celemony_ :: Direct Note Access

Audio as a building material and the new freedom

Fortunately there’s more to making music than the avoidance of errors. It’s nice to know, of course, that you can correct errors. But once you’ve done so, more interesting, more creative, tasks await you. In Melodyne, you can squeeze, stretch, transpose and rearrange audio material preserving the highest audio quality. By shifting the blobs around, you can completely restructure melodies; you can copy notes from one part of a recording and paste them into another; and you can create vocal harmonies simply by making as many copies of the melody as necessary and then changing at will the pitch of the copied notes. Melodyne users have long treasured such freedom. But that was just the beginning ...

Because Direct Note Access makes it possible to change the harmonies within a recording, in future you will be able to modify the DNA (so to speak) of your audio material: to take the guitar track from your last jam session, for instance, transpose it from C major to F# minor and integrate it into the song you’re working on now. Naturally, the tempo and timing of polyphonic material will also be variable. You’ll be able to move the notes of a chord not only in pitch but also in time. With Direct Note Access, you won’t believe how flexible your audio material has become.

The editing possibilities for polyphonic audio material will be the same in future as those Melodyne already offers for monophonic material: using the familiar Melodyne tools, you will be able to modify the pitch, position in time, duration, vibrato, pitch drift, formant spectrum, volume and internal evolution of each note. That gives you unheard-of freedom to create new acoustic realities: You can make individual notes within a chord louder or softer or change their tone color by shifting their formants. You can copy a note on the marimba and use it to replace the notes in a piano chord: the music remains the same but it’s a whole new sound. And imagine the extent to which Direct Note Access will enhance the value of your sample libraries. You’ll no longer be restricted to samples that match the harmony of your song, but will be able to base your choice of samples upon sonic, rhythmic or musical criteria – and then transform the harmonies of the sample with total freedom to obtain the effect desired. Haven’t you always wished you could do that?

Pt. 4: Soon in your Melodyne