Celemony Melodyne Studio 4 v4.2.3.001 WIN
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Melodyne lets you work with audio in an entirely new way. One that is musical, nifty, crystal-clear and almost magical. Working with Melodyne is like being able to say to a singer “hold this note a bit longer” or to a pianist “give slightly less weight to the third in this chord” – hours, weeks, even years after the recording session.
The fantastic editing possibilities, the outstanding sound quality and the intuitive and musical operation make Melodyne an incomparable tool without which it would be hard to imagine modern music production.
Notes are displayed in Melodyne in the form of “blobs” – the precise path traced by the pitch is indicated by the wavy line. With Melodyne’s tools, you can edit the notes directly and modify all important musical parameters. Just grab the notes, and you’ll find you can adjust their pitch, vibrato, volume, timing and much else besides in a highly intuitive manner.
Melodyne identifies the notes and the relationships between them. It is only as a result of this knowledge that Melodyne’s algorithms are able to “think” and operate in such a musical way. The benefits to you as a musician and producer include the famously superior sound of Melodyne and many other advantages that software lacking this understanding of musical contexts is incapable of offering.
What can Melodyne do?
Melodyne offers you algorithms for every type of audio: vocals, instruments, percussive sounds, noise, entire mixes. The algorithm determines how the audio material will be interpreted and displayed.
The Melodic and Polyphonic algorithms offer you, in the case of vocals as well as both mono- and polyphonic instruments, full access to the notes of which the sound is composed as well as to their musical parameters.
The Percussive algorithm offers you a time-sliced display suitable for drum loops, percussion instruments and noise-like, unpitched material. The time slices are edited in a very similar manner to the notes.
The Universal algorithm is ideal for time-stretching or transposing entire mixes or polyphonic instrument tracks in cases where no access to the individual notes is required. It is very sparing in its use of resources and it, too, slices up the material along the time axis.
Melodyne’s algorithms a
llow you to make anything from the subtlest to the most far-reaching enhancements to your audio material, whatever its nature, the resulting sound quality being optimal in every case.
Editing pitch
Melodyne distinguishes between three different types of pitch parameter for each note: the pitch center, the pitch modulation (or ‘vibrato’) and the pitch drift.
The fact that you can shift notes that are slightly out of tune to (or towards) the correct pitch, as well as – quite independently – controlling the amount of vibrato and pitch drift they exhibit, means that the sound remains natural at all times, with no tell-tale signs of having been edited. You can make very precise, targeted interventions by hand or, if you prefer, take advantage of intelligent macros to make sweeping changes swiftly and easily.
You can move notes continuously in pitch or else up and down the chromatic (or some other) scale. In this way, you can alter melodies and chords in an intuitive way and also copy parts with a view to doubling them at the unison or octave or creating counter-melodies, backing vocals or entire choral arrangements.
When you change the pitch of connected notes, the transitions between them are preserved. As a result, performances continue to sound authentic and credible – even though no trace of their original melodies may remain.
Scales and tunings
Melodyne allows you to work with whatever scales and tunings you like, including exotic or experimental ones.
Unusual scale structures and irregular tuning are often important musical parameters that should on no account be ironed out in some clumsy, clueless fashion. For this reason, Melodyne supports every conceivable scale or tuning system, allowing you to handle the nuances of each musical genre with sensitivity. You can also define and edit scales and tuning systems, as well as analyze those found in existing audio material.
And whether you’re working with orchestral, choral or synthesizer recordings, you’ll find just intonation lends chords greater transparency and penetration. With Melodyne’s Dynamic Just Intonation, you can give your productions the benefit of this unique acoustic impression.
Editing timing
Each note can be moved forwards or backwards in time, lengthened or shortened, or quantized using the grid of your choice. Detailed editing is even possible of the timing within each note.
With the Timing Tools, you can correct specific errors, enhance phrasing and shape the envelope and transients of notes. The Quantize Time macro affords a particularly flexible and user-friendly means of tightening up performances giving them a different feel.
Time stretching in Melodyne is note-based and dynamic: Transients, consonants and sibilants are not stretched or squeezed to the same extent as the parts coincident with vowels that generally convey their pitch. This means you can make even extreme changes in the timing of notes without their transients becoming corrupted or their envelopes assuming unnatural forms.
Editing tempo
Melodyne comes with powerful algorithms for the detection and editing of tempo. Taken together with the timing tools and macros, these offer you complete control over all temporal aspects of your recordings.
The quantization of notes, and use of the time grid when moving notes, only make sense when the grid reflects the true tempo of the performance – including any fluctuations therein. Thanks to the accuracy of Melodyne’s tempo detection, this is invariably the case. It follows the exact tempo of a live recording, with all its human fluctuations – the click is dictated to by the musicians, not the other way round – yet you still enjoy all the practical benefits of a beat-based grid when working in your DAW.
Further functions allow you to transfer the living, breathing tempo of a live recording to rigid loops and even other live recordings, as Melodyne’s ability to create precise tempo maps of each performance allows you to bring them perfectly into sync. You can undertake tempo changes without ironing out the small fluctuations that reflect the vitality of a live performance. And naturally, you can tighten up sloppy timing, too, wherever necessary as well as speed up or slow down the tempo – even to a dramatic extent – for creative purposes.
Editing amplitude
You can make notes louder or quieter simply by dragging with the Amplitude Tool. Double-clicking on notes with this tool successively mutes and unmutes them.
The ability to fine-adjust amplitude on a note-by-note basis is not only convenient but makes an important musical contribution: through targeted intervention, unwanted fluctuations in volume can be corrected easily and the dynamic expression of a performance enhanced or optimized. You can even tweak the volume of individual notes within a chord.
When mixing, too, the ability to fine-adjust amplitude using Melodyne is an invaluable aid: you can rein in the volume of sibilants, consonants and breath noise by intervening directly in the audio material, which means you can make more sparing use of any compressor following in the signal chain.
Shape the sound
The Sound Editor and Formant Tool provide unique ways of optimizing the timbre and achieving spectacular tone colors and effects.
Unlike a conventional sound processor, Melodyne knows the notes on each track and allows far more penetrating access to their sound – direct access, in fact, to their overtone structure. In this way, you can change the timbre of voices and instruments at the source, so to speak – through subtle, fine enhancements or far-reaching experiments in sound design. These might include, for example, varying the sound depending on the notes played, adding emphasis to the individual character of a sound source, or impressing upon one track the sound characteristics of another.
Whereas with the Formant Tool you can edit notes individually, with the Sound Editor you are shaping the sound of the entire track. Here, you can control with surgical precision the level of individual overtones or transform the spectrum systematically with an array of swift and efficient macros. A high-resolution, 1/12-octave equalizer affords you a further, very musical, means of shaping the sound.
Work with multiple tracks
Multi-tracking is one of Melodyne’s most important functions. Because it’s only when you can see and edit multiple tracks in context that the possibilities of Melodyne reveal their full potential.
In the Note Editor, you can display as many tracks as you like simultaneously – some to edit, others purely for reference; you decide. This allows you to see the harmonies, melodies and rhythms of your project in context and keep the overall musical picture in view as you fine-tune, or even rethink, things like voice leading, intonation and timing.
Notes can be selected, edited, copied or deleted across track frontiers. This makes it possible to change the melodies, harmonies and rhythms of multiple tracks simultaneously or edit notes you’ve allocated to different tracks, for the sake of the mix, as though they were still on the same one. This type of simultaneous access to the contents of multiple tracks is afforded by Melodyne alone.