wax&wires

Melodyne Direct Note Access

I just posted about the Beatles’ chord getting decoded, and here’s the software behind the process. A lot of this news is a bit old, but I’m taking these first few days of the site launch to catch you all up on stories I’ve been sitting on for the past year or so.

There are some interesting videos up on the Celemony site about Melodyne DNA.

I would agree that this does open up a lot of doors for creative uses in post-production, however I don’t see myself purchasing it any time soon.

The primary use of previous versions of Melodyne has been pitch correction, time editing, and formant shifting. The “norm” for these functions would have to be Antares Auto-Tune for pitch correction, and your host app (ProTools, Sonar, Logic, Cubase, etc) for time editing. Formant shifting was usually done in a tortuous way through EQ. Melodyne has always been stellar for integrating all of these related functions into one user-friendly interface.

I heard a lot of people expressing excitement that this may be the solution to removing particular instruments from completed mixes. I don’t really see it as such. Peter Neubacker himself said that this was not the intention or purpose behind the software, so if you’re looking for the latest and greatest way to turn your favorite songs into karaoke mixes, you’ll likely be phase inverting for a while yet.

What DNA offers that previous versions of Melodyne do not is a way to correct and essentially “Auto-Tune” polyphonic instruments. In the past, if a particular note from a monophonic instrument (a vocalist, trumpet, bass guitar, clarinet, etc) was out, you could throw on the trusty Antares and (for a small sacrifice in tone) have yourself a pitch-perfect “performance”. If you ever played a guitar chord with an out of tune note though, you were sorely out of luck, as AutoTune could only identify one pitch and thus would not be able to locate and re-pitch a full chord, let alone a single note within the chord. DNA solves that by breaking down the chord into individual notes, and letting you edit each note separately.

What I love about Melodyne is it’s GUI. The layout and functionality is extremely intuitive as a graphical pitch/time editor. The Graphical mode in Antares has always been extremely tedious to handle, and the Auto mode was never precise enough to nail the notes you want without over-correcting the notes you wanted left alone. Melodyne wins that battle, though the “plug-in” work-around through rewire in Melodyne is not nearly as convenient as that of Antares. The formant shifting is pretty awesome too, as a way to get new creative sounds, natural sounding or otherwise.

In the end, I’m a fan of technology and what it offers. However, if I botch a chord, I still think it would be better to re-track it than run through any amount of processing to repair it. I would end up burning more time trying to correct it in the computer than if I were just to play it again and get it right. Don’t get me wrong, the best recording is the one without wrong notes and out-of-tune instruments. So if you have no other options to correct a pitch, you have my blessing to hack away! My main argument would be that good recordings start with the source, so if at all possible, just play it right; then you don’t have to worry about all of this “fix it” stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 12:07 am. It is filed under wires and tagged with autotune, direct note access, melodyne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.