Pitch-Correcting Vocals With Melodyne (2023)

Pitch correction of vocal parts is now commonplace in all but afew genres. Find out how to craft aprofessional-sounding result.

Over the last decade or so, vocal tuning has become increasingly accepted as part of the music post-production process. In asimilar way to other performance 'fixing' processes, such as drum quantisation, it's now used so much, on almost all commercial releases, that engineers and the general public alike have become accustomed to hearing it. I'll leave the rights and wrongs of pitch-processing to others to debate, but Iwould say that we engineers and producers should remember that tuning plug-ins are intended to help us achieve the best sound we possibly can — and unless we're trying to create adeliberate effect (a Chris Brown-style robo-voice, say, or aCher-like warble), we really don't want the tuning process itself to be noticeable in the final mix.

Celemony's Melodyne pitch-processing software is one of that select bunch of tools that we can genuinely call revolutionary. When it first burst on to the scene, it seemed a miracle that you could treat recorded audio in much the same way as you could MIDI notes. Initially a stand-alone application, it soon became available as a plug-in. Later still (2009) Melodyne Editor wowed people with the ability to manipulate the pitch of individual notes within a single polyphonic audio file.

Having initiallychosen Melodyne simply because it was cheaper than Antares Auto-Tune, Isoon noticed that there were very few audible artifacts in the tuned audio. I found it intuitive to use, but while instant results were possible, it took time and experimentation to get the best results. In this tutorial, I'll share some tips and techniques that should lead you rather more quickly to pitch-perfect productions.

Melodyne remains the only game in town if you want to work with polyphonic audio, but for vocal tuning that's usually unnecessary. The two other leading pitch processors are Auto-Tune and Cubase/Nuendo's built-in VariAudio, and although the tools are slightly different, much of my more general advice applies equally to users of those tools.

Pitch Preparation

Let's face it: tuning vocals is not the most fun you can have in music production, but good preparation makes the tuning process much simpler and more speedy. Sometimes Itune vocals on my own projects, but Ialso do this work for other engineers and producers. In both scenarios, I tend to work in the same way, starting with the creation of adedicated tuning project, in my DAW, that's separate from the main mixing project. This helps me to keep all the vocal-tuning work neatly together, while still allowing it to be recalled quickly if further edits are required. Another good reason for working in this way is that it avoids having half adozen instances of the Melodyne plug-in hogging computing resources while mixing. While that might not be the limiting factor it once was, tuning needn't be a real-time process, and I'd rather leave resources available for other tasks.

You can use a stand-alone version of Melodyne, but I prefer to use the plug-in in a DAW session, so Icreate anew empty project (Iuse Logic Pro, but the principles apply to any DAW) and import the vocal tracks. Ialso import arough instrumental mix of the song, which is important, as it provides the context you need to make the pitch and time adjustments to your vocals. It's quite common to be working with many layers of lead and backing vocals, and to use different tracks for different song sections, so rather than having dozens of instances of Melodyne running, I'll start with an instance on one track, perform my Melodyne processes, and print the result to anew track before moving on.

Partly this is, again, away of managing computer resources, but it's also an insurance policy: in my early vocal-tuning career Ihad too many experiences of part of avocal erratically shifting out of sync during playback, or even cutting out completely. In other words, while Melodyne's agreat tool, no software is infallible, so it's good to know that the vocal line you've just laboured over is saved as audio in your project.

How to print the results will vary from DAW to DAW, but in Logic, I usually send an output from the un-tuned vocal track to abus and create anew mono track, with the input set to the same bus. I then record the result on the new track as it's playing through. It's possible to do a bounce offline, of course, but you really want to listen through and check the result, so this real-time approach works well.

That's avery basic overview. I'll get into more detail later, but first let's consider how best to set up Melodyne so that using it is intuitive...

User Preferences

When you first open an instance of the Melodyne plug-in, it's agood idea to make the plug-in window as large as possible; just click and drag out its bottom right corner. Having adual-screen setup is extremely useful, but it's not essential. Indeed, I can work reasonably quickly and efficiently even on a17-inch laptop screen.

Before you dive in and start tuning, spend some time familiarising yourself with the user-preference options. Everyone will have their own idea on how best to set things up (that's why they're called user preferences) but I'll explain how Ilike to tweak things and why.

Clicking on the top-left corner of the plug-in window reveals the preference settings for the Time and Pitch Grid, as well as general View options. Anew Melodyne instance always defaults to 'Semitone Snap' in the Pitch Grid preferences, and Iprefer to set this to 'No Snap'. Why? Because Iwant to be able to move the notes freely on the grid. Vocal tuning is not an exact science, but something that's best finessed while using your ears; sometimes moving anote ±15 cents sharp or flat of the 'perfect' pitch can make all the difference in the world.

