Learning Journal WEEK 12 – AUM162

DATA

1. EarMaster – I’ve nearly finished EarMaster, but my scores in a couple of the mastery section were below the 90% which would be unexpectable to advance to the next exercise. So, it means I need to redo the exercise until I can reach the required percentage. I did the ones I could with the intention of doing the weak ones at the end.

2. Time for this old dog to learn another DAW trick. How to convert midi drums into audio wav for mixdown. With the midi drum setup at the moment, I’m using one mono midi instrument track to control the sounds of the drum kit which is spread out into individual drum kit pieces via midi tracks. This means I can’t add EQ or compression on the midi tracks individually. I could open the right amount of midi instrument tracks and drag all the midi tracks onto the instrument midi tracks. Now that would allow me to mixdown the drums easy enough and add EQ and compression. The problem is, I wanted to have a crack at converting midi into audio and learn the different conversion methods.

Midi tracks duplicated in case I muck up.

All the drum kit has now been converted from midi to audio. It took me a couple of attempts to work it out, but now I understand that midi files have to be shifted into the midi instrument track before it can be converted to audio. I believe it needs a plug-in sound to read off, and I was using the EZDrummer plug-in to generate my midi drum kit. I also worked out you can drag a mono midi file into the stereo midi Instrument track and the conversion still works.

Reflection

1. EarMaster is such a great challenge to see if I can do the exercises a 100% right and pass it on the program’s rules. I enjoyed testing my skills and seeing what areas are strong, but more importantly what musicianship skills are weak, and need to work on. Just like any musician skills that you find yourself being weak on, you can start building up those skills to an acceptable standard for starts, and then can build on the new standard.

I will take what I have learned from EarMaster and look upon building my skills in the areas that have been proven to be my weak spots. This will be an awesome personal challenge to work on in my musicianship and self-growth.

2. Now I can actually explore combining midi drum tracks with audio drum tracks. How cool is that! This is going to open up so many song ideas to explore and start learning how to create ‘doof doof’ music. (OK EDM) I’m now not stuck in a rut of limitations, and now have options. I discovered a video that demonstrated the three main ways of accomplishing midi to audio conversions:

1. Drag a midi file from a midi instrument track straight into an audio track and it will convert immediately.

2. Record the midi track to an audio track by connecting the midi outlet to the audio inlet with the same buses in both out and inlet.

3. You can then prepare an internal DAW conversion.

These three conversion options will work with any midi instrument tracked. This is really exciting as I am gradually working out the DAW. Now I’m going to have a go at converting all the midi tracks to audio. All the midi tracks I convert, I then don’t have to get rid of, and can still use them or can hide, and make inactive as a backup plan. This technique is going to make a huge difference in the way I can create sounds for songs.

Reference

Music Pro, M. (2019, February 7). How To Convert Midi Tracks To Audio Tracks In Pro tools ... Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wh0Kd9lLr0