# ReMidi real time sketching based on the masters



## Rich4747 (Sep 8, 2020)

Real time orchestral sketching. ReMidi plus Scaler 2 driving The Orchestra Complete. Remidi is an Extremely powerful idea generator. I thought this deserved its own thread as many don't realize how powerful remidi can be for Orchestral sketching ideas and learning.


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## dflood (Sep 10, 2020)

Fascinating. Thanks for the walkthrough!


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## Frederick (Sep 10, 2020)

Rich4747 said:


> The Trinity of real time orchestral sketching. ReMidi plus Scaler 2 driving The Orchestra Complete. Remidi is an Extremely powerful idea generator based on the great masters. I thought this deserved its own thread as many don't realize how powerful remidi can be for Orchestral sketching.




Thank you very much for this walkthrough! ReMIDI was on my radar already, but I couldn't find anything on the forum the other day about that people were actually using this. (The Orchestra Complete 2 and Scaler 2 are in my toolbox also.)


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## Rich4747 (Sep 10, 2020)

Frederick said:


> Thank you very much for this walkthrough! ReMIDI was on my radar already, but I couldn't find anything on the forum the other day about that people were actually using this. (The Orchestra Complete 2 and Scaler 2 are in my toolbox also.)


I think many do not realize how powerful remidi is in an orchestral setting.


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## Rich4747 (Sep 14, 2020)

A fun video


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## ProfoundSilence (Sep 15, 2020)

Not really a fan of essentially "Remixing" the masters to "write" music. 

at risk of sounding like a purist, the "chords" the masters used aren't secret... it's the circle of fifths. 

no shortage of I ii V7 I, I V I, i N V i. Some aug6th chords thrown in - but all in all, if you use a typical tertian harmony book you can fairly easy use the same tonal language. 

There will always be people in this community trying to make the process of coming up with ideas easier, but I feel like this is leaving the grey area and entering the realm of "creative borrowing without giving credit". There is a reason they used music that is all public domain.

remidi might be interesting for a writing tool, but I'm fairly positive most people wont be using their own music in it.


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## Henu (Sep 15, 2020)

I'm fairly positive that all this is just basically "buy awesome midi chord packs" 2.0.


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## Mark Kouznetsov (Sep 15, 2020)

Not sure how I feel about that..? I was already on the fence about using loops (unless your own), but this seems like a next level of fast food composing


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## Rich4747 (Sep 15, 2020)

what ever it is, and thats debatable. its a lotta fun and a great learning tool imo. Its a tool that folks should know about and not dismiss it too quick. imo


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## Henu (Sep 15, 2020)

We don't. And that's why we're _studying_ it instead of trying to take shortcuts which teach us nothing in the end.


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## Saxer (Sep 15, 2020)

I take a lot of photos with my phone. And there are some editing features in my phone like "drama filter" or "portrait" presets. Some pictures look really great. It's a nice hobby. But I'm far from being a photographer.

It's the same with this kind of workflow. It's a nice way of getting "something" done. It can sound good and even professional. But the job is not getting "something" done. The job is writing for a target. Music for film. Arrangements for clients. For commercials. For a solo artist. A special mood. An expression. At least any reason for another piece of music.

Using those tools is the first step: a few minutes of good sounding music. Your client will say: Yeah, sounds good! Can you make it a little more "modern"? And we need more enhancement until the end. And something unique. It sounds a bit like my brother in law who has a kind of music software. You know what I mean. Something with a personal touch. And get rid of these repetitions. Tomorrow morning?


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## ProfoundSilence (Sep 16, 2020)

thats kinda how I feel, which is kinda weird because classical/baroque music is insanely formulaic... you follow the instructions and you can create convincing baroque music... the 40$ could be spent on a used text book and teach you the framework the music was written in.

That luxury doesn't exist for other genres!


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## SlHarder (Feb 19, 2021)

$19 at Plugin Boutique

https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/5935


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## MauroPantin (Feb 19, 2021)

This works okay and I'm sure it is great for fishing for material or auditioning for an initial idea or motif that you then develop. But I imagine this is probably much more useful to beat producers, not so much media composers. The way I see it, coming up with a decent motif is not really the bottleneck as far as media composition goes. I think Cthulhu had a similar feature with chords and voicings from the classical realm that was super popular among producers at one point.

Having said that, as an engraver and music preparator I have to say that I am not a fan of any of these tools, automatic orchestrators, whatever you want to call em. I understand the appeal. Orchestrating is a tough subject, it demands a lot of score study and time investment. But I dread the idea of (at some point down the line) getting a 2 track MIDI file with the melody and 3-4 notes per bar on another track and having to flesh out the (usually super busy) orchestrations and ostinatos to be able to even start working.


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## pondinthestream (Feb 19, 2021)

reminds me of a conference where someone played a bunch of state of the art AI composing version of "Mozart" (of course) and some real Mozart and asked which was which and everyone got it correct - and this was to an audience of mainly pop people who wouldn't have recognised the Mozart.

I am sure tho that it would be possible to play around with this, push the edges, and get something interesting maybe


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## KarlHeinz (Apr 19, 2021)

Maybe I could find some help here inside from someone knowing reMidi.

I think I miss something obvious but not the actual video about version 2 not the manual could help me with this and support seems to be none existent:

the case:

- I have a generated midi file from another app that is 32 bars long (or 16 or 124, dont matter, I tried with the 32 bars one)

- Now I loaded it into ReMidi and would have expected that there would be a way to have these 32 bars been split up in anyway automatically on DIFFERENT pads (so for example bars 1 to 4 on pad 1, bars 5 to 8 on pad2 and so on) but I just did not find any way to do this, not automatically and not by using the bank/size/shift whatever buttons, not with the edit mode on, not with edit mode off.....

