Don’t get me wrong although I have not used this I believe it is a remarkable piece of kit, however I would not want to get into the space of using it as if it were a routine and seemingly indispensable tool. I have an archive of 20-year old 4-track recordings that would present a huge temptation for its use but hopefully everything we do in these circumstances is subject to some sort of critical assessment. Thomas, you have clearly gone through that process and come out the other side with what I detect is a creative assessment in terms of how you produce music.

Further, as with all things, some will do things with this tool that are not so creatively desirable (or legal for that matter). Love it or hate it, Autotune has been used and abused in equal measure and there are other examples. Tools of any kind are great if they are fit for purpose, used for their intended purpose and in appropriate measures.

I was tempted to spring for Autotune last year and decided against it. ME may become part of my toolset this year but I am very interested in how people use it in the meantime.

To me this sounds like exactly the sort of ‘enabling’ step that music needs every now and then; a tool for the very talented and a lifeline for the partially talented (and I include myself very much in the lower half of the latter)!

It’s like the synthesizer sequencer – genuinely talented people like TMDR (fawn, fawn..) can use it to build backing tracks for demos or studio work and then play along with it live, or perhaps replace the sequenced parts with live musicians; it’s their choice. It will also allow you to change or replace stuff AFTER the song’s been created (meaning that you don’t have to re-record that rather dull sounding bridge but can mess around with the timings, harmonies etc.)

For ham fisted, sausage fingered loons like me it means I can actually produce a half decent song (note by note if I have to) and produce something that people can listen to without feeling they’ve just listened to a Steinway falling down the stairs with a cat inside it…

They both sound good, but in the case of those who get it right 99.9% of the time (or in TMDR words, which I don’t believe incidentally, 50-25% of the time) will just look a whole lot better on stage because that’s them having to ACTUALLY do it for real. Everyone has ‘off-days’ but that shouldn’t get in the way of the creative process (which is why some new albums take years to surface and others take weeks – it’s usually down to people getting off-track because today didn’t work out so well). Why wait for days for that mild cold, sprained thumb or mental block to go away and stop you from finishing your latest single when you can get it done and just replicate the performance when you’re more on form?

And it’s available as a VST so it could well work in a lot of DAW products – think I might have to download me the demo…

Haven’t used Melodyne, but it sounds as if it could be used to make an awful lot of previously pretty things radically out of tune. Forget about sampling, this is rewiring. Looking forward to hearing what the experimentalists and mischievous make with it.

Glad you’ve discovered the joys of Melodyne. In these days when producing music on computer is pretty much routine, it has taken a special piece of kit to blow me away, the way that Melodyne has.

Just wanted to share my opinion and experience with it.

When I recorded my album, I only had my drummer for a day session, now good as he was and knew all the tracks, we had to get drum tracks for 9 songs down in that session, so he belted through them.

When we got them back to my studio, even though he’d played to a click (and 95% was perfect) there were still a few bits just not sitting right. Once we had got the drum tracks sitting in the mix where we were happy, we bounced them to a stereo file and Melodyned them! Even though we were aware of what we were doing at the time, I had to take a step back and think…. “we’re quantizing real audio drums” astounding!

Also, as you said about comping the vox, sometimes you get a great performance with all the emotion in one take but the odd notes are a bit ‘wafty’ pitch wise, a little tweak here and there and you got it!
Also used it to create a missed harmony part long after the required vocalist has left the building!
Bass guitar also.

Yes! So much more than just a glorified ‘Autotune’!

And on that subject Thomas, as a fan of many years, I feel that what you describe as, and I quote “Being a pretty innacurate singer” is very much a part of the charm of your vocal style, so have fun …..but don’t ME your vox too much eh mate!!

I thought you used Logic.

I know its PC only, but have you thought about
Cakewalk’s SONAR.

SONAR RULES !!!

plus you could use it on one of your submarines.

What I said ‘destructive edits’ I was probably using the wrong term. I was referring to the fact that if you perform a process on a chunk of waveform eg Pitch Shift, then try to lengthen it (or do a crossfade) you no longer have more of the original waveform available to you. Sure you can re-spot the raw region, but then you have to try to recreate any/all the processes you’ve run on it.

I’m a long time Melodyne plugin user, and I use Pro Tools HD. I just wanted to clear up a couple of misconceptions above about PT…

There is no difference between LE and HD in terms of whether or not one might need to crossfade regions to avoid clicks. One handy solution though is to set up auto-crossfades of a few milliseconds in the Prefs, I believe this is available in LE as well as HD.

The other point is that Pro Tools NEVER performs ‘destructive’ edits, (unlike Logic!) The only time this is possible is with an AudioSuite process when you select the option to overwrite files, and even then it always warns you what you’re about to do with a dialogue box. However, if you haven’t duplicated the playlist (or done a ‘Save As’) before you perform edits it can be tricky to get back to where you were…! But even then, if you’ve got a previously saved version (or one of the autosaves) with the desired edits, it’s fairly easy to use Import Session Data to get back what you need…

With regard to Melodyne, I found the new ‘Editor’ version buggy and cumbersome when trying to perform vocal tuning/editing compared to the old version, so I’ve reverted to that! A lot of the folks on the DUC have come to a similar conclusion…!