Really interesting development in digital music production: The Melodyne plugin allows you to separate notes out of a chord to manipulate individually, as if they were multitracked – or, more accurately, as if acoustic recordings were MIDI.
It’s pretty impressive – and apparently due later this year.
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Melodyne started off as a poor mans Autotune. For many years the audio quailty was just not good enough – you’d export your vocal say into Melodyne and it would come back grainy and slightly wrong. For that reason most people used it more like a toy.
It’s got better over the years, they managed to integrate it with Pro Tools and Logic Audio with some plug ins, but even then it didn’t really work that well.
However, this latest version has had jaws dropping all over the music production forums as to be honest no one thought it was possible.
If the nature of ownership of recordings ever wanted shaking up, this is the product to do it. Can’t wait to input Mars The Bringer Of War and move all the notes around. It’ll be MY composition then. Won’t it?
Melodyne has been a very strong tool for a while now. At first they were very much a poor-man’s Antares AutoTune, but incorporating timing correction and direct note access lifts their offering.
As with AutoTune though playing and recording your music well is no substitute for “fixing it in the mix”, but at €300 this could save a lot of hassle if you are doing post-pro on a session recorded at a studio you can’t afford to go back to. Also, it will be possible (perhaps) to record some generic backing vocals and retune/retime them to many projects.
I’m sure there’s a lot that can be done with the plugin creatively too, rather than just remedially.
It’s already going around. A friend had a copy on his laptop (probably illegally obtained). He showed me what it could do and I was astounded.
Yes, it’s a great product. Very impressive. While the video on the website might be just an advertisement, you can see there the real presentation by the inventor Peter Neubaker (I love that Peter really looks like a crazy inventor!)
http://www.sonicstate.com/news/shownews.cfm?newsid=6281
Very impressive. It seems that he really uses the software during the presentation. Funny, he mutates a Mozart string quartet from a major to minor key.
What do you think are the repercussions of advances such as this?
I’m all for progress, new ideas and possibilities but what is the future of recordings?
I read about this plugin a few days ago and checked out the video, its very interesting and it seems to work good. Being an engineer I’m really looking forward to using this so I can fix up some of those tuning problems or to correct that one chord that botched an amazing performance. I just hope we (engineers/producers) don’t get carried away with it, sometimes stuff like this takes away the musicality of a performance – the human element if you will.
that’s amazing! i want it.
I used this product to fix up the vocals on a song I produced last summer: http://www.sweatshopstudios.com/sweatshopstudios/sofine
The product did wonders, as the original singer’s performance wasn’t exactly on tune. After listening to the song countless times, I realized I wanted to try to adjust some of the notes in the melody. It was very easy to do, and it sounds like the singer intended those changes in his initial performance. We also used Melodyne to manufacture harmonies.
Really cool product, and neat interface.
Development of this kind of software helps increase post-production options, taking the power away from the hands of the musician and putting it into the hands of the man (or woman) behind the mixing board… the producer.
@Juan Zelada
The impact of manipulating recordings has been an issue ever since a clever tape-op at CBS in New York spliced together two takes of Glen Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. Digital editing has increased the scope of the possible manipulation but for me in the end it’s a subjective judgement of the sound I hear that matters.
@Julian Moore
It’s the my father’s axe paradox as to whether your Mars is yours and not Holst’s. I suppose it depends what you do with it. How much of “Rappers Delight” is the Sugar Hill Gang and how much is Chic? Probably more than “Can’t Touch This” is MC Hammer’s rather than Rick James, but maybe I’m just showing my prejudices.
It had to happen, didn’t it? I can see a lot of cost shaving taking place in the next couple of years with this little piece of software. Seriously, with recorded music revenues going down, anything that allows you to radically reduce studio times is going to be considered a godsend. Plus, a lot of people lacking musical ability can now be turned into stars, just as when Autotune became a standard tool.