5 Melodyne Tips That Aren’t About Pitch Correction

Celemony Melodyne is excellent for correcting vocal pitch, and when used tastefully (e.g., you correct only the notes that actually sound wrong) is remarkably transparent. But Melodyne can do a lot more than just tweak vocals to perfection, as I’m about to show you. These tips all work with Melodyne Essential; of course, there are additional options with advanced versions of Melodyne (like Melodyne Editor), but don’t underestimate what the Essential version can do.


Envelope-following Flanger

This not only works for individual tracks but is also pretty amazing with a finished stereo mix. Even better, the flanging is not your basic, boring “whoosh-whoosh” type of flanging, but it follows the amplitude envelope of the track being flanged. It’s also easy to do.

Duplicate the track you want to flange.
Set up Melodyne to edit the duplicate track.
In Melodyne, choose the Percussive algorithm.
Select all the Melodyne blobs.
Set the Pitch Grid to No Snap.
Click on one of the selected notes, and drag slightly off pitch — certainly less than half a semitone to start. You’ll hear some ultra-cool flanging.
I realize this sounds far-fetched, but take a listen to see how great it sounds.


Experiment with Chord Progressions

Hey guitar players — if you’re stuck for some songwriting inspiration, then this might help you get out of a rut.

Record yourself playing a chord in a rhythm you like. Don’t necessarily change keys; just keep playing an E, A, F#, whatever. I prefer playing root + fifth power chords so that I can add a minor or major character afterward.

After you’ve recorded the part, open the clip in Melodyne. Choose Percussive mode, and set Pitch Grid to Chromatic Snap. Each chord will appear as its own blob, so you can grab a blob and transpose it to experiment with different chord progressions. The blobs from measures one through six have been transposed to try out some chord progression variations; the blobs originally looked like the blobs starting on measure seven — all the same chord.

Transposed notes will change timbre the more they’re transposed and might even get a little artifacty. As a result, the transposed part probably won’t be a keeper (although it might be — you never know). But this is an easy way to try different chord progressions, and you can then play along with the edited track — using major and minor chords as appropriate — to create your final rhythm guitar part.

Incidentally, when I mention this technique at seminars, people assume I must be talking about a version of Melodyne that does polyphonic processing, which Essential doesn’t do. But that’s not the case. We’re not asking Melodyne to get inside the chord, which is what polyphonic processing does; Melodyne Essential considers a sound as a sound, whether it’s a single drum hit or a guitar chord.


Fun with Drum Slice Tuning

If you’ve played with REX files that slice up drums, then you know how much fun it can be to shift those slices around to create new rhythms. Well, here’s a way to have even more fun: shift the timbre, and even add a bit of a melodic vibe.

Select your drum track and open it up in Melodyne. Choose the Percussive algorithm, then transpose blobs up or down to change the pitch. In the audio example, the first four measures are a straight drum loop. The second four measures modify the drum loop by dropping the kick on each beat down three semitones to make it fatter, moving the snare up four semitones to give it a tighter timbre, and then varying other slices to change the tuning — you have to like the way the pitch moves up at the end of the example.

Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) with Vocals

Yes, Melodyne can also be your ADT plug-in. Here’s how.

Before pitch correcting a vocal, duplicate it to a different track.
If you plan to do pitch correction, apply correction only to the original vocal.
Open the duplicated vocal in Melodyne. While listening to both the original and duplicated tracks, set the duplicated track’s Pitch Center and Quantize Time Intensity sliders to about 50%. (With Melodyne 4, select Auto for the Groove Reference; with Melodyne 2, select None.)
Adjust these sliders for the most convincing ADT effect.

The slight pitch and timing changes create the kind of effect you’d expect from automatic double tracking. When mixing ADT vocals, center the two vocals for more of a chorusing effect, or spread them about 30% left and 30% right for a more spacious soundstage.

Bass Tuning and the Hidden Split Tool

No, that’s not the title of a Harry Potter movie; I found out about this trick while making an electric bass sample library. Based on physics, electric bass strings should be a lot longer than they are (that’s why a Bosendorfer 9-foot grand is nine feet long). Because they aren’t, the low strings flop around and go out of tune over the course of their decay. This gets worse if you hit the strings relatively hard, because they go sharp before they glide down to their (somewhat) stable pitch.

Melodyne can fix this. Although it appears there’s no Split tool in Melodyne Essential because there’s no dedicated button, you can still access it. Hover the cursor over the blob where you want to do the split, position the cursor in the blob’s upper half until it turns into a Split tool (a left/right double arrow), and then double-click to split the note.

Granted, you probably don’t want every bass note to have the stability of a synth oscillator. But tuning with bass is particularly important because of the low frequencies involved — if there’s beating between notes, it can be long, rolling beating instead of the faster beating that happens with higher-frequency notes. Selecting all notes in a bass part and applying Melodyne can fix the overall tuning (although I don’t recommend doing mass correction with vocals!). If you need to take the tuning precision further, apply this technique when a note still sounds out of tune — or if you’re creating a sample library.

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