I work purely in Logic Pro 11 so all plugins I use must be compatible. The grand project I’m hoping to undertake is to take the many tunes I wrote from the 90s onwards and start producing them. These tunes are progressive rock pieces that I just quickly recorded as audio scratch tracks.
The first thing I’d do is split the vocals and guitars into separate stems using Logic Pro. Then I’d like to detect the key, scale and chords and timing information. I’d like to output the data from the detection process right into the Logic Pro chord track. Can this be done? Can it also transcribe detected notes to MIDI regions?
From this point on I’d like to start arranging and harmonizing further and Scaler 3 should be a good fit for that task. So at this point, before I purchase Scaler 3 I need to confirm that it will first and foremost be a good detection, analysis and scribe tool.
Please confirm and point me to a video showing the process if possible.
It will do some of what you want but not all of it.
Scaler will detect the chords from audio. It’s surprisingly good at this but not perfect, depending upon the source material. Once it has the chords it will offer you a whole bunch of matching or partially matching scales and give you the other chords in any of those scales. What it will not do is capture the timing of the chords. You’d have to recreate that manually, either on the Arrange page or in Logic. It will also not convert audio notes into midi tracks/clips. You’d need something like Melodyne for that.
There are also a whole bunch of online AI things that claim to unmix audio and make MIDI files but I’ve never tried any of them. They usually offer you a snippet for free then want to charge you a subscription fee. I guess if you find a good one it might be worth subscribing for a year and feeding all your tunes to it to get a starting point for your grand project.
Whatever method you settle on, be prepared to be underwhelmed by the initial results! Turning mixed audio into individual MIDI tracks is going to involve a lot of manual editing.
So, in summary, Scaler is good at detection and analysis but not so good as a scribe tool. It’s also top notch as a composition tool - it will take you chord progressions to places you would not have thought of.
@boingy You said “What it will not do is capture the timing of the chords. You’d have to recreate that manually, either on the Arrange page or in Logic”.
Do you mean it only returns a string of chords that are not at all aligned to positions in the source audio file? If so that defeats the very reason for the detection in the first place!
Does the detection not detect chords and then record them into another track if you set it up that way? That is what I read it would do elsewhere.
It doesn’t record them into a track. It just places each recognised chord on the top bar (section A) ready for you to drag into the main sequence. Each one you drag will be the same length (defined in settings) and you have to manual change the length of each if you want it to be different. So not what you were hoping for.
Suggestion: Notegrabber 2 from Navie D. in conjunction with Scaler could be the solution you are looking for. Notegrabber 2 has a 14 day trial as well. Notegrabber gives you full control to creatie MIDI from your audio, it can be placed as an effect on any audio-channel in Logic