when this app was at v 0.9 beta i asked peter how he sees the tool himself: to use it for boring retuning jobs or to abuse it for messing around with it for creative purposes.

his answer came fast and was unmistakable: "for abusing it, of course!"

so... those who are not even looking at the silly tutorial videos for boring retuning jobs are currently not one, but two dimensions away from the core. ;)


and when melodyne came out, the "stretching" competitor from neuronaut at that time was not zpx but mpex-1, which you could hardly could call a competitor since it is not an app.

what i personally miss in melodyne is that i would like to have a bit more algorithmic access to the data. while it is nice to freely drag things around, in other situations i would prefer to enter numeric values for pitch, filtering and time parameters in the editor.


third thing i´d like to add is that the editor version of melodyne 5 is currently available for 145 euros at retailers.

and the smallest version currently costs 95 euro.

in the past you could also get the VST version as seperate product, wich was 129 when i remember right.

so it is not like you had to invest 700 to get the technology as such.

 

Last edited: Jan 9, 2021

he also missed that DP had melodyne tech inside before it got zpx, and that DP got stretching and tuning 10 years later. so the differences are quite plentyful, and those who once paid for melodyne or timefactory helped that DAWs now all have something like this built-in.

 

Last edited: Jan 9, 2021

..as opposed to auto-tune, btw, because that guy is a billionaire - his audio software was only his hobby.

 

it doesn't take a long time to save more than $700 if you're able to fix recordings made in rented studios that you'd otherwise have to discard

 

If you are asking if Cubase's VariPitch can do the same job as Melodyne, it's already been answered, but in short the answer is no and that is the reason why they added ARA support. If you are asking how Melodyne works with ARA in Cubase 11, it works just fine.

OMG. You know Peter Gabriel ? Just kidding of course heh. Surely, Melodyne is the best melodic manipulator around. But lemme add something different:
You may find retuning jobs boring. I find them a trip to the unknown, or an exercise of patience. Especially, the worse the singer is, the fatter the blunt i have to roll, thus the trippier the whole procedure becomes hahahaha. Too many times i have secretly pitched vocals to gummybear alikes and laughed stoned at my short-lived creations. The more serious and dramatic the singer is about what he sings the funnier the outcome is. So yeah, retuning jobs may be pedestrian but they do posess their own kind of charm so to speak.
Cheers

 

I saw a videotut where the guy somehow did a guitar dive bomb. Sick stuff.

 

I said it on another thread, and will repeat it here. The price of those plugins, which are pitched to pro users, is justified in the amount of time they save in performing the tasks for which they have been designed. In a commercial facility time = $$. In the case of Melodyne, this is reaffirmed. Not only is Melodyne the BEST at what it does but it also is a time saver. For example, you are working on a project for artist "&*#@" for which you charged XXXX amount of money. The artist (who lives in another country) has traveled to your place, recorded vocals, and returned to her country. After the artist has left, there are some parts of the vocal take that you or someone in the production team or from the A&R wish to modify. It could be for creative or technical reasons. What do you do? You call Melodyne to the rescue. With it you are able to accomplish whatever changes needed to be done and do so without the client having to travel back to your place to do another vocal take. Therefore, Melodyne not only saved you some time for which you would not have gotten paid but also saved the client some time and money as well. All these plugins, Melodyne, Soothe, etc. paid for themselves. Again, time = money. Do the math. A plugin that saves you just 30 minutes per day five times a week, ends up saving you in 52 weeks 130 hours of work. Multiply 130 hours times your hourly fee and you will find how much the plugin has saved you. In sum, it is expensive to the hobbyist who is making no money but for those of us who actually make money with it it is not. That should be the starting point in any discussion as to the price of any plugin.

 

let me put it like this: if i had to record singers regulary i would use autotune or waves retune (50 euro) and not melodyne (95 euro) because those are just fine to correct something for 35 cents for 150 ms, and are more hasslefree to operate in conjunction with a DAW.

melodyne is more the tool i use to convert middle age music which was dorian to a 22 tet version. or to create alien voices. or humanize percussion tracks.

