Recording - May 2011 - 39

Celemony Melodyne Melodyne came on the market at a time when Auto-Tune was seen as kind of uncool and hadn’t really been updated much recently. It was also the first pitch-correction software that dealt with time correction. In other words, Melodyne was a producer’s dream because you could actually tune and quantize a performer. It was almost like having a vocal in MIDI. Not only that, but while AT7 only works one track at a time per window, in Melodyne Studio you could see all your tracks at once—the lead and background vocals. Perfectly suited to see the waveforms and create super tight BV performances. Melodyne is almost like having AutoTune, Ableton’s Warp capabilities, and Synchro Arts’ VocALign all in one plug-in—or, better still—all in one window. Now the latest plug-in version is a bit closer to the AT7 situation, where it’s a track-by-track plug-in called Melodyne editor. They still support their multitrack ReWire-based bundle called Melodyne studio. It operates more the way Ableton Live works with a DAW.

The big difference between AT7 and Melodyne is that Melodyne is polyphonic. That’s a game changer altogether and really puts them in different leagues. This is far too deep to get into here, but there are many videos on Celemony’s website displaying the possibilities. In brief—you can actually tune horn sections, change keys for a whole choir, transpose all the vocal harmonies at once, and, of course, transpose samples to match your track, not the other way around. Check Joe Albano’s article for a few audio examples he created himself. All you hip-hop producers will be wondering where this was when you had to slice everything in an Akai MPC to transpose the horn hits or Rhodes parts to fit your key. Not anymore! You can even take a Rhodes or guitar chord and change notes within it. You have the perfect Herbie Hancock sample but it’s in A minor and you’re in A Major? No prob, once you track it in Melodyne, it splits the chord and you can bump the C to a C#. Apart from that, most of the commands are rightclick enabled for your mouse, so the graphic interface is uncluttered and the learning curve very simple.

Summing up As I said at the beginning, both these products go way beyond vocals, and you can easily fix errors with both. To sum it up: If you are mostly looking for vocal tuning on the fly, MIDI input capability, and creating the weird sort of special effects often heard in R&B, AT7 will be for you. If you can do without real-time tuning but want most of the other capabilities, plus polyphonic tuning, deep editing, and completely transparent tuning of melodies and chords, then Melodyne is the way to go. The real difference lies in whether you do a lot of your tuning after the singer has left the room, and you get deep into making the tuning unnoticeable, or just let the plug-in automatically do its thing and never go deeper. Everybody has their own approach. Sebastian Arocha Morton (arocha@recordingmag.com) is a keyboardist, songwriter, engineer, producer, and composer who works from his RocaSound studio in Burbank, CA. More at www.rocasound.com.

http://www.rocasound.com http://www.CRAS.edu http://www.CRAS.edu

Recording - May 2011

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