Similarly, the Time Grid preferences allow you to determine how the notes will snap to the grid. This is something I often have enabled, but with the 'Dynamic' option ticked, so that the snap resolution is finer the more I zoom in. This is very helpful when working on material that's been recorded to aclick or programmed on agrid, with afixed tempo, but should you need to break free from the constraints of the grid, holding down the Alt key while adjusting the timing of anote bypasses the snap function, and allows you to make finer adjustments.

The 'View' menu presents lots of options for what information is to be displayed with the analysed audio. The only settings Igenerally have ticked are 'Show Pitch Curves' and 'Show Note Separations'. Pitch Curves are the thin lines that join the notes to show the variation in pitch, and Note Separations are the vertical lines between each note, which make it easy to see how and where Melodyne has decided to separate the notes in aperformance. This is particularly useful when splitting asingle note into smaller pieces, as we'll discover alittle later.

Try This At Home!

As far as I'm concerned, that's it for the preparation stage, so we're ready to look at apractical example. You can download and use audio example 1 if you want to work through the process with me, and my instructions will assume that you are doing this.

First, loop aregion, then click Melodyne's 'Transfer' button. If you've done it right, this button will turn orange. Now play the looped section. Once Melodyne has analysed the audio, it will appear as orange Blobs (Melodyne's terminology, not mine!). Now, when you press play on your DAW, you're hearing the audio that's captured inside Melodyne, rather than the audio whose waveform is displayed on the DAW track on which the plug-in is inserted — so any edits you now make on that DAW track will not affect what's played back (unless you bypass Melodyne).

Now magnify the captured area using the horizontal and vertical sliders, so that the Blobs are as large as possible, while still seeing the loop you've set. The slider in the bottom-right corner of the plug-in controls how large the Blobs will appear on the grid. There are anumber of different sliders for zooming in on the desired section of audio in Melodyne. The bottom right one adjusts the size of the Blobs themselves.

Before you do anything else, listen back to the passage and look at how Melodyne has analysed the vocal. In audio example 1, the vocalist sings, "Comfort, it comes to me...”. Mostly, he's singing legato and staccato notes, which Melodyne has tracked accurately, but notice that the singer bends the note up at the start of the words "Comfort” and "to”. Melodyne has interpreted these as single notes, so we'll need to separate them before further processing, to prevent these nuances of performance from being lost or minimised. Use the Note Separation tool to split the note where the vocalist hits the B note in "Comfort” and the C# on "to”.Melodyne is generally very good at tracking pitch, but some nuances are usually missed. In these two screens, you can see where two notes were read as one, and how the author has used the Note Separation tool to split them at the appropriate point.

If the vocals have been well sung and require very little tuning, as in this example, Melodyne's Correct Pitch function provides areally quick way to get everything sitting in the right place. Highlighting the captured vocal and clicking the Correct Pitch button opens awindow with Correct Pitch Centre and Correct Pitch Drift slider controls. As long as any note splits such as those we've just done have been performed, pushing both sliders up to 100 percent usually makes for adecent starting point. From there, only afew minor tweaks will usually be needed to get the vocal sounding really sweet.As long as you've done all the necessary note splits, it can be good to set the pitch-centre and pitch-drift correction settings to 100 percent. For one thing, this will show you clearly if Melodyne is trying to force aBlob to the wrong note!

Ifound that the Correct Pitch function in my example shifted the word "to” down to C natural, when it should have been aC#. Correcting this by clicking and dragging makes the line sound much better, and A/B comparison with the original untuned vocal should reveal asubtle improvement, as demonstrated in Audio Examples 2 and 3. However, to achieve the best result, alittle further attention is still required.

Attending To Details

Listening more forensically to the last example, you should be able to hear that the vocalist takes atiny amount of time to settle into the notes at the start and end of the word "Comfort”, as well as during the legato transition between "to” and "me”. If you want Melodyne to give natural-sounding results with such fine details, you need to split the notes and work on the resulting parts separately — so let me break this down and take you through how I assessed and processed each note.

• "Comfort”: In the first syllable of the word, there were two small wavers in pitch at the beginning of the note, and then aslight variation about athird of the way through. First, I split the note into four sections at the appropriate points. This made it possible to use the manual Pitch Tools to bring all four parts of the note into tune.It's not uncommon to find considerable variation within anote. In these cases the best results are usually obtained from splitting the note into even smaller segments, and using the manual pitch-correction tools. I find the Pitch Drift tool the most useful for this job, because it irons out those little deviations, but the Pitch Transition tool (which appears when you hover the mouse over the start of any Pitch Transition line, if you have the main Pitch tool selected) is also invaluable, as it smooths out any joins created whilst splitting and moving the audio. In this instance, it was also useful for slightly accentuating the bend into the note. The final process was to slightly raise the pitch of the tail end of the syllable, so that it dropped sweetly from the B to the G#.