 

Ok, and i 'll put it like this: I rarely do the recordings myself. And the majority of singers is populated with bad or mediocre ones. You just can't use Antares or Waves tools with bad singers (that somehow got a name for themselves and have money to make albums and some following etc etc). These tools are meant to be used with "near accurate" singers, with bad ones they are just too evident in a mix no matter the engineer's skill, and not everyone wants to be the next T-Pain if you know what i mean, especially when their musical style is far off from hiphop/rnb.
And then of course is the case of creating backing harmonies out of the main one or the case of detuned gtrs which is very common in rock and pop recordings. In many cases it just so happens that the gtr was perfectly tuned in the beggining and somewhere along the tracking of a song starts to deviate. And it may not be the player's fault at all, sometimes room temperature changes is the culprit.
Plus too many times i have been handed material that was recorded in the most unprofessional environments and conditions and was expected to make it sound decent. So no, i prefer not to use any kind of auto-tuning method/tool unless it's for a live gig.
Lastly, it's not always about the money although "my man" @The Pirate will tell you otherwise hehe. For me, the last 15 years or so, it's about maintaining a certain status i worked my ass off to build. So, simply out of respect for my own self and trade and to just maintain credibility within my own circles and the people who still put their trust in me after decades, thanks but i won't settle for a quickie, i want the full run please, even if it's not as cost effective
With that said, i wish i was given a job to convert middle age music. But what can you do... At the very least i got to record some decent baroque.
Cheers

 

Last edited: Jan 10, 2021

Melodyne for me, it can separate a 5 BVs out of 1 mono BV track. The task is a bit specialist. Is it worth 700e? You decide for your use-case.

 

Its worth every penny! Just like a lot of other things on here.

 

Although is tacit, we should stress AutoTune is designed to work in real-time. They may overlap a bit but they're quite different things.

 

AutoTune - Automatic Realtime tune
Melodyne - Manual Tune (CARE!!! You need basic knowledges of software to use it right )
I can recommend you watch some tutorials like Melodyne for beginers and Advanced Techniques.

 

AutoTune - Automatic Realtime tune
Melodyne - Manual Tune (CARE!!! You need basic knowledges of software to use it right )
I can recommend you watch some tutorials like Melodyne for beginers and Advanced Techniques.

 

so there are even worse singers than the one i know?

a good singer tells YOU how to record him. i never had that pleasure myself, but sat beside.

 

If you want to hear some unique sounding AutoTune that sounds different than Antares AutoTune, CrispyTuner, Waves Tune Real-Time etc, try out zplane reTune, because it uses Polyphonic AutoTune and it can be used in Real-Time, it sounds totally different than Monophonic AutoTune VST's and key and scales changes are very noticeable with Polyphonic AutoTune, unlike Monophonic AutoTune.

You can use zplane reTune to force a voice or song into any key & scale with Polyphonic AutoTune in Real-Time, that's actually it's main strength, I have like 100 custom scales saved as presets lol.

That seems to be the advantage using Polyphonic AutoTune instead of Monophonic AutoTune, because the key & scale change is more noticeable with zplane reTune Polyphonic AutoTune.

I'll show you 3 different examples, here's my same voice recording using zplane reTune to force it into 3 different scales with Polyphonic AutoTune.

Notice how they all sound totally different from each other, and they probably wouldn't sound much different from each other if i used a Monophonic AutoTune plugin like Antares AutoTune, because it uses Monophonic AutoTune.

zplane reTune Major C Scale (Polyphonic AutoTune)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/9ki1y5xkhday4wg/Major_C.mp3/file

zplane reTune Balinese C Scale (Polyphonic AutoTune)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/49jocmuza2q1798/Balinese_C.mp3/file

zplane reTune Negative Harmony / Reverse Chromatic Scale (Polyphonic AutoTune)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/51wepnys3iu9ba0/Reverse_Chromatic.mp3/file

 

Last edited: Jan 11, 2021