Home » The PARIS Forums » PARIS: Main » Auto-Tune vs. Melodyne - some observations
| Auto-Tune vs. Melodyne - some observations [message #88365] |
Fri, 20 July 2007 18:24  |
Neil
Messages: 1645
Registered: April 2006
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Senior Member |
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I've used Auto-Tune for some time now - still have V1-point-
something on Floppy disks, in fact; and now am on v5-point-
whatever, but hadn't tried Melodyne until a few months ago.
Had the occasion recently to do a good deal of work on a
vocalist who needed a bit more correction than what I could get
out of A-T without it really sounding like an Auto-Tuned
vocal... if you know what I mean. Tried the Melodyne Plugin &
it was the ticket in this particular case. I know we've had a
couple of threads on this topic over time, so, based on having
done a few songs with it now, I now offer up my take on one vs.
the other:
1.) If you need a little bit of gentle correction, Auto-Tune 5
on autopilot is definitely the way to go - from what I can
tell, A-T passes more of the unadulterated qualities of the
signal through, while Melodyne EVEN IF YOU DON'T APPLY ANY
CHANGES TO THE NOTE will sound altered - it's not a harmonic
kind of alteration like AutoTune doing a severe correction
would display, but it's almost as if it "rounds out" the sound
a bit... maybe takes a bit of the edge or air off. It's not
severe, but it's noticeable. AT5 sounds really fucking good, by
the way, and has a couple of features that previous versions did
not, such as "Humanize", which, when used in gentle degrees can
sound good, and an option where you can set the pitch
correction to ignore vibrato - something that's VERY useful in
the case of any singers who have a wide vibrato!
2.) If you need more serious pitch correction, then Melodyne is
the way to go - in this type of application it displays LESS
artifacts than does Auto-Tune.
A couple other observations:
a.) Melodyne can also adjust/alter timing, ether automatically
(not recommended, IME) or manually (better - if you need to do
it at all).
b.) Melodyne does not handle "noise" as well as Auto-Tune
does... for example, if you have a nice, clean vocal track -
someone singing softly through a clean mic & preamp, it may not
make much of a difference; but if you have someone singing a
typical rock, country rock, or if you're recording Tom Waits,
you may have some problems with Melodyne... especially if you're
tracking Tom Waits through a u-67 & a nice woolly Neve preamp -
- get my drift? Let's say Tom sings the phrase: "Baton Rouge"
and phonetically it sounds something like: "Brhaagghtnn
Hrooozzgzzzh", then you, my friend, are going to have a lot of
noise/non-note kind of artifacts that Melodyne will not know
how to deal with. This includes breaths, by the way, so a
breathy female vocal may also give you fits. It'll be up to you
to do one of two things with those short bursts of noise that
Melodyne will be incapable of recognizing as notes:
1.) Leave 'em where they are & don't try to correct the pitch
on 'em & just hope it works.. or: 2.) manually edit those
artifacts out of the Melodyne display screen & extend the note
right in front of or right behind were it was to take it's
place. If you haven't worked with Melodyne yet, then you
obviously don't know exactly what I mean by that, but suffice
it to say this can be laborious on some singers & genres.
I would suggest trying "1" before automatically jumping to
option # "2" - you may find that some of the noise bits are OK,
leaving you only to have to manually tweak the remainder.
Final Tip:
When using Melodyne, ALWAYS make sure to set the record path to
a new subfolder you can create within the project directory or
folder tree - don't use the default. In this manner (setting
the record path yourself), the Melodyne files aways go with the
project, even when you back it up, archive it, etc.
Anyway, just some observations.
Neil
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