If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of vocal production and making sure to get the absolute best performance out of your artist. Once you have recorded several great vocal takes, you comp them to feature the best parts of each take.
However, even with this process there may still be some slight nuances that only catch your ear after the artist has left, or maybe you are sent only one take to work with if you didn’t record the song yourself.
That’s where Melodyne 4 comes in handy.
Melodyne allows to grab a great vocal performance and turn it into the perfect vocal by tweaking slight nuances in intonation, timing and vibrato. Even if you have to do heavier tuning, you can get very natural sounding results, which is what has made Melodyne an industry standard for vocal tuning in the last decade.
Even as a mixing engineer, knowing your way around this software can come in handy. In the end, what your clients expect from your as a mixer is to get back a better sounding song than they had. If that means you have to tweak the vocal tuning slightly, go ahead and do it!
Today, we have the marvellous Stefan Lindlahr from Celemony with us, showing us the basic functions of Melodyne, explaining it’s intended use and how to get the best results when tuning vocals. He also shows us their latest invention which will not only let you adjust monophonic recordings like vocals, but also tune single notes inside a chord progression. You can even tune multiple instruments at once, making sure that they all stay in relation to one another.
This is a huge leap forward in the editing and post production process and gives you a lot of power! In this tutorial Stefan and I discuss how to use it wisely.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, we’ll be following up with more advanced Melodyne tutorials very soon!
Now it’s your turn:
Please let me know about your approach to recording, comping and tuning vocals. Do you have any special techniques you love to use to get the results you are looking for?
Have a marvellous time recording and mixing,
Warren
Watching the video raises a fundamental issue I’ve started to find, now I’ve started editing tracks by hand. I can edit no problem (spent 7+ years editing film & video), but…
Don’t you have to be a pretty damn decent musician to be able to make decisions about timing, pitch etc with confidence?
…there’s nothing worse than having to work on vocals that have been poorly or overly pitch corrected / adjusted. Particularly when it’s a great vocalist. It’s unforgivable to trash a beautiful vocal performance with second rate pitch FX.
Hey Tobi, I’m nothing close to an expert but I’d say that if you are really sticking to cleaning and polishing and not trying to re-paint the vocal then you are doing the song justice. If it is in the realm of being an effect (pitch FX) then that’s a production thing the artist is/should be involve with. Fixing the stand-out errors is, IMO, part of the job, whether with fine line editing or using Melodyne. Depending on budget too, I guess. Then there is the morality factor, should we be making tone def wannabe’s sound so good they can never live up to it live? Is it our place judge? I guess that’s the delicate part of producing music, those fragile artist hearts.
…my point was… doesn’t the producer have to be a competent musician, in order to make those judgements?
A Producer can only adjust an Artist’s performance, if they understand what the Artist was going for in the first place, in terms of timing, pitch, arrangement etc.
Often when I hear ‘overworked’ vocals, I suspect it is because it was easier for the Producer to lacked the skill / knowledge / time / work ethic / taste (one, some or all of the above), to do job properly.
To ask the question in a different way…
In this modern era of editing and pitch correcting performances after the fact, can a Producer be a good producer, without also being a good musician?
Great points @plap-disqus-e44fea3bec53bcea3b7513ccef5857ac:disqus and @plap-disqus-44c4c17332cace2124a1a836d9fc4b6f:disqus! The answer to this question is simple, use your taste. If you don’t hear that needs to be fixed, then don’t automatically fix it! The badly tuned vocals I hear are from automatically assuming that everything needs to be tuned! Have a marvellous time recording, mixing and occasionally tuning if at all needed! haha Many thanks Warren
Thanks @plap-disqus-d3d9446802a44259755d38e6d163e820:disqus ! A lot of the issues I have with editing span from my dodgy music theory.
The other week, I had to google ‘triplets’, then watch a drum tutorial video on them, then watch a Cubase tutorial video on how to work with them. Then I edited the track – but talk about, ‘working without a net’ and ‘winging it’.
My latest googling has led me to ‘Polyrhythmic’. Steep learning curve.
Hey Tobi, I’ve been away so just saw this. I get you. Certainly music skills help, but there are different types of “Producers” You might recall one of Warren’s previous interviews when the guest said there was the musician producer and the radio producer. I think both can make those judgements but the latter might use an engineer to make the actual adjustments. But by all means study music, it’s good for you in so many ways. It is here I will cite Keith Richards. Does anyone think he’d still be alive were it not for music? 🙂
The advantage of being a ‘non musician’ producer, is that you hear music more like most people hear it. You role becomes to help the musicians hear their work as a ‘song’, rather than a ‘composition’, if I can make that distinction.
Equally, the music remains the domain of the musician, with the producer providing the ‘ears of the audience’, rather than involving themselves in the act of creating the music.
Of course, different musicians will prefer different approaches, need different approaches at different times in their careers, and both approaches (the musician producer Vs the radio producer) can give wonderful or terrible results.
This is true but to do that does take a special talent in itself. My Mom was an A&R person for Atlantic back in the day. She said it required the ability to employ taste without involving your personal taste.
That’s such a great way of putting it, ‘taste without involving your personal taste.’. I like that a lot.