Melodyne studio: applications

Not even Melodyne studio can turn a bad performance as if by magic into a good one, but Melodyne studio makes it easy to transform good material into excellent.

From Macro to Micro

Melodyne studio offers you a particularly musical access to your audio material. For the correction of intonation and timing errors, macros are available that enhance a recording quickly and easily. However, with the intuitive tools provided, you can go further and fine-tune the most subtle tonal characteristics: not just the pitch and volume of notes, but their vibrato and pitch drift, their position and length, their formant spectrum, the transitions between them and even the speed at which events unfold within individual notes.

Perfect Timing

With Melodyne studio, it's child's play to get things spot-on. Using a macro, you can progressively iron out timing irregularities or impose the rhythm of one track upon another. As it does these things, Melodyne studio moves the notes intelligently, even adjusting their length. That guarantees results of unprecedented musicality. Needless to say, you can also move notes forwards or backwards in time manually until the timing is exactly as you wish it.

From Melody to Rhythm

With Melodyne studio, you can edit very effectively not only vocals and melodic instruments but also rhythmic material. From a short, stiff drum loop, for example, you can create a vibrant rhythm track in next to no time by cutting, copying and pasting beats. Melodyne's parameters allow you even to effect subtle or even extreme tonal variations. Melodyne studio gives you a freedom when dealing with rhythms and sounds that will suggest totally new ideas to you.

Global Intervention

Not even full mixes dismay Melodyne studio. Stretch or transpose entire songs without compromising their sound quality. Select parts of songs or individual beats, and transpose, move or copy them in their entirety to some other location. Because Melodyne recognizes and separates the beats in audio material, all such procedures can be accomplished effortlessly and without little clicks or other blemishes being introduced along the way.

Virtual Ensembles

In Melodyne studio, you can implement a doubling or create a second voice with a few mouse clicks. Thanks to the formant parameter, the transposed voices sound exactly like the original, unless, of course, you want them to acquire a different character—ideal for creating a natural sounding choir from a single voice. Or a brass ensemble from a trumpet part. Or a string quartet from a violin.

Sound Library Reloaded

With Melodyne studio, much will change. Including your sound library, which will suddenly be a whole lot bigger. Since you'll be able to alter at will the tempo, timing and melody of your sampled licks and phrases, you'll always have suitable samples to hand for your productions. And as many variations as you wish.

Sound Design

The unique possibilities of Melodyne studio can be used not only for unobtrusive correction but also for drastic alteration and extraordinary effects. With formant shifting, you can color the sound of individual notes or entire samples subtly or else drastically. You can time-stretch sounds to such an extent that their tonal development is literally audible in slow motion. Even with such extreme applications, the starting transients of the notes remain crisp and the sound soft and round.

Recomposition

With Melodyne, you can effect far-reaching changes in your audio material in order to create something new. You can copy, for example, only the pitches from one track to another, so that a percussion track, say, follows the notes of a vocal part. You can output the detected notes—including precise data regarding their dynamics and pitch—via MIDI and use it to control a synthesizer or a sampler. And with that come fascinating new possibilities for doubling, arranging and sound design.