I'm enjoying researching this.. [my music activities stopped abruptly in 2012 due to family priorities - most of my gear boxed up and gathering dust]

Sound on Sound review - extract:

"The last thing I tried, noticing that there was a wind/voice option in the source instrument list, was a microphone. I can confirm that it works — you sing notes into the mic and MIDI comes out of the Sonuus — and I can confirm also that I'm not a good enough singer to do useful work with it that way. It would always be quicker for me to play the lines on a guitar. Somebody who is a decent singer, but no kind of instrumentalist could, I think, do useful programming work with this, especially with the help of chromatic mode and a little editing. It requires a little care with the attack of your notes — avoiding potentially pitch-ambiguous consonants and plosives in favour of a clearly articulated "Aaahhh" for each note seemed to give the best results.

I noticed also that in the Sonuus users' forum, there is a sax player apparently getting good results doubling his instrument in a live context, so if it works there, with the potential problems of separation and spill, it should certainly be OK in the more controlled environment of a recording context. I wasn't able to summon up a friendly wind player in time to verify this personally, so try before you buy if you are interested in a Sonuus primarily for that facility."


Sonuus User Forum - extract:

"i2m with vocals??
Postby rdebs812 » Thu Feb 10, 2011 7:37 am

can this piece turn vocal ideas/harmonies into midis? like if i have a quick melody in my head that i would later like to find a synth for, would i be able to just plug a mic into it, sing and get the midi? and if not... could i achieve this if the vocals where pitch corrected first so that they are basically in true key? or is this piece just really not for any type of vocals at all? i would really appreciate any answers on this because i am very interested in this piece for specific purposes
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Re: i2m with vocals??
Postby james » Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:06 pm

Yes, it will work with vocals.

To capture exact notes, you can enable CHROMATIC mode so it will "snap" to the nearest note. If you want to lock to a musical scale you can now do this too (with our latest firmware update) so then you can never be out of tune! So no need to perform any pitch-correction beforehand.
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Re: i2m with vocals??
Postby JackNash » Fri Feb 10, 2012 1:30 am

I'm having trouble converting Vocals. My primary reason for purchasing was to use for converting vocal melodies to midi. I've tried it with guitar and there is a smooth conversion, but when I sing into a mic, I am getting pretty unusable midi information. There are a lot of extra notes and the melodies are unrecognizable when played back as a midi instrument. What is the best way to set up vocals? I have the software set up for vocals, ive tried legato on/off and ive tried Pitchbend/Chromatic and still haven't gotten results. Is there a way to have the midi information be as accurate with vocals as it is with guitar?

Thank you
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Re: i2m with vocals??
Postby james » Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:21 am

This happens because the voice isn't often as controllable as a guitar, so there is lots of extra (unintentional) pitched sounds going on: breaths, plosive sounds (p, b, etc).

The first thing to do is to ensure the sound source is good. Essentially, you want to sing only vowel sounds to ensure they have as pure a pitch content as possible.

Another thing that may help, assuming that these bad notes are quieter than the others, is to enable the "velocity filter". You can do this in the "mode" page of the i2M editor. Any notes falling below a MIDI velocity you set will be ignored. This can be used to clean up "glitches" in guitar, as well as other background noises such as string noise, breath noise etc.
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Re: i2m with vocals??
Postby soundog » Sat Mar 17, 2012 10:44 pm

Yes, there is a lot of variation in pitch in the typical singing voice, even if you are a practiced vocalist! If you are having problems and want to get good optimized audio-to-MIDI tracking with vocals, you can try putting a pitch correction device in front of the Sonuus, such as one of the TC Helicon hardware boxes (many of them do pitch correction). In fact, with many of these devices you set them up to send the pitch corrected audio to the Sonuus (thus getting accurate MIDI notes), separate from the uncorrected vocal audio. Also, you can dial in the amount of correction used so you retain some of the scoops and inflections if desired."



The impression I get from all this is that an experienced singer with a good command of technique and a decent dynamic microphone,
should be able to easily achieve reasonable and reliable results
converting real time vocal performance to USB midi conversion
within computer recording/notation software....???