Studio Pro: Note Extraction

Extracting notes from an audio event is as simple as right‑clicking it and selecting Extract Notes from the Audio menu. The detected notes will be placed onto a new instrument track, with an instance of Mai Tai loaded up and ready to play them.

We put Studio Pro’s new AI‑powered note extraction to the test.

For our first plunge into the freshly painted Fender Studio Pro 8, we’re going to swim around in the AI‑assisted note and drum extraction tool. It’s unclear exactly what role AI is taking in this process, but the results are impressive. For any chunk of melodic audio, Studio Pro can reliably detect and then extract note data. It will take the data and throw it up onto an instrument track for you to use as MIDI. It can do the same for a drum track, reliably identifying the individual drum sounds and extracting the hits as MIDI notes. The basic idea is that you can change the sound or instrument used in the piece of music while maintaining the original performance.

Some of this we’ve seen before with the Melodyne integration, but what Fender have done to wrap it up into a workflow of a couple of clicks is quite remarkable.

There are many ways this could be useful. I think the one that strikes me as fascinating is how it releases us from having to be tied to a MIDI controller keyboard or computer when inspiration strikes. I could sit down at an upright piano in a pub, or at my Grandma’s house, and record myself on my phone. It doesn’t have to be a piano. It could be a guitar, a flute, an organ, a kazoo or an elastic band; the instrument, as we’ll come to understand, is the least important aspect in all this. Drop that recording into Studio Pro, and you can extract the performance as MIDI and build a whole arrangement around it. But it also has a lot more uses than that in areas such as drum replacement, tonal adjustments, using your voice to write synth lines, or really enjoying a guitar loop and wishing it was played on a harmonica.

The process is really easy, and Studio Pro has retained Studio One’s workflow ethos of always offering more than one way to do a thing.

Taking...