Oh.... My... God.... (Melodyne from Celemony)

[AndyR]

I had an actual moment of "you're kidding me, right? you mean... omigod... holy f***ing cow!!!" earlier.

It was SO jaw-dropping I dragged Mrs R off her sofa and away from her new 80s compilation CDs.

I didn't tell her what I'd found out, I showed it to her and she was dumbfounded too. It's not often, on musical stuff, that I know she's as impressed as I am!!

So, Melodyne, I did a search on here and some folks seem to know about it and use it to good effect. But I couldn't see that anyone knew about this particular facility already. Mebbe you do, and I've just been in the cheap seats.

All I knew about Melodyne was that it did pitch-correction and you could use it to generate backing vocals.
That, and because I haven't been on a DAW for years, made me look down my nose at it a bit...

In fact, when I was installing my free stuff with Studio One, "Melodyne Essentials" was one of the things I skipped because "why would I need that??!?!"

So, a few hours ago (when I still thought the earth was flat, the sun revolved around it, and so on) I was watching an "exclusive content" video I have access to on PreSonus. It was a live stream a few days ago, and it's about the sound samples library and loops and stuff (which I also didn't bother downloading and installing) ... and he was showing how he uses the samples, etc, etc... and then he used Melodyne to do a thing that made me go... "WHAT@!@!@!?"

Later on, someone on the stream asked about how do you get Melodyne in Studio One (the answer is a complimentary licence to Melodyne Essentials in the stuff I've got - and everything he'd shown is doable with that... Melodyne Studio is a whole bunch of money).

So Andrew halts the video, gets Melodyne sorted out in his Studio One... and holy sh!t!!!
It works...

1. I found an audio track with lead guitar part (single notes) in my demo song that Mrs R and I have become intimately familiar with...
2. I selected the audio
3. I hit CTRL+M to edit it in Melodyne
4. When it had analysed the audio I closed the Melodyne window
5. I created a new instrument (MIDI) track
6. I copied the audio onto the MIDI track and.... it pasted as MIDI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WOWOWWOWOWW

I had to tidy up slightly, string bends and fretnoize and wotnot causes some slightly interesting notes

But, basically, the part I played on guitar is now playing on a synth, a piano, an oboe, whatever I want... with the same expression and dynamics and bad timing as I played it.

HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!?!!

And now you're gonna tell me that all you DAW-dudes have been doing this for years 

[Blooby]

The Earth isn't flat?

[Mach]

(when I still thought the earth was flat, the sun revolved around it, and so on)
And now you're gonna tell me that all you DAW-dudes have been doing this for years

Sure, just select the time travel drop-down to hollow earth.

[AndyR]

 

[Ray Brookes]

Celemony have pioneered pitch correction on vocals for ages, Andy and the feature they have in Melodyne of converting audio to midi is astonishing in its conception. They also have incorporated a cool feature which I think they call 'DNA' whereas if you play a guitar chord say E major and you realise it should have been E minor, in polyphonic mode you are able to select the G sharp amongst the other notes in the chord you strummed and change it to G natural. In other words, you can strum any chords you like and go into the program and alter whatever notes you like to create whatever chords you want. Bloody science fiction.

I don't use Melodyne these days as the latest program was getting a bit expensive and in the DAW I have there is already a pitch correction feature that does everything I need.

Ray

[Bishmanrock]

I'm not familiar with Melodyne, but Cubase (not sure which tier) has a basic version of this built in. I imagine it's not as robust as Melodyne, but I've used it a few times to get chords/notes from stems and it works decently. Better than most freebie tools that reckon they can do audio to midi.

EZBass has a function where you can drop a bass stem into it and it'll not only work out the notes, but work out velocity, slides, tapping, etc. It's specifically bass software, so it'll only look between a certain range and identify certain bass techniques, but it's very impressive how accurate it is. Superior Drummer also has an older and not quite as impressive version for drums too. Toontrack really pushed it with EZBass though, so I think we might see more further down the line.

All I knew about Melodyne was that it did pitch-correction and you could use it to generate backing vocals.

Hadn't even heard about this. Just YouTube'd it and looks interesting. Didn't realise Essential was pretty affordable. Glad it's not payday!

[StephenM]

can you post an example here?

[Flash Harry]

The Earth isn't flat?

Of course it is.

Though ORH introduced me to melodyne a few years ago.

Its pretty cool. 

[Jean Pierre]

melodyne is a gas factory (with sound rather), I use it to correct falsities when I record lap steel; there is a plug ins in Reaper a little equivalent but less powerful and less ergonomic

the procedure that transforms an audio track into a midi file looks really interesting

[64Guitars]

Though ORH introduced me to melodyne a few years ago.

What? You mean all these years that I thought he was a great singer he's actually been using auto-tune? I feel so cheated!!