Anything and everything about MIDI - arp, mapper, mangler, generator, chorder, controller, utility, fx etc.

[onerob]

I do wish Cableguys would make Midishaper available as a proper MIDI FX in AU format. I don't think it would be very difficult but I emailed them and they said it's not something they plan to do.

If you are mac you could use reaper and feed the included white noise generator through Gatekeeper and use that to control automation of CCs etc

Thanks. I'm actually using Logic and can get things working using the IAC option plus Logic's midi Environment workflow, but it's not ideal.

[CircuitTree]

I love using Cthulhu, especifically the highly customizable arpeggiator. I’m still figuring out the chord functions

[Trancit]

It's really awkward nobody mentioned BlueARP, it's best midi arpeggiator & has really powerful chord detection ability and it's freeware!

And has the worst midi timing I´ve seen here on my machine...
I was recording the midi output of Blue ARP in various DAW´s and got random midi timing all over the place... not a single note was where it should have to be

[someone called simon]

an anyone recommend a chord memorizer?

It would need to play user definable chords, of any selectable notes rather than just by chords by name. And ideally, with notes able to be given individual midi channels.

I'm imagining having several big chords assigned to foot control; and being able to improvise guitar over the top, ambient style, dramatic af...

edit: oh, and Mac au or vst

[phreaque]

And has the worst midi timing I´ve seen here on my machine...
I was recording the midi output of Blue ARP in various DAW´s and got random midi timing all over the place... not a single note was where it should have to be

Have you reported this issue to Graywolf? If not, please do, here's the discussion link

[relayer]

Does anyone still use anything from Piz?

[antic604]

Melody sauce has for me at least a quote of 60-70% with the ability to choose between different moods and what is even more important it keeps everything it generated in playable slots!!! Hitting the random button in Riffer deletes everything it generated before...

Not defending Riffer here (I'm yet to test it properly), but Melody Sauce is only good for those very cliched, radio-ready EDM "melodies". With a more random tool like Riffer or Reason's QNG it's true you might need couple of runs to find interesting parts, but at least they're not making you cringe along the way

[Karbon L. Forms]

Melody sauce has for me at least a quote of 60-70% with the ability to choose between different moods and what is even more important it keeps everything it generated in playable slots!!! Hitting the random button in Riffer deletes everything it generated before...

Not defending Riffer here (I'm yet to test it properly), but Melody Sauce is only good for those very cliched, radio-ready EDM "melodies". With a more random tool like Riffer or Reason's QNG it's true you might need couple of runs to find interesting parts, but at least they're not making you cringe along the way

My thoughts also. It only does Major/Minor. (cue Trancit angrily telling us to run it thru a scale plug if we are too pro for diatonic radio jingles ). I see Riffers relative brainlessness as a strength.

[Trancit]

Use whatever you want...

[jagjitonline]

This holiday season is shaping up to be one Golden Hour for MIDI FX…both for us all, and esp. in my world where they're already amongst my favorite tools. Loomer Architect is about burst upon us all, but in MY studio, I've just this weekend cracked the lid on some older apps that have already proved they'll be game changers for me, maybe as much as Architect probably will also be, in very different ways (which is always good:).

First, there's RapidComposer, which has the best list of MIDI-mangling algorithms I've seen, and definitely takes the cake for randomization control and depth when generating new stuff:

"Included rhythm generators: Schillinger's Interference, Polyrhythm, Subdivision, Generic Rhythm, Probabilistic Rhythm, Euclidean Rhythm, Smooth Rhythm, Bass Rhythm, Simple Intervals, Toggle Intervals
Included phrase generators: Arpeggiator, Bass Generator, Chord Generator, Dyads Run, Generator, Fingerpicking Generator, Generic Generator, Phrase Container, Piano Run Generator, Strings Staccato Generator, only in the full edition: Melody Generator, Random Melody Generator, Phrase Morpher
Included variations: Add Chord Notes, Add Interval, Adjust Note Lengths, Apply Rhythm, Audio Gain, Delay Notes, Double Note, Double Phrase, Expression, Extract Rhythm, Humanize, Join Notes, Limit Note Range, MIDI Echo, Make Monophonic, Mirror Horizontally, Mirror Vertically, Permute Chord Notes, Quantize, Remove Note, Remove Short Notes, Rests, Rotate Notes, Simplify Phrase, Spread Out Chord Notes, Staccato-Legato, Strumming, Swap Chord Notes, Swing, Transpose, Triple Phrase, Velocity, Velocity Generator
Melody generation (full edition only), melody auto-harmonization using 2 methods…"

http://www.musicdevelopments.com/features.html

Then there's, believe it or not, EzKeys:

[quoting myself from here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=517114&p=7268696#p7268696]

"FWIW, I'm a collector of MIDI FX and am also waiting with very little patience to explore Architect, but I just recently got another one that's quite blowing my mind, since it does something that seems unique to me, never having seen any other tool that exactly does what it does, and does very easily.

It's that old horse EzKeys, which I just picked up here for $50 (posted a WTB and quickly got several replies willing to sell for that price).

I'd recently seen on YouTube some excellent tutorials about it, along with and compared to Scaler, Instachord, Captain, etc. (—though my own musical interests are very far from those of the video maker; he IS a good explainer!), and as a result saw that EzKeys isn't just the way over-priced, Band-In-A-Box sort of tool (retail $179!!) it appears to be, for making jingles and commercial-track mimics, etc. while spending another fortune on their "in-app" options for new instrument sounds and MIDI style packs.

