MIDI export: differences based on instruments

Hi everybody,

just bought a license and I’m doing some experiments going from Hookpad to Garageband :slight_smile: Doing a really basic experiment — harmony + Lead 1, both should be guitars — I found a thing that I don’t properly understand.

If I set Harmony on Guitars / Rock / Rock 3 the MIDI exports single notes with a properly set rhythm. No chords. If I switch Harmony to Piano, MIDI exports chords. Obviously I don’t have the rhythm of Rock 3 guitars. Is there a way to have a MIDI export with Rock 3 rhythm for Harmony and chords too, not only single notes? This would really help to make some quick experiments going back and forth between Hookpad and Garageband.

P.S. I’ve already bumped into the same question published some years ago, but no answer. This is why I’m asking :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Hi, and thank you for your question! Let me try to shed some light onto how our MIDI exports work.

When exporting to MIDI you have two options:

  1. “Piano only” exports just a bass and a chord track without any rhythms, and of course one melody track for each melody voice you have used in Hookpad. This is useful if you just want to get the melody and the chords into your DAW.
  2. “All bands” exports all instruments you have in your project’s band with the rhythms you can hear them playing in Hookpad. So if you want to have the rhythm of the Rock Guitar and full chords as well, I would suggest you to add a second harmony instrument and use the first patch where it says “Full Chords”. This will export both the Rock rhythms and the Piano chords into your MIDI file.

    The Rock Guitar is a special case. It won’t export chords right now as each power chord you can hear has already been recorded as a sample and this sample is triggered by just one note in Hookpad’s playback engine. I wanted to write a function that translates these single notes back to power chords when exporting the guitar instruments, but I didn’t have the time to do this yet.

Please let me know if this helped!
Dennis

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for your quick reply. Super helpful. I now know how Rock Guitars and Hookpad’s playback engine work together. It totally makes sense. Having single notes translated back to power chords when exporting to MIDI would be really… :boom: powerful, you know, but I totally understand the time thing :sweat_smile: Splitting myself literally in two for years so far, between freelancing as a brand designer and caregiving for my son. I stopped playing music a long time ago but now I would like to have some fun with Hookpad, so I think I’ll ask for 36-hour days. Let me know if I should ask for you too :rofl: :rofl:

Have a nice day!

Haha, for a start we could move to Mars, there we would have an extra 37 minutes each day.

Better than nothing :slight_smile: