noteGRABBER 2 - Audio to MIDI Conversion Plugin for Any DAW

[00:00:00] Hey folks, welcome back.
[00:00:01] So today it's about noteGRABBER 2 and this is a plugin that you can use in any DAW to
[00:00:07] convert audio to MIDI or to notes so you can play synthesizers with it or instruments.
[00:00:15] So audio in, you get some kind of sonogram as a graphic or visual and then you paint
[00:00:21] some notes above it and then you can pull this out and create some note clips with it.
[00:00:28] So very straightforward, very easy.
[00:00:31] And I made a video about NoteGrabber 1 almost a year ago and had some problems with it and
[00:00:36] a few days ago, Navie D. actually sent me a new version said, "Hey, this is noteGRABBER 2.
[00:00:41] We release this in a few days, maybe make a video about it, maybe give us some feedback."
[00:00:47] And that's exactly what I want to do because I actually use NoteGrabber 1 a lot in certain
[00:00:54] situations.
[00:00:55] So I know that there are many solutions on the market right now that do some kind of
[00:01:03] audio to MIDI conversion.
[00:01:05] Also in Ableton Live and Cubase and Logic, you already have something like this included
[00:01:11] inside of the DAW.
[00:01:13] But as far as I know, most of these solutions are actually kind of automatic and they rely
[00:01:19] on certain algorithms to extract these notes.
[00:01:23] And what I like about NoteGrabber is that you can actually do this manually.
[00:01:27] So you can go in here, look, oh, you can see this is your base, right?
[00:01:32] This is a base, this is a kick drum.
[00:01:34] I don't want to have this and this.
[00:01:36] I just want to paint in here a note, maybe reset this here, right?
[00:01:40] I want to have this note and this note and this.
[00:01:44] And then I can extract basically the baseline, right?
[00:01:48] So I can use your direct MIDI, pull this over and then you can see in the background here,
[00:01:54] it's just the baseline.
[00:01:58] So that's the idea and that's what I like about NoteGrabber that it's so straightforward
[00:02:01] and manual.
[00:02:03] But they also included now some additional features, not big features.
[00:02:09] It's more like an update.
[00:02:11] So they updated the visuals in the background, that's what they say in the changelogs.
[00:02:16] So it looks probably better.
[00:02:18] I can't compare it because you can only run one version.
[00:02:22] So we either have NoteGrabber 1 or 2, but it looks okay in my opinion.
[00:02:30] Then they added here something like quick grab.
[00:02:32] So you don't need to paint in these notes manually if you don't want to.
[00:02:36] You can just use the slider here, pull it up, right?
[00:02:39] And you can see it fills the visuals with these notes.
[00:02:46] But you get also a lot of junk in here and that's what I don't like.
[00:02:51] And to me, the algorithm here looks a lot like what Neural Note uses, which is this
[00:02:59] Spotify library called Perfect Pitch or something like this.
[00:03:05] It's an open source library.
[00:03:06] I guess they use this.
[00:03:07] I'm not sure about this one.
[00:03:09] Maybe they implemented their own algorithm for that.
[00:03:14] But in some cases it works, but for me, most of the times it gives you a lot of crap you
[00:03:20] don't want to, which is also true for these automatic algorithms and logic and able life.
[00:03:27] At least what I saw and when I tried it, you always get these kind of overtones you don't
[00:03:34] want to have to in these note clips.
[00:03:37] So I usually don't use it.
[00:03:40] I want to use the manual thing.
[00:03:43] We have also now here some kind of zoom feature, but everything that you change in here also
[00:03:50] here, the grid, which is also new, only works after you record it basically.
[00:03:56] So here nothing changes, right?
[00:03:59] You reset the graph and then you hit play, hit record here.
[00:04:25] So we can zoom in, zoom out or change here the overlays, which gives you an indication
[00:04:38] of I think this is just one bar from here to here is one bar.
[00:04:42] So you have an idea about the rhythm inside of the track.
[00:04:47] When you paint in notes here, it's actually not snapping to these grids.
[00:04:51] So it's just a visual overlay and nothing more, nothing less.
[00:04:56] We also have now here some kind of preview.
[00:04:59] So you can paint these notes in, you can already hear, already hear what you paint in more or
[00:05:08] less.
[00:05:09] Here's a note, there's a note.
[00:05:14] This one, I really like to paint this in actually because I can exactly see what I do here.