- From the logic I would have expected maybe that it will split up in different banks but there is only bank 0

Any help would be really appreciated, in version 2 this is really a nice tool and I think its easy to use but without getting this basic starting problem solved it wont be of any use for me.......


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## Rich4747 (Apr 19, 2021)

try setting the slice-size to a small number like 2 or 4 and use the filter tab to filter out or in various tracks. I just tried to import some midi files and it seems to be working. also make sure to check that the vst that is playing the remidi is recieving the notes in the octave that it can play. if not transpose it. Yeah it would be great if remidi could make some videos with tips on how to best make custom midi to be used in the remidi engine.


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## KarlHeinz (Apr 19, 2021)

Thanks Rich, still dont get it. Here is a picture from ReMidi in my daw:





So depending of setting the slice I can get 1, 2 or up to I dont know bars into this pad 1 (blue).

But what I needed is to get lets say bars 1-4 into pad 1, bars 5-8 into pad 2, bars 9-12 into pad 3 and so on for all the (in this case) 32 bars of the imported track, so split the 32 bars onto 8 pads and that prefered automatically or in easy steps. I know there must be an easy answer for this, sigh......


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## gamma-ut (Apr 19, 2021)

Rich4747 said:


> Yeah it would be great if remidi could make some videos with tips on how to best make custom midi to be used in the remidi engine.


Why wouldn't you just bung some MIDI into the DAW's MIDI track and drive it from there. What is ReMidi providing. I tried ReMidi as a way of auditioning MIDI clips but just found it to be overly clunky vs simply dragging MIDI straight into a DAW.


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## Rich4747 (Apr 19, 2021)

KarlHeinz said:


> Thanks Rich, still dont get it. Here is a picture from ReMidi in my daw:
> 
> 
> 
> ...





KarlHeinz said:


> Thanks Rich, still dont get it. Here is a picture from ReMidi in my daw:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


You could divide the org file into 8 parts 1-8 and assign each to a pad. then set the slice size for each. each pad can be named for the slice it holds. would be a cool way to store and access 50 different ostinato patterns in one remidi preset


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## Rich4747 (Apr 19, 2021)

gamma-ut said:


> Why wouldn't you just bung some MIDI into the DAW's MIDI track and drive it from there. What is ReMidi providing. I tried ReMidi as a way of auditioning MIDI clips but just found it to be overly clunky vs simply dragging MIDI straight into a DAW.


its like a sampler for midi notes. you can load many clips and assign them to pads and name them. a tool to work faster after you set up some presets imo


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## KarlHeinz (Apr 19, 2021)

Rich4747 said:


> You could divide the org file into 8 parts 1-8 and assign each to a pad. then set the slice size for each. each pad can be named for the slice it holds. would be a cool way to store and access 50 different ostinato patterns in one remidi preset


Do you mean my original midi file with "the org file" ? So I have to do the splitting of the midi file OUTSIDE ReMidi ? Then I wonder what the "splice" function is for. I thought this function would do that for me, drop in a midi file with 32 bars and get it "sliced" into 4 x 8 or whatever slices and put on pads from 1 to 4 or whatever automatically. If this dont work it is definitely not the tool I am looking for in this case


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## Rich4747 (Apr 19, 2021)

KarlHeinz said:


> Do you mean my original midi file with "the org file" ? So I have to do the splitting of the midi file OUTSIDE ReMidi ? Then I wonder what the "splice" function is for. I thought this function would do that for me, drop in a midi file with 32 bars and get it "sliced" into 4 x 8 or whatever slices and put on pads from 1 to 4 or whatever automatically. If this dont work it is definitely not the tool I am looking for in this case


well it automatically will divide it and assign it to notes on your keyboard. but if you want complete control on every note maybe spit it up pre remidi. also you can shift the slices in time with the shift button. when you import a midi file it simply divides it across your keyboard keys at a slice size of your choosing. each slice can be shifted in time and transposed. so each pad in the remidi software holds a set of midi slices on your keyboard notes. and you can save entire sets of the remidi pads in a remidi preset.


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## KarlHeinz (Apr 19, 2021)

Rich4747 said:


> well it automatically will divide it and assign it to notes on your keyboard. but if you want complete control on every note maybe spit it up pre remidi. also you can shift the slices in time with the shift button. when you import a midi file it simply divides it across your keyboard keys at a slice size of your choosing. each slice can be shifted in time and transposed


Thanks, that: *"when you import a midi file it simply divides it across your keyboard keys at a slice size of your choosing" *was the missing information link I did not get  . So it is not automatically assigned to the pads but to midi keys. Still it would make sense to me if it would be assigned to the pads with the associated key too so when you click on the pad you have the midi part assigned to the key of the pad shown in the note view, but I will see if I can work with this, thanks again for your explanations


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## Rich4747 (Apr 19, 2021)

KarlHeinz said:


> Thanks, that: *"when you import a midi file it simply divides it across your keyboard keys at a slice size of your choosing" *was the missing information link I did not get  . So it is not automatically assigned to the pads but to midi keys. Still it would make sense to me if it would be assigned to the pads with the associated key too so when you click on the pad you have the midi part assigned to the key of the pad shown in the note view, but I will see if I can work with this, thanks again for your explanations


your welcome, once one gets the concept its a real cool tool. and yes I agree the pad thing could be explained better. I have made more videos on remidi 2. I hope they help someone as I paid for my copy and dont work for songwish, I just hope to help someone understand how it works. Pads can be assigned a keyswitch i believe.


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