Introduction to Tuning Vocals with Melodyne

Script for the screencast titled Intro to Tuning Vocals with Melodyne.

Hi, this is Rob from Wizkid Sound. In this screencast I’m going to give you a brief introduction to Melodyne, a pitch-correction tool that we use to tune vocals. I’m going to be using Melodyne Studio, but the steps I’ll be taking will be similar in other versions of Melodyne. For this screencast, I’ve taken a line from a song we are working on with Patrick Scott called “Weightless”. First, you’ll need to export the vocal track or tracks you want to tune to import into Melodyne. Be sure to export your tracks at the session sample rate as you’ll be importing these tracks back once we’re finished tuning. If you’re using a plugin, you’ll need to set up the Melodyne plugin on your vocal track. Import the vocal audio and open the Editor window. Let’s listen to what we have. The performance is already good, so we only need to perform mild pitch correction to tighten things up a bit. The quickest way to perform pitch correction on a vocal performance is by selecting everything and choosing Correct Pitch. Generally speaking you can leave Pitch Center and Pitch Drift at 100%. Now let’s listen back to the corrected performance. Sounds pretty good. Sometimes Melodyne doesn’t correctly detect each note, so it’s a good idea to listen back and make any changes by dragging notes up or down. By default Melodyne snaps each note to the grid. If you need to make minor corrections, hold the Alt key while dragging. You can use the same method to modify the melody. Sometimes a singer will add too much vibrato to certain lines or words. You can fix this by selecting the notes you want to adjust and switching to the Pitch Modulation tool. Now, drag up or down over the selection you just made to add or remove modulation. As a rule, we generally remove a tiny bit of modulation on the lead vocal tracks and a larger amount from the background tracks. We’ll go over background tracks, both tuning and creating, in another screencast. We’ll also be getting into more advanced pitch correction techniques with Melodyne. Look out for Patrick Scott’s EP in the near future, and check out his website at patrickscottmusic.com. Thanks for watching.

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