The Sound Board

Melodyne does a really good job turning a bass audio file and many other instruments into MIDI parts but it doesn’t do drums as pitches, just MIDI positions.

I asked Celemony and got this reply: “Melodyne is not meant to detect pitches of drums as these a mainly atonal and noisy instruments. This is why the percussive algorithm does not display pitches.”

Well, with a trap set, I disagree with that characterization but nonetheless, there we are.

Is there any software that anyone knows of that can do it?

Superior Drummer 3 can - I've never used that functionality but I understand it does a really good job.

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jan 04, 2025 4:47 pm Superior Drummer 3 can - I've never used that functionality but I understand it does a really good job.

Does it do a full kit audio file or only kit pieces? If the latter, can you please give it a whirl and let me know how well it does it?

Ashermusic wrote: ↑Jan 04, 2025 6:24 pm

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jan 04, 2025 4:47 pm Superior Drummer 3 can - I've never used that functionality but I understand it does a really good job.

Does it do a full kit audio file or only kit pieces? If the latter, can you please give it a whirl and let me know how well it does it?

I've given it a whirl! Never used it before so I'm a newbie here, please take that into account...

It'll work best if you are importing a drum multitrack, but I wanted to see how it did with just a stereo file. I used Steve Ferrone's sublime drumming on Madonna's Like A Virgin as a source:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0jqdlyub ... zlz1e&dl=0

This then goes on the timeline as a track and you select what instrument you want it to replace. I started with Kick. You then can set the trigger sensitivity, and duplicate the track to go on to the next instrument. I had 4 tracks - kick, snare, hats, cymbals. The other options were ride and toms. There was no choice to select percussion / tambourine, you're on your own there. You can also select other tracks to reduce bleed, that worked pretty effectively.

I used a basic kit from Decades - note I don't have the bleed mics installed on this, which I really should as the hi hat could sure use them. Here's the result of about 20 mins tinkering from the ground up having never touched it before:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3ql257wd ... vcutm&dl=0

With the exception of the hats, it's picking up the hits perfectly, inc a flam on the snare. But where its disappointing is that it doesn't seem to map the velocity very well - the snare hits feel very mechanical. As for the hats, they're all over the place articulation-wise.

Were I doing this seriously, I'd take the midi and then manually massage to the right articulations and velocities. I don't have the time / inclination for that right now, but I suspect another 20-30 mins would have this sounding pretty good.

As it is, it seems to do a phenomenal heavy lifting job to get you going, but there's still a lot of elbow grease involved to get a realistic result.

Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate is quite good at this (although the quality and accuracy of the result depends, as you'd expect, on the drumtrack you want to convert of course).

Here's how you do it:


Bad news is that, now that the end of the year sales are over, the Oxford Drum Gate software is back at its regular price which is quite hefty. But it's an excellent tool.

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Piet De Ridder wrote: ↑Jan 05, 2025 3:07 am Bad news is that, now that the end of the year sales are over, the Oxford Drum Gate software is back at its regular price which is quite hefty.

It's still cheap as chips here - https://www.pluginboutique.com/products ... -Drum-Gate

€39??? Holy vinniecolaiuta!
I wouldn't hesitate.

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Wow, the Oxford sounds like the ticket at that price. Thanks Piet and Guy.

Here is what I am trying to accomplish btw. I am doing a gig at a retirement home and I am performing a Bobby Darin tribute show, singing and playing their very nice piano. I already did a Bacharach-David tribute show there with full backing tracks I created.

This one is less ambitious, I just want bass and drums, but some of Darin’s bass and drum parts are very complex and would take a very long time to recreate. So I used Logic’s Stem Splitter and the drums and bass while accurate sound pretty crappy. Back in that era, there wasn’t much thought given to separation. So I used Melodyne on the bass and now my ArtVista Back Street upright is sounding really good after some velocity tweaking but the drums are the issue.

OK, well clearly I am asking a little too much from the Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate.

When I let the entire song play through and select "drag" sometimes it's grayed out, other times it lets me drag it in but it's only five bars long.

The manual says"Some hosts do not allow MIDI output from an audio channel, or don’t perform it efficiently enough to use the Drum Gate as a live instrument controller. In these circumstances, you can use the Capture button to save your performance into a buffer, which can then be dragged into your session as a MIDI file."

So Piet, maybe Logic Pro is guilty of this?

I can "capture" it one kit piece at a time but that is time consuming and laborious. So maybe I should just play in the drum parts. They won't be as authentic, but they will sound better. to the audience.

