIDI to audio goes much further.
For all of MIDI's strengths, there are some issues which can't be resolved for a part that is MIDI-based, while other
tasks are much more long-winded than they would be were the data in audio form. For instance, if you want to
reverse a sound, there's no way to do that with MIDI, but once a part is bounced to audio, it's a simple task to find the
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reverse a sound, there's no way to do that with MIDI, but once a part is bounced to audio, it's a simple task to find the
"reverse" function and apply it to your audio file.
Piano and Beat: Listen to the first audio clip, where I've recorded a MIDI piano part to accompany a
beat-loop from FXpansion's Geist.
Reversed and Beat: In the second clip, the piano has been bounced down and reversed to run over
the same loop. Remember, bouncing your MIDI file down as audio doesn't mean you need to delete
the MIDI original, and sometimes the most impressive audio tricks can be achieved when the two files
and data types run together.
Piano with reverses: You can hear an example of this clip where I've chopped up the reversed file
and placed it in the gaps under the original MIDI piano part.
Reach Out...
Reversing is effective not only when it's applied to entire audio files but also when reversed reverb is employed to
preempt a sound. Normally, reverb provides a decay tail after a sound to create the illusion that the note decays into
an acoustic space but, what if that space somehow "knew" the sound was coming and faded up in volume to meet it,
rather than providing a tail as normal? This is the trick made famous in "Personal Jesus" by Depeche Mode, where
the "reach out, touch faith" line is pre-empted by a reverb rush which rises to meet the vocal line. Reverse reverb
tricks are achieved firstly by bouncing the dry file you want to apply reverb to down as an audio file.
Dry Drums: In the audio examples I've prepared, I'm using a drum loop, which you can hear here.
Reversed drums: Then, make a copy of that file and reverse it.
Reversed drums reverb: Next, route the output channel of the reversed copy not to the stereo bus but
directly to an auxiliary bus and set up a reverb on this bus so that rather than hearing a dry sound
with reverb added, the entire file is triggering the reverb.
Reversed Reverb: Solo this track and bounce down the file, leaving enough empty space at the end
so that the reverb has time to decay to silence. Bring this new file back into your arrangement on a
new audio track and reverse it. Now, the file will be back the right way around, yet the reverb will be
reversed.
Drums with Reversed Reverb: If you place the file underneath the dry original file, you can match up
their positions so that the reverb file leads into the dry one. Often, there's a benefit to dropping the
level of the reversed file so that it's placed subtly under the original rather than swamping it. This trick
works well on a number of sound sources, so try it out with synth parts, vocals and other mix elements
to find out how well it can complement your track.
Gating without Noise Gates
Audio files are great for more than just producing reversing tricks. In particular, they can work wonderfully well for
creating quasi-gating effects, which are particularly useful for pad sounds with slow attack times. If you have a MIDI
pad part that are changing chords every bar but which takes a little while to attack, there's no way you can use MIDI
to create a busy sequence part, as whenever you try to repeatedly trigger the sound, you'll find it doesn't attack
quickly enough.
One way around this is to bounce the pad part down as an audio file and then use the "chopping" tool within your
DAW to cut the part into slices. If these slices lock to the 8th or 16th notes of your track, you can create rhythms.
However, this won't sound effective until you've selected the chopped files and dragged their end points "backwards"
to create short gaps between the regions. This will provide a blast of audio followed by a short period of silence,
providing a gated effect. Often, these chops will sound unpleasantly "glitchy," as the audio regions will click every
time they start and stop. Most DAWs allow you to create a short real-time fade in/out for each region and if you apply
these fades, with short values such as two or three milliseconds, you'll get rid of the clicks without affecting the
percussive nature of each slice of audio.
Pad bounce: I've created exactly this sequence for you to hear, starting with an Omnisphere MIDI-
based pad part which I've bounced down to audio...
Chopped Pad: ...then chopped up to create a rhythm.
Chops and Fades: You can hear the clicks clearly, so in this final example, I've added 2mS fade ins at
the beginning of each region and added 3mS fade outs to the end.
