Converting MIDI file to audio using VST

[dfbevilacqua]

Hi there guys, I'm far from professional at music producing, and have no intention of being more than that, I'm just a musician (vocalist) that wants to record demo/cover vocal lines to the songs with an acceptable sound quality playback.

What I did then was to buy an Audio Interface, a decent computer (windows 10 - 64bit, minimum requirements for doing what I want), download Tracktion 5, some basic set of VST't and that's it.

I know that the easiest road was to download high quality playbacks with no vocals (in case it is a cover song) and just sing it over. The problem is when I don't find available the songs I want to cover, or when it is a composition of my own. The solution I found was to download MIDI files available for most of the songs I want and those of my own, when I wrote it back in the days of Guitar Pro and saved it to MIDI.

I was hoping to use these MIDI's converting them to playbacks with VST (something I did quite easily using Sonar), but I can't find the way to do that in Tracktion.

My problems start even when I cant open Microsoft Wavetable Synth as my default MIDI Output - I get the message ''Can't open the device".

I know that is a lame question... I am probably just too limited in these stuff to resolve that. Anyway, I just wanna record my singing with a decent playback, that's all. Anything that can fullfill this will do as a solution, not exactly the MIDI thing. Hope you guys that have more experience will help me.

Thanks!

[chico.co.uk]

You need some kind of multi-sound VST that you can use to generate the audio from your midi tracks. Which one will depend what kind of sounds you need (eg, if it's all piano, orchestral, or mostly classic synth noises / old drum machine sounds etc)

You could do worse as a starting point that downloading a copy of Sampletank 3 Free, which gives you a selection of various instruments ;

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/sampletankcs/

It'd help to know what kind of sounds you need ...

[rosesbyrosex]

download Tracktion 5, some basic set of VST't and that's it.

Tracktion 6 is now free

About midi to audio, you need Vst (Sampler or Synth) to make midi into audio.
About the Setup, Tracktion is modular and mostly everything is drag and drop, it's done like this
1. First add your midi tracks.
2. Drag the Vst (Sampler or Synth) plugins from left panel to the section of the right, on the track you desire as shown on the image.


If vst don't sound check the midi channel of the track some vst work only with midi channel number 1.

[chico.co.uk]

You might find this useful. A step by step guide to recording and producing a track in Tracktion 6, which as above, is also now free;

http://www.musictech.net/2017/12/record ... ing-tools/

[Peter Widdicombe]

We don't know where you're stuck; but in ADDITION to adding instruments all well explained above, you need to IMPORT the MID file. It will ask a few questions, but basically you want all the midi instruments to default to different tracks on input.

I did a quick test after downloading a .mid file, and had 7 tracks for "Billy Jean" - assigned instruments for each by dragging in the appropriate .VST instrument for each (fairly easy, if the tracks are already named and you know which is which).

The difficulty I had was for percussion, which, unknown to me initially, had a bank/patch change imbedded, so it wouldn't sound otherwise. At least I think so, as this is one of the weaknesses of tracktion, is seeing actual MIDI non-note data in MIDI tracks.

This also assumes the .mid file you have IS arranged as a multi-track MID file with one instrument per track.

[dfbevilacqua]

Thank you guys so much! Downloading now Tracktion 6 and will be posting news in a few hours!
See ya!