Difficult to say from a distance, Jay. But yeah, capturing is one-kitpiece-at-a-time thing. (Forgive me for not mentioning that in my earlier post.)
I can understand you're not looking forward to 'capturing' entire drumtracks, one kitpiece at a time, from I don't know how many songs.

I would also do as you suggest: forget about 'authentic' and simply play the drum part the way your 'song intuition' (of which you have plenty) inspires you to play them. ('Spade drumming' is what McCartney calls that: drumming in function of the song, rather than to showcase the drummer.)

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Piet De Ridder wrote: ↑Jan 07, 2025 3:21 pm Difficult to say from a distance, Jay. But yeah, capturing is one-kitpiece-at-a-time thing. (Forgive me for not mentioning that in my earlier post.)
I can understand you're not looking forward to 'capturing' entire drumtracks, one kitpiece at a time, from I don't know how many songs.

I would also do as you suggest: forget about 'authentic' and simply play the drum part the way your 'song intuition' (of which you have plenty) inspires you to play them. ('Spade drumming' is what McCartney calls that: drumming in function of the song, rather than to showcase the drummer.)

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Thanks Piet, yes, I already decided to go ahead and do that and I am half way through. Nobody will mistake what I am doing for Jim Keltner but it will work for this purpose.,)

Hmmm…thought I’d posted this, but you might very possibly be able to extract audio stems of the bass and drums from the original recording using lalaai.

Lawrence wrote: ↑Jan 07, 2025 4:12 pm Hmmm…thought I’d posted this, but you might very possibly be able to extract audio stems of the bass and drums from the original recording using lalaai.

I tried it, no better than Logic Pro’s stem splitter. These old recordings just don’t separate well because people were in the same room with no separation.

Darn. I did pretty well with stuff like Midnight Confessions and Born to Run, but I guess those are more recent.

Damn! I hadn't heard of lala.ai until Larry mentioned it, but I watched a video for it just now, and it's really impressive.

Guy, what's the name of the feature you used in Superior Drummer 3 to do what you did? Can it give you an actual MIDI file/track, or does it simply replace?

Mike Greene wrote: ↑Jan 08, 2025 12:08 pm Damn! I hadn't heard of lala.ai until Larry mentioned it, but I watched a video for it just now, and it's really impressive.

Guy, what's the name of the feature you used in Superior Drummer 3 to do what you did? Can it give you an actual MIDI file/track, or does it simply replace?

Mike-give it a try. I got some really amazing results, not on everything, but on some things it was awesome.

Mike,

Here's a video that goes through the process of how to convert audio drumtracks (multi or stereo) to midi with SD3's Tracker:



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Mike Greene wrote: ↑Jan 08, 2025 12:08 pm Guy, what's the name of the feature you used in Superior Drummer 3 to do what you did? Can it give you an actual MIDI file/track, or does it simply replace?

Piet's linked the video that'll walk you through everything, but it creates midi. I couldn't actually seem to click a button in Tracker to export as audio, oddly enough.

Lawrence wrote: ↑Jan 08, 2025 12:27 pm Mike-give it a try. I got some really amazing results, not on everything, but on some things it was awesome.

Definitely! I'm not sure what actual uses I'll have for it, but it sure looks like fun. (Okay, actually I can think of a few uses for it.)

Piet De Ridder wrote: ↑Jan 08, 2025 1:45 pm Here's a video that goes through the process of how to convert audio drumtracks (multi or stereo) to midi with SD3's Tracker:

That's exactly what I wanted to see. Plus thanks for saving me the time of finding a video that shows this, without wasting my time with five minutes of rambling introduction and a bunch of "Don't forget to Like and Subscribe!" fluff.

On another note, here's one for the "How much do I trust Piet's opinions?" files - After Guy posted that the Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate was only $39, and knowing how highly you rated it, I bought it without even watching a demo. Cheap plus Piet-Likes_it = I'm buyin' it! I figured that might amuse you.

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jan 08, 2025 2:05 pm Piet's linked the video that'll walk you through everything, but it creates midi. I couldn't actually seem to click a button in Tracker to export as audio, oddly enough.

Lucky me, for my purposes, the MIDI is all I want. (Why would anyone want to use those amateur SD3 drums when they have the incredible RealiDrums at their disposal! )

So now, hopefully the upgrade to SD3 from whichever version I have (looks like SD 2.0) is cheap...