Snap to GRID
Nov 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Doug Eisengrein
The MIDI sequencer was one of the coolest things ever developed for music. Using one of these contraptions in conjunction with a MIDI sound module, musicians could write music either on digital staff paper or on a grid corresponding to measures and a piano keyboard, not to mention endlessly edit individual note lengths, dynamics and pitch. There were some limitations, but on the whole, this was a giant leap forward for all musicians.
Almost as hip as MIDI sequencers was the idea of digital audio time stretching and pitch correction. Early programs such as Sonic Foundry (now Sony) Acid and Propellerhead ReCycle allowed users to explore whole new universes of ultrafast audio-file tempo altering and matching with or without affecting pitch. But unlike MIDI, this action — changing tempo without affecting pitch — didn't necessarily work well in the other direction. And ideas of altering individual note dynamics, length and pitch on the fly were yet a dream — that is, until Celemony's Melodyne showed up on the scene in 2000. Although far lesser known than programs such as Acid, this ambidextrous, easy-to-use software deserves to be a household name for what it can do with digital audio files. In essence, Melodyne (in the words of the company) “understands” digital audio files. It provides control of audio-file tempo and pitch entirely independent of one another.
What makes Melodyne different from traditional loop programs is that, like ReCycle, it can find transient attacks and align audio on a horizontal grid according to time (tempo) and it allows you to edit the individual parts. But unlike ReCycle (or any other program), it also arranges the individual notes vertically, as if on staff paper, guided by transients and pitch. The program finds and displays an audio file's key and shows the notes as they are — flat, in key or sharp — and provides drag-and-drop control of each note, allowing you to do simple things, like correcting a single flat note, as well as broad edits, such as perfectly shifting an entire file's key. Users can replace individual slices in an audio file through cut and paste and, as with Acid or Ableton Live, perform radical tempo shifts. In addition, Melodyne can analyze the groove of any audio file and, using it as a template, shift other files to match that groove. In short, Melodyne is a killer tool to fine-tune or creatively work with any note-based digital audio material, especially vocals.
PERFECT PITCH
Melodyne divides the bulk of its duties between two spaces: the Arrange and the Editor windows. The Arrange window displays tracks in horizontal rows just like most DAWs, but the different notes are displayed higher and lower in the track, roughly identifying their individual pitch. By double-clicking anywhere on an audio file, the Editor window opens and displays the audio along a large note-labeled (C2, C#2 and so on) keyboard, similar to a MIDI sequencer. The notes are completely elastic — just as if they were MIDI, you can do just about anything you want. For example, if certain notes in a vocal take are slightly (or very) flat or sharp, you can select them individually and drag them up or down freely on the scale. If you need the notes to be absolutely in tune, you can choose Note Snap from a drop-down menu and simply double-click on offending notes to snap them to the nearest respective notes. You can perform this on single notes or entire audio files. If you select all notes in a particular vocal take, transposing them properly and snapping them into another key is simple. By selecting the Edit Pitch tool and choosing Scale Snap from the drop-down menu, the keyboard on the left side shows a list of available keys and highlights the selected file's current key. By clicking on any other key, Melodyne will approximate the best place for each note and place them. Once you place a vocal into another key, you can then individually edit each note to make it more harmonically pleasing.
A separate window labeled Tone Scale includes all of the main scales that you're likely to need, including Major; Natural, Harmonic and Melodic Minor; Ionian; and a slew of exotic others, such as Hungarian Minor, Arabian, Hindu, Japanese and more. This, of course, is a great way to match up different loops and audio files in different keys and transpose them to wherever you please. If, instead, you choose Scale Snap and drag an audio file up or down (instead of choosing a key), Melodyne will identify the nearest in-key notes to maintain the already-chosen key. Best of all, if you do this while holding down the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key, you will instead create a clone of the original audio, which Melodyne will automatically place on a new audio track directly below the original. This is how harmonies are created, and the resulting sound quality is excellent. Melodyne is even smart enough to place the new copy slightly offset from the original to make harmonies more realistic-sounding and to avoid phasing issues. All of this is done nondestructively to original recordings.
IT SLICES, IT DICES
Editing your vocal volumes is also a snap with Melodyne. The Edit Amplitude tool, found in the Editor window, is used for that very purpose. Altering a selection's volume is as simple as dragging up or down with the tool on the section you wish to change or manually typing in a positive or negative decibel value into a corresponding text field. But say you want to emphasize the initial attack of a note in the beginning of a phrase without raising the volume of the entire note. Melodyne provides another tool, Note Separation, that allows you to add slice points anywhere on an audio file, just like in ReCycle. In this way, you can select just the section that you want to emphasize by adding one slice near the beginning of the note and then boosting the attack using the Edit Amplitude tool. The Amplitude Transition tool allows you to smooth over or emphasize the abruptness of your volume changes.
