So anyone who's been watching my bumbling and bungling this morning knows I'm screwing around with Melodyne for the first time in X3. Most of my elaborate plans and schemes are being undermined in one way or another but that's okay because I just wanted to test it out to see what it can and cannot do.
 
A few of my schemes revolved around using the resulting MIDI output from my bass tracks using Melodyne. It's a very busy bass track so the results are kind of bleh and will require significant editing in PRV to correct but I just tested out one of my wacky schemes and I'm quite literally kersnortling at the results.
 
I've had this idea of beefing up my live performance bass tracks to get some gut rattling bottom end without sacrificing the punch of the original tracks. Zeta has some nice, non intrusive bass presets that I think will work nicely. However that also got me thinking about using some of the crazier patches to add some sheer mayhem.
 
Well I'm currently browsing patches in Zeta using the clip I MIDIfied from my bass and it's absolutely twisted and hilarious. I can see this being a nutsoid effect/tool in the future but I'm just having a LOT of fun screwing around with the patches, settings and transpose function in Zeta.
 
Totes recommend. ;-)
 
Edit: After getting my larfs off and getting on task I'm finding the Classic Content > Bass 2 > Standard Bass patch is working well as a decent bass reinforcement for my live tracking. This is a very preliminary finding though.

I have been having fun doing something similar with guitar tracks. I play a rhythm or lead, covert to midi, and then just cycle through presets of a synth. GREAT stuff can come out of this! :)

smallstonefan
I have been having fun doing something similar with guitar tracks. I play a rhythm or lead, covert to midi, and then just cycle through presets of a synth. GREAT stuff can come out of this! :)

Have you upgraded to Editor or found a way to work with rhythm/chords in Essential? 

I did upgrade to Editor. However, to be honest, I am doing this more in Ableton Live at the moment as the clip format there is more natural to how I create parts. It worked great in Sonar after I purchased Editor though!

I do this all the time with guitar. Usually the MIDI that Melodyne generates is way off and needs a lot of tweaking (this is the polyphonic version). But in the process of tweaking it I often end up turning it into something completely different, that I would never have come up with otherwise.

sharke
I do this all the time with guitar. Usually the MIDI that Melodyne generates is way off and needs a lot of tweaking (this is the polyphonic version). But in the process of tweaking it I often end up turning it into something completely different, that I would never have come up with otherwise.

Just trying to correct all the missed/doubled/off pitch notes right now. It's mostly kind of close but this is a LOT of work. I think it'll be worth it. First pass I'm just trying to get all the notes tight/correct with the live bass part as it is then I think I'm going to try doing a "perfect time" version of it to use as a reference for any other timing correction I may do with AS or whatever. I don't want to suck the "live human" out of the track and I normally would even really bother but I figure these are useful skills and I'm working on my PRV/Smart Tool chops in the process.
 
I was kind of intending to just finish off this song quickly but now I'm getting sucked into trying out all the crazy stuff in X3 I've been meaning to get around to. I started this song right after installing X3 last winter as an educational experiment and to test out all the new goodies but got waylayed into writing theory crap (which I need to get back to) but I guess this is a nice, educational break from non stop guitar geekery.

I think it helps to turn the tone knob on your guitar way down, the theory being that you're cutting out some of the overtones that confuse Melodyne. And it's important to remember that you have to play "for Melodyne," i.e. avoid things like slides, make sure not to bend notes, play everything cleanly, damp any open strings that wouldn't normally worry you but which Melodyne hears etc. I have a problem playing fingerstyle chords with the polyphonic version whereby I arpeggiate the notes a little instead of playing them all together. I really have to think about what I'm doing when playing for Melodyne, so that the raw material is as clean as possible.
 
On a related note, if you're interested in adding more expression to your MIDI parts and like me you're not much of a keyboard player, try just banging out the rhythm and feel you want on the keyboard with one or more fingers, ignoring which notes you're playing. You can then drag the resulting MIDI notes into the correct pitches while using the SHIFT key modifier to preserve the timing. It works great with both chords and single note runs. Sometimes I will bang out a rhythm without even having any pitches in mind, then I decide on the pitches in the piano roll. It's another creativity trick which results in things you never would have come up with playing "conventionally."

I have had fun feeding Z3TA+2 MIDI from other things, and this can be rather interesting. As sharke mentioned above, the biggest downside (to me) of the Audio->MIDI conversion is that it does not capture bend information, so much of that gets lost (or errantly assigned) during the conversion, making for a lot of editing to recover the intent sometimes. Supposedly Melodyne Studio does this (never used myself), but that is cost prohibitive for one feature to me.
 
The audio->MIDI possibilities have great potential, and a comment about the 2nd Generation You Rock" guitar was mentioned in a thread a while back. One of these days I may actually give one of them a go to see how well they really do (there are other options available as well out there, not just that though). Being able to use a guitar string versus a pitch/bend wheel has a lot of merits (if captured accurately).