Image credit: Antares Check out and download from: Sweetwater Plugin Boutique It does take some getting used to, as some of the key commands and shortcuts are less intuitive, and it functions almost like a mini DAW in itself, but it’s a powerful tool that’s worth the effort to learn. Well good news! With Melodyne 5, it now works as a normal VST plugin inside your DAW, meaning no more exporting/importing! It uses Audio Random Access technology, or ARA, and this makes the workflow of it a thousand times better.īasically, Melodyne should be an essential part of the kit for anyone who works with vocals, period. Those of you familiar with the name Melodyne might remember that it needed to be run as a standalone operation outside of your DAW, and you’d have to record the vocal into Melodyne, edit it, then export it and bring it back into your track. It even has pitch, volume, and timing macros, which can automatically quantize notes to a scale or chromatically, apply downwards and upwards compression on a note-by-note basis, and quantize notes to beats in the grid, syncing automatically with your DAW’s tempo, of course. There’s so much that Melodyne is capable of, and you’d never even notice because in the right hands, it just sounds like it came straight through the singer’s mic. It can make words longer or shorter, reduce the volume of sibilances without affecting vowels, change timings of notes, eliminate vibrato, increase or decrease the time of pitch bends, adjust formants, individually tweak the volume of each note, and more, all without leaving any artifacts. You may be thinking, “Well I know autotune when I hear it, and none of those singers sound like T-Pain”, and you’d be right it doesn’t sound like autotune.
Adele, perhaps, and maybe Tori Kelly, but even Beyoncé and Brendan Urie’s vocals get edited in some way on every track. Out of all the singers in the world, and there are many, it would surprise you how few of them are able to record a radio-ready vocal track without some sort of pitch correction. Image credit: Celemony Check out and download from: Sweetwater Plugin Boutique