➲  Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:34:41 +0200; Tags: [hack_of_the_day; linux-audio].

I always thought it required a lot of signal processing black magic and many hours spent setting up mysterious knobs to get the conversion of any piece of sound to an acceptable stream of MIDI events.

Well … I guess I was right … but, if we relax the constraint on the meaning of ‘acceptable’, we can maybe work something useful out.

Actually, we can quite easily use a guitar to ‘take notes’ of some piece of melody. Indeed, I just discovered Rakarrack which has an extremely simple Guitar-to-MIDI converter. From there, the steps are easy (all software used here is in Debian and Ubuntu's APT):

• connect your guitar to Rakarrack (for example using QJackCtl in the figure img:audio_connections);
• connect Rakarrack's MIDI output to a MIDI recorder (I used Rosegarden), c.f. the figure img:midi_connections;
• push Rakarrack's settings to eleven as in the figure img:rakarrack_midi;
• press record in Rosegarden and try to play.

One can only play a single note at a time, strictly, and the audio-to-MIDI conversion adds a lot of random delay. But after a few attempts, it is possible to take notes. Maybe the reader can recognise a piece of the most famous Norwegian melody in the figure img:rosegarden.

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