MIDI Recorded Doubled...I'm toast

[spicyitaliano]

Hey fellas,

Well, I finally got my last MIDI situation taken care of. Thanks to everyone who helped. Let me go ahead and say that when you're presented with a job to record MIDI live, be prepared for the worst. The album we're releasing is using a different patch for the live mixed version. The MIDI tracked without a hitch, easy to setup, and so long soundchecks to get it just right on stage. Oh how could this go wrong?

So I get back to the studio, load of the tracks into PT, and I find that the MIDI track has been recorded doubled. I don't just mean it's playing back doubled. You can actually see the notes doubled, one following each hit just a few milliseconds later. The entire show ended up like this, and I can see it all the way throughout.

Simply put, I'm toast. I could manually delete each note, one at a time, but it could take forever and may just be a waste of time. Is there any method of MIDI manipulation in PT that would allow me to cancel out these doubled notes?

Any ideas??

I'm a gonner...

[saz]

set the MIDI LOCAL OFF when the external sequencer or computer MIDI ECHO BACK is ON.

Ciao

[spicyitaliano]

Thanks for the quick reply. I don't think you understood what my problem is. I know what you're thinking, but I made it as obvious as pissoble -- it's actually recorded doubled. I also said that I am positiive it's not simply a doubled playback problem, which is an easy fix -- and you described just fine. I'm not MIDI impaired, this is not that kind of problem!

Like the title said, the MIDI was actually RECORDED doubled. I can zoom in and see the individual hits, with one following it just a few milliseconds behind it. Again, I can look at the midi notes, and there is another midi note following each one. On the screen. Right there. Two hits. Not a playback issue. Again, right there. Two hits. See what I'm saying?

Arrrgh! I'm asking if there is anyway you can simply drop all of the little notes that follow. Thats all.

[web01169]

i may not be the smartest person in the world...but when you say MIDI recorded double....do you mean MIDI note-on info recorded double or did you record MIDI to audio.....if so...you're toast...but if you are playing MIDI instruments live from a sequence then you're going to be fine....just go to your MIDI editor and remove the second or undesired hit....or you may have a MIDI reverb effect going on and you may need to cut that fx

[Jim Wintringham]

I think web01169 may have some good ideas. How about experimenting...record a 'dry' sample, no effects...and see how it comes out. Along the same lines...try different tones (sound samples). Disconnect the 'midi in' cable to your keyboard just in case there is something reacting,that you have missed. Check the 'touch sensitivity' of the keyboard...try disabling that feature, as many keyboards have 2 connecting points to judge the force of your playing, that might be read by PT as a second note.
Best Reguards....I hope you find your problem :)

[MrKeysAOO]

I think that we're kinda missing the point here....spicy, I know exactly what you mean: you probably recorded with an echo on somwhere and now you have a literal duplicate of every midi command (I've done that, it sucks). Because each duplicate occurs a couple milliseconds behind, you might be able to quantize everything---you'll still have duplicates, but they will occur at the same time and thus won't be out of phase. Along the same lines: I don't know what sequencer you are using but you might be able to use some sort of midi interpolation filter in a similar way as quantizing (remove all notes that don't occur on the specified beat grid). Sorry I can't be more directly helpful, this is definately an unfortunate problem. Best of luck though!

[xstatic]

I know that Cubase SX has a command that removes doubles. Hopefully Pro Tools LE does as well. Quantizing is a good idea, but may not work. Unless the band was playing to a click track, quantizing may change intricate timings. If you do quantize, do so at a very detailed timing.

[spicyitaliano]

Thanks MrKeys and xstatic. You guys nailed it. I literally have once note following the next, which I can see the actual MIDI notes, one played just a few milliseconds after it. I'm working in ProTools and I have about an hour of MIDI data -- and with a really complex keyboardist. So there's probably about 50,000 hits. There's no way in hell I'm going to manually remove each one.

Does ProTools have a function that can remove doubles?

I tried quantizing the entire performance. It worked to a degree, but with all of the patches, it still caused phasing issues. And there was no click, so I couldn't really quantize to a grid.

Is there any hope?

[spicyitaliano]

Got it worked out. I got a hold of the keyboardist and we re-recorded it with a different controller. Worked out great.

Unfortunately, I have new MIDI problems. See my next post "MIDI problems again -- whats the deal now?"

Thanks guys.