One of the more difficult things for artists is composing, but what if you could let nature take control here and provide you with a melody? You can and here’s how.
I got this idea from Rafael Anton Irisarri in an interview he did where he said, “One little trick I love to do whenever I’m writing is to take a field recording and map the sounds’ transients to MIDI notes in Ableton Live and experiment with the naturally-occurring rhythmic patterns of a field recording, utilizing those as the rhythmic foundation.”
You can do this with any digital audio workstation (DAW).
The idea is to take a field recording, or any recording for that matter, and convert it to MIDI notes.
I use FL Studio, so I can show you how in FL Studio:
1. Find a field recording and open it in Edison.
2. Click the wrench icon.
3. Select “Convert to score and dump to piano roll.”
4. View your MIDI notes on the piano roll.
From here, you can export as MIDI or modify as needed. I recommend quantizing and adjusting before using it as I usually get some really strange sounding results at first. But with some manipulation, I can get workable melodies and sounds.
Rafael Anton Irisarri has other ideas as well and I highly-recommend you check out this incredible artist’s works and read about his ideas on ambient music.
The possibilities are plentiful and going out and getting field recordings and using them for both samples and for MIDI (like in this post) is a truly rewarding process.