[00:05:24] These are the overtones, I imagine your preview here.
[00:05:36] So you can extract notes from these visuals, which is very nice.
[00:05:41] And I not only use this on tracks, because it can be sometimes very helpful to see what's
[00:05:49] going on inside of these tracks, what kind of chords they play or what kind of root note
[00:05:55] they use for the bass and sometimes you can't hear it and it's very hard to extract just
[00:06:00] by ear.
[00:06:01] And here you can see it sometimes very clearly what's going on.
[00:06:06] So let's say I have here this drum bass tune.
[00:06:09] And I think this is kind of a cool bass line in here.
[00:06:13] Maybe reset this for a moment, it's record.
[00:06:29] Right.
[00:06:30] So we can clearly see here where the bass line is.
[00:06:33] And you can tweak this a bit here with the range, with the gain.
[00:06:37] This was actually some of my feedback here.
[00:06:39] They need to implement some kind of auto gain.
[00:06:41] So you don't have to do this for yourself in a way or an offset auto gain.
[00:06:47] So it pushes the audio up to a normal level.
[00:06:51] And then you say, oh, I want to have the normal level plus minus 40B or something like this.
[00:06:56] So you have like the perfect graph in here.
[00:06:59] Anyway, so you can extract to the bass line, right?
[00:07:01] You can see here, and we don't extract to actually the snare and everything else.
[00:07:10] I just want to have the bass line.
[00:07:11] You can see the bass line here very clearly what's going on.
[00:07:17] And then you track it out and you have it then here as a MIDI or as a note clip.
[00:07:27] And you can play along or maybe just use it for your own drum bass tune, have something
[00:07:32] similar or maybe go in here and just use this one octifier, or one semitone higher, two semitones
[00:07:42] higher.
[00:07:43] But it's usually the same thing in drum bass.
[00:07:46] It's the whole tone scale or maybe harmonic minor scale or whatever.
[00:07:50] It's probably harmonic minor.
[00:07:52] Yeah, that's the root here and so on.
[00:07:57] So you can extract this pretty easily and can see what's going on in the tunes that you
[00:08:01] like and you want to copy or maybe get the same vibe or the same funkiness or whatever.
[00:08:08] And you can learn from other tracks just by analyzing here the harmonics or the notes.
[00:08:15] Also of course for chords, when you have something like this here, pretty dope sometimes.
[00:08:32] Right.
[00:08:46] So this is not very easy to track by ear what's going on.
[00:08:52] If you're not a piano player, if you don't have perfect pitch, you have no idea what's
[00:08:56] going on in the song, harmonic wise.
[00:08:59] So here you can get a sense.
[00:09:01] You can see over here is actually some kind of note going through.
[00:09:05] So this is probably the root note of the scale or, you know, and everything else moves around
[00:09:13] this kind of pedal tone or whatever.
[00:09:16] So you can get a sense of what's going on.
[00:09:19] Sometimes you can even then extract here a certain notes.
[00:09:22] You can see here, oh, this is probably chord progression as a note here, right.
[00:09:29] This is the bass and so on.
[00:09:31] So you can kind of analyze this a bit more clearly than just relying on your ear or maybe
[00:09:38] using something like tonic, which is also a cool plug in actually that finds out the
[00:09:44] root note and all the notes that are used or pitch map or something like this.
[00:09:49] Here you can see it and you can analyze it and then you can paint over the sonogram and
[00:09:55] then drag this out and you have it as a note clip.
[00:10:00] So very easy, pretty straightforward.
[00:10:02] So that's what I'm using this actually for analyzing other tunes for baselines or sequences
[00:10:09] or melodies or what's going on with chords.
[00:10:14] But I also sometimes use it for just sounds here, something like this.
[00:10:19] Let's reset this here for a moment and record.
[00:10:36] So this is a very dissonant, almost noisy, atonal sound, but you can still see some harmonics
[00:10:44] in here and you maybe can extract certain notes from it.
[00:10:49] You can maybe look here for some kind of pedal tones that go through the whole sound.
[00:10:57] Then you can use that and build something on top while you have to sample in the background
[00:11:03] or maybe you sampled something from, I don't know, from foley noises or whatever and you
[00:11:11] can extract and try to extract some harmonics from there and you can combine it then with
[00:11:16] synthesizers or other samples or whatever.
