Best Workflow To Transform Vocalized Ideas?

[tommyzai]

let's say I vocalize a baseline, then want to convert that into a synth bass. Is a two-part workflow the best (only) way to go at this time (audio-to-MIDI converter w/in DAW and routing the resulting MIDI to a synth)? Software, not hardware. Is it possible to keep it all as audio and not using MIDI?

[Ah_Dziz]

You can do whatever you want. If you're bypassing midi then you will need another way of managing pitch and editing it. This can be a bit tricky especially if you aren't the world's best singer. It gets difficult to do edits outside of octave transposition. All that being said, you can get a decent voice to CV setup going in Reaktor, Pure Data, or MaxMSP with a wee bit of effort. This will generally be about as close to realtime as any pitch analysis can be (somewhere between 2 cycles of your fundamental frequency and a 128 bin fft). You can then use various quantizers and similar CV processes to wang the extracted pitch data into something you want.

There are also some existing tools that use the pitch of a monophonic input to control a synth. Waves ovox is neat ( has midi out) and also has a harmony engine that's fun to play with. The mouth (reaktor player) is a good vocal controlled synth. Then there are many externals and such for PD and max that are designed for extraction of pitch information with an eye towards using the result to control synthetic sounds.

Good luck
JJ

[Ah_Dziz]

Glad you found it useful. Also all the melda plugins can track the pitch of an incoming signal and map that to parameter modulation. This allows you to do fun things like pitch tracking comb filters. It's especially fun in mxxx ( their modular FX rack). You can send higher notes though different effects or EQ extremely low notes differently etc etc. Very fun to set up with a live mic.
Also there's a very fun plugin called manipulator from the infected mushroom people that can do drastic pitch and formant shifting and has midi control of the incoming voice. I often use that to turn my mumbly voice into a synth bass.