Adding slice points to audio files, especially vocals, has other advantages. Similar to Ableton Live's Warp Markers, each slice point acts as a handle that you can pull in either direction, meaning that audio files are like rubber. For instance, say you want to expand a note so that it bridges more to the following note. Stretching the note is a simple matter of a click-and-drag. To keep things in time with the tempo, Melodyne provides a snap-to function with a range of one bar to a 64th note; you can, of course, set it to None, as well. You can add as many slices as you like, and you can freely move them around before stretching the audio, providing perfect precision. So, for example, if a vocalist sings the word satisfaction, you can morph it to sound like satissssfaction, satisfaaaaction or any infinite number of other possibilities. In addition to its venerable pitch- and time-altering capabilities, Melodyne also offers formant control. You can infinitely raise or lower an audio file's various formants, and just like the Amplitude Transition tool, the Formant Transition tool allows you to subtly alter the smoothness of formant shifts from smooth to sharp. With this tool, the sonic surgery can end and face-lifts begin. If used heavily on vocals, formant transitions can create everything from monster sounds to chipmunk voices.
MIDI MEETS ITS MATCH
One of the most unique and amazing functions in Melodyne is the ability to play and rearrange notes in an audio file with a MIDI controller. In other words, if you have a vocal take loaded on a track and a MIDI keyboard, you can replay the take as if it were a MIDI module or a soft synth. With MIDI set to Edit Notes, you can play in time with a vocal recording and move the notes to the keys pressed. If the sequencer is engaged, the changes happen in real time. If the sequencer is stopped, as each key is played on your keyboard, Melodyne jumps from note to note, allowing you to record a new melody in step-sequence style. In Play mode, you can, for instance, press and hold a single key to move the entire vocal phrase to a single note to create a blank slate. Then, rearranging the vocals note by note on the keyboard can be an experimental affair. Or if you're more of a player than a traditional songwriter and arranger, play a few takes freely on top with the sequencer engaged, and watch as the notes magically snap into place.
Best of all, you can not only translate MIDI to audio but also go in the other direction. In other words, if you want to match an accompaniment to a vocal track, for example, you can send the vocal track's notes out via MIDI to be played by an external sound module. Or you can call up a VST instrument right inside Melodyne and route the notes to your soft synth of choice. You can send any audio track to any MIDI channel (1 through 16) of any available MIDI interface or VSTi, and, of course, you can work with copies of tracks. So if you wish to accent only certain vocal notes or phrases, simply create a copy of the vocal track and delete the notes you don't want to accent.
POWER TO THE PROGRAM
When it comes to mixdown time, Melodyne offers a bevy of options. You can bounce an entire arrangement to a stereo file at any standard resolution, but right from within the Export prompt, you can also turn individual tracks on and off or save them all as individual files. Melodyne neatly tucks the files, all edits intact, inside a folder of your chosen name. So if you generally work in Digidesign Pro Tools, for example, and you just want to bring in a couple of vocal cuts to fix a few sour notes, it's easy to save copies of your files and return to Pro Tools for the final mix. Melodyne's mixer is robust enough, however, to perform complete mixdowns, and the program supports Audio Units and VST plug-ins.
Whether you just want to perform minor pitch-correcting operations on your vocals or you want to go musically buck wild, Melodyne has the goods. If you don't already know about this swift multitrack recording, editing and sequencing tool, this article has hopefully helped shed some light. For more information, check out Melodyne on the Web at www.celemony.com.
PIANO ROLL
Here, you can see an original vocal take in Melodyne's Editor on the left. The maroon-colored sections are the notes, and the blue boxes behind them are where the notes should actually sit according to Melodyne's Scale Snap function. By selecting all notes and double-clicking on one of them, all notes snap perfectly in tune and in key, as seen in the right-side panel. In the same way, individual notes of an audio file can be selected and snapped or manually moved to other notes, guided by the piano-style keyboard on the left of the window.
BACKUP SINGERS
Creating vocal harmonies is a snap in Melodyne. Simply select the notes that you want to harmonize in the Editor window; then, using the Edit Pitch tool, Shift- or Alt-drag them to where you want. The Editor conveniently displays both audio files while a new track for the clone is automatically created in the Arrange window. In this screen, an entire vocal is brought down a fifth (the clone is a darker shade of maroon) with the Scale Snap function engaged. Notice the change in the first two notes from the original to the clone; Melodyne keeps everything in the proper key automatically. Also notice the last note displayed: The higher note (A) is time-stretched independent of its harmonic clone.
THE REAL VIEW
Here, you see Melodyne's Arrange window. Unlike work spaces in other DAWs, it displays audio files with their melodic content intact, including drums. In this screen, track 1 is a combined drum-machine track, track 2 is a vocal, and track 3 is a bass line. Because the notes of tracks 2 and 3 are more distinct, they are displayed with more separation. A simple double-click on any waveform section opens the Editor window, where distinct timing and pitch changes, among other useful edits, can be made. In this screen, timing is separated into quarter notes, as defined by the aqua-blue lines. Users can customize this to display down to 64th notes.
VOCAL TO MIDI
Here is Melodyne's Arrange window with a VST instrument (in this case, Native Instruments Reaktor) called up. In this example, track 2 (the vocal) is sending its audio note values as MIDI to Reaktor to create a vocal accompaniment. The Send Midi checkbox allows users to toggle on and off the notes sent. The VSTi sits on its own track in the Mixer window, where volume, pan, aux send, and VST and AU effects can be used. From the Arrange window, you can create some interesting tonal effects with the Use Pitch Bend and Use Envelope functions. Each audio track can send on a different MIDI channel to any virtual instrument or MIDI channel available.
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