[00:11:20] So my biggest complaint in the last video and this is not really fixed or it's actually
[00:11:26] another feature and I know it's very hard to implement but what I want to see is, so
[00:11:32] let's say we have here some harmonics and I don't know, sometimes these harmonics don't
[00:11:37] fit into the chromatic scale.
[00:11:40] So they are between notes, right?
[00:11:43] So maybe this is here a bit off, this needs to be one higher but something in between,
[00:11:49] right?
[00:11:50] Between these two notes.
[00:11:52] That's not a good example here, I have a better example here, I guess this one is a bit pretty
[00:11:57] off.
[00:11:58] Let's reset this here, let's play this.
[00:12:02] This is a simple boat by Skyance, so here we can paint in a note, I think this is kind
[00:12:18] of correct but you can see it's almost not really on point so it's not on a note, so
[00:12:25] it's all over the place kind of with these harmonics and I wish they implemented something
[00:12:31] like MPE where you can paint in between notes and then when you drag out the MIDI data here,
[00:12:41] something like this, you go into that, you have all these notes but some of these notes
[00:12:48] have actually here, let's say MPE data or it's this one here, right?
[00:12:53] So in Bitwig we have your pitch per note, you can say actually have something like this,
[00:13:02] a pitch bend of this note for minus 0.21 semitones, right?
[00:13:09] And then the synthesizer plays it but I know most of the DOS don't support this, it's only
[00:13:15] enabled live and Bitwig and Bitwig has this for years but it would be so nice to have
[00:13:22] all these harmonics that are not on a note in a note clip here realized with MPE data,
[00:13:31] but I know it's not easy to implement, I know that, I tried it for myself in pure data and
[00:13:37] it's not easy to do because it's not in the MIDI standard, it's basically MPE, it's a
[00:13:43] completely new thing.
[00:13:44] I think there's one note has basically one channel, one MIDI channel and then you have
[00:13:52] a pitch bend defined on this channel.
[00:13:55] So yeah, something like this but that's what I want to use it for sometimes, right?
[00:14:00] To have these atonal sounds then extract harmonics, get the notes from it with pitch bend for
[00:14:07] each note and then you can play with this and experiment and maybe create something
[00:14:15] microtonal or whatever.
[00:14:18] But I know it's not, you know, it's just probably 1% of use cases and it's very special narrow
[00:14:25] edge case so it's not really a bug or anything that I can be mad off, it's just, you know,
[00:14:32] it's probably not in the scope of the plugin.
[00:14:35] So anyway, so this is basically how I use it, oh yeah, that's one last thing.
[00:14:43] So these basically are the new features, we have the script overlay here, we have a preview,
[00:14:48] the zooming is new, quick grab is new and yeah, the preview is new.
[00:14:54] So this is basically what they did and also the sonogram looks better, I guess.
[00:15:01] I use it for in special cases, like I said, for different reasons and there's no other
[00:15:08] plugin that does this.
[00:15:09] Most of the other plugins, like I said, are automatic algorithm based and they give me
[00:15:13] a lot of crap.
[00:15:15] I know you can do it with Melodyne, but Melodyne is super expensive.
[00:15:20] You also have to export the way file imported into Melodyne or you have to rerecord it or
[00:15:27] something like this.
[00:15:29] I tested this or used this many years ago and it wasn't my thing actually.
[00:15:38] So this one here is pretty dope.
[00:15:39] I really like it, but my last big problem with this plugin is actually the price.
[00:15:45] In my opinion, it's still too expensive, it's 69 bucks and in my opinion, it should be half
[00:15:52] the price.
[00:15:54] But at the same time, like I said, there's nothing else on the market that kind of gives
[00:16:00] you this kind of workflow.
[00:16:02] It's very quick, it's very fast and it just works kind of and I use it all the time when
[00:16:10] I want to convert actually audio to media.
[00:16:14] So I guess the price is okay then, I don't know.
[00:16:19] Maybe you can grab it on a sale or I don't know if they have some kind of upgrades, pricing,
[00:16:25] if you already own noteGRABBER 2, NoteGrabber 1, I have no idea.
[00:16:30] So I put you the link in the description below, I showed you how I use it, I also showed you
[00:16:35] what it's new and how I use it and I think that's it for this video.
[00:16:42] Thanks for watching, leave a like if you liked the video, let me know what you think
[00:16:45] in the comments down below and I'll see you in the next video, bye.
[00:16:50] [BLANK_AUDIO]