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