Less dramatic, but just as effective, is the notion of being able to stop long release times once a file is bounced as
audio. If you're using a pad which has a long release and you come to a point in your track where you want an abrupt
change of mood, it can be frustrating to have to wait for the pad to decay fully, as this can dilute the effect of the track
changing character. By bouncing the pad down, it's a simple job to chop it at the point where you want its sound to
stop, creating a much clearer division between one section and the next. It's what I call a "jigsaw piece edit," as you
can see and hear the line where a sound stops so clearly. If it's too much to have the sound stop completely dead at
the chop point, extend its region a little and apply another real-time fade, so that you're compromising the difference
between a full "hard" and more gentle "soft" edit.
Sampling
Reversing the MIDI to audio concept has its own advantages too. The most effective way to do this is to use sampling
techniques, which will allow you to take any audio file and convert it to MIDI so that it can be triggered, either as one
long file, or in slices. Looking at the advantage of using one file first, for beat programming in particular, it can be
great to layer up loops of original, double, half and quarter-time lengths.
Sampled drum loop: I've sampled a drum loop here. Within my sampler, I've allocated its original key
to C3 but spread its note range from C1 to C4, which means that when I play the note at C2, it plays
back at half-speed.
You might be wondering why this works, so here's a short explanation. Samplers capture a sound using a sample
frequency, in the same way that pitch is also measured in frequency. In pitch frequency terms, let's take the note A
above middle C, which has a frequency of 440Hz. The A at an octave below has a frequency of 220Hz and the one
below that, 110Hz. The reason As are all called "A" is because this mathematical link exists between themfor each
octave rise, the frequency will double, and for each octave drop, it halves. So it is with samplers.
More often than not, sampling frequency is set at 44.1kHz, so by triggering a note an octave below its original
sampling time/pitch, the playback frequency is 22.05kHz, producing a halving of pitch and time.
Drum Loop octaves: In beat programming terms, this is great news, as it's easy to spin additional
loops in at double or half-speeds to enhance the original loop as you can hear here.
Getting Choppy
However, the disadvantage of long blocks of sound triggered from a single key becomes all too obvious if you
suddenly change the tempo of your track. Suddenly, rather than having a loop which sits comfortably with the rest of
your production, you'll suddenly discover that, as the loop is simply triggered at the beginning of a bar but then has
no tempo reference points until it's triggered again, it'll be out of time.
As with the pads example given above, to rectify this, chop your audio file into slices, with either 16th note or 1/32nd
note resolution. Then save each slice as a new audio file. Most DAWs allow you to select lots of audio regions and
save them as separate files in a single operation, so it shouldn't be too painful to make this happen. You can then
drag the audio files into your sampler and assign each one to its own keyagain, this is usually possible via a single
operation so that the first file maps to C1, the second to C#1 and so on. All you need to do to have the original loop
play back via MIDI is to draw a ramp of notes from C1 upwards in a semi-tone scale, with a note being triggered in
the time-frame you selected when you sliced the original audio loop up. In other words, if you chopped in 16th notes,
enter an event every 16th note.
When you press play, the loop should sound identical. Now, though, you can change playback speed. As each slice
is being triggered from its own position within your track, if you slow down or speed up the tempo, the positions of
those slices will still trigger where they're stored, so while you might get brief gaps in the audio file, or a few glitches if
you slow it down a great deal, the loop will still run in time.
Sampled Sliced Loop: You can hear an example of this here. I've sliced my loop up into 16th notes
and re-triggered it. It's at the original speed in the first half, but then I've dropped the tempo from 120
BPM to 90 BPM.
Often, DAWs contain dedicated "Convert To Sampler" options which carry out the task of changing an audio file into a
chopped sampler track automatically, saving you the time of the actions described above.
Lastly, here's one final trick to try once your audio file is converted to your sampler and is being MIDI triggered. Adjust
the amplifier envelope settings within your sampler, these are likely to have immediate attack, little or no decay, full
sustain and little or no release, as these settings will play each "slice" to sound like the original audio. However, if
you drop sustain to zero, you can use the decay time to control how long each slice will play for.
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Automated Decay Loop: If you set a short value here, you can adapt "full" slices to become tiny,
glitched ones instead. Automating this decay time can be a great way to take even conventional drum
patterns and make something new from them.
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Words / Jono Buchanan
Published / Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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