Nah, the killer feature here is it lets you run almost any sort of one-track (solo-instrument) MIDI file, NOT just the factory ones (tho it does come by default with a good bit of quite interesting stuff, from very basic to very stylized, the same in every engine version) through any sort of chord progression with lots of very fast ways to generate, tweak, and randomize the progressions, as well as analyze melodies you throw at it to create new ones.

I've been collecting MIDI files, too, for many years going back to the early 90s, and have a ton of everything from short phrase/style/chord/progression clips to complete solo-instrument pieces from medieval to modern times—many found free online—along with the many oddball clips and tracks I've compulsively saved out myself from years of DAW/arp/MIDI-FX tinkering, despite having rarely found any serious use for them.

But NOW, in EzKeys, I can load or invent any kind and length of progression, and with a click, audition it as played through by virtually any of my MIDI collection, as well as easily drag out, DAW-mangle and drag back in whatever stuff I hit on. All while using my own sound makers, not the built-in instruments at all, tho some are quite nice.

Bottom line, I'm finally using my MIDI-file and MIDI-gen collections in the way I'd always vaguely hoped they'd be good for, merging and morphing them around so easily with other sorts of harmonies, both randomized AND well-established, and getting a very high percentage of useable and delightfully surprising results, compared to any of the general, typical, or even a-typical, randomize-it or arp-it techniques I'd often previously dabbled with using my MIDI-FX arsenal, and usually quickly tired of, up til now.

It's definitely re-defined the game, for me anyway."

Both of these older tools are unique and fresh for me (and even more so together) because they're not so much manglers or super arps like most of my already loved tools mentioned up-tread in my first post here, but because they're all about building traditional musical structures in very easy and also very deep ways, quite as well as facilitating endlessly surprising algorithmic mash-ups and concatenations.

I reluctantly must agree with the comment above about so many of these desktop tools having terrible GUIs, or simply being not fun to work with, either being too complicated or too simplified to make any sense of (Nora and Kameleono come to mind for me…both fascinating and assuredly powerful, but covered with fangs). There's no doubt that RC's powers, too, are hidden behind a space-shuttle-like interface, but EzKeys is quite brilliantly "E-Z", once you get that it's so much more than it appears to be, and is marketed as.

HNY!

Thanks!! for sharing your knowledge. I felt the same with all midi files I saved are rarely of any use. EZKeys seems promising to improvise midi files close to my taste.

[David]

Thanks!! for sharing your knowledge. I felt the same with all midi files I saved are rarely of any use. EZKeys seems promising to improvise midi files close to my taste.

Glad to hear somebody found all that long text useful:)

Since then, I've actually turned much more towards RC, which is definitely more complex but can be settled down into pretty much the same thing as EZKeys as described above, with a whole bunch of additional skills.

I did some short RC video feature demos, linked below, once I found the way in and thought that the existing videos weren't quite suited to how I use it. EZKeys remains IMO more efficient for exactly what I described, but RC, for me, makes that same process a much deeper, more flexible, more productive one. It feels to me like ALL the relevant tools are in place, not just the specific thing that EZKeys does so well—again just IMO:)

Plus, it's got a very active community right here on KVR, with generous users and lots of updates and responsiveness from the dev. viewforum.php?f=168

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... bcZjO4z7py

[David]

Does anybody here use Reaper and Reatune to record midi output? I'm trying to figure out if he can do polyphony at all. It seems to be able to do paraphonic when I stack 2 Reatunes and use both channel 1 and channel 2 output. I just bought Waves Tune and that's monophonic only. I only got Melodyne essentials and trying to find a way to extract the midi of chords out of samples without buying Melodyne Studio.

Studio One 4 is pretty good at this (extracting MIDI from polyphonic audio), and you can get a free two-week trial from Splice to see if it works for you, then rent it for $17 a month from them anytime you want to do a bunch of that.



You have to go back in and create a track of stacked MIDI notes, with each stack as long as each chord in the Chord Track, that the Chord track will then transpose for you, if that's what you want to get from the process, but there's a lot of other options, well worth exploring, I think.

Link to a manual: https://forums.presonus.com/viewtopic.php?f=153&t=30324

[Protocol_b]

NORA - a huge fan. Stochas. Numerology. Kontakt - as stated earlier, you can take advantage of all the clever scripts developed by clever devs. Hats off to Thesys, Kirnu Cream and BlueArp as well. I have a ton of these types of devices but the above are my favorites.

I may re-investigate EZ Keys based on the comments in this thread.

And I must add, the Phrazer in HALion / Sonic is a treat but proprietary (or does HALion have midi out? I think not? Not at home to check at the moment. Speaking of midi out, when the HECK are Rayzoon going to release Jamstix 4 for Mac?)

[David]

…
And I must add, the Phrazer in HALion / Sonic is a treat but proprietary (or does HALion have midi out? I think not? …

Indeed a treat:) No MIDI out, but there is a Record function:

[David]

Sugarbytes Guitarist and especially Ample's Riffer are both excellent if you like guitar patterns. Also Realitone's Fingerpick. All allow drag n drop to DAW tracks, and are loop/phrase generators rather than performance recorders, like Halion, or, say, szcz's free Kontakt record-MIDI script. Plundering these for use in EZKeys and RC is big fun:)