Now for the second syllable, "fort”. The only part of this that Ifelt needed addressing was the very tail, where the note drops off slightly. Using exactly the same Splitting, Drift and Transition tools, I was able to bring this nicely into line.

• "Comes”: This is delivered with anice vibrato, but it also drops in pitch alittle at the end. Atouch of the Transition tool smoothed the edit, but Ifound that Ialso wanted to use the Modulation tool, just to calm the vibrato effect a tiny bit on the tail of the note. This is apowerful tool and over-use may inadvertently introduce the robo-voice effect, so proceed with caution!

• "To”: Isimply nudged the initial note down to B and added awhisker of Drift with the Drift tool. Iliked the way the part rose to C#, but could hear the tail of the note go slightly sharp. Using the Drift tool on the whole note would make it dip in pitch in the middle (not pleasant!), so to straighten it out unobtrusively, the note needed to be split.

• "Me”: This final word sounded fine, and just atouch of the Drift tool straightened the note out perfectly. The building vibrato at the end rounded off the whole line neatly.

With all your tweaks done, it's important to listen back to the part, comparing the tuned with the untuned original. You're checking that you've got the pitching right in the context of the track, and listening out for any artifacts that may have crept in during processing. If you've just followed this example and the tweaks are subtle, you shouldn't detect any such artifacts, but you do want to be sure! In audio examples 1 (original) and 5 (processed), you can hear that the notes have become more definite and strong, but, importantly, the character that defines the vocal part remains intact. The difference between the two examples is subtle, but it's noticeable, and such changes add up, particularly when there are a number of different parts.

Everything we've covered so far has been about finessing apart in atrack with afixed tempo and time signature, but not every track is so regimented! Trying to use Melodyne without telling it about atempo or time-signature change will result in the playback from the plug-in slipping gradually out of sync with the rest of the track. In atrack with asingle, fixed tempo, the Chain button next to the tempo display will remain grey (unlit), but if Melodyne detects atempo change, the button will slowly flash orange. Note that Melodyne hasn't acted on the tempo change: it's simply telling you that the plug-in is no longer in sync with the DAW.

Although it's easiest to use Melodyne on material that's played at afixed tempo, it can also handle tempo changes — and will even alert you if it has lost sync with the DAW and present you with options to remedy the situation.

The next example (audio examples 6 and 7) changes at bar 69, from 150bpm in 3/4 time to 160bpm in 4/4. To get Melodyne to 'learn' the tempo change, you need to set up aloop around the bar where the tempo changes. Clicking on the Chain button opens asub-window where you can edit the tempo preferences. Click on 'Tempo Variation', and then, leaving the sub-window open, play the looped section through. Melodyne should pick up the tempo change automatically. In the example, it displays 150-160bpm.We can now capture this vocal, safe in that knowledge that Melodyne and the DAW will remain in sync.

Now let's look at this vocal part in more detail. The line is "The voice in your ear is the voice in my head”. Listen to the untuned and tuned parts (audio examples 6 and 7). You should be able to hear that I've done quite abit of work. Ihad to split the words "In your”, "ear” and "head” before Iapplied any processing. Iaccentuated the bend into the word "ear”, but then decided to straighten the word "head”, so that it stayed on the B note. Why? It just seemed to have more impact. You always need to be thinking in this way, applying your musical judgment throughout.

The next thing that Inoticed was that the words "in your” and "is the voice in my” sounded alittle rushed. Such aspects of aperformance can be easily tweaked by using the Timing tool to slightly shift the notes. Ifind the Activate Grid setting alittle extreme for this job; you usually lose the feeling from the vocal line if all the words start exactly on the beat. It's much more effective to use your ears to find the natural rhythm and perform manual edits. Listen again to audio examples 6 and 7. The last line, in particular, sounds better when the phrases are more evenly spaced.

The Amplitude Tool

The final thing to note about this line is the slight variation in level between some of the words. Most notably, the first word ("the”) is rather quiet, and the second time it occurs, the word "voice” is slightly over-accentuated. These level issues could have been gradually smoothed out with some suitable limiting and compression, but using the Amplitude tool I was able to raise or lower the amplitude of those words by afew decibels, and that made all the difference.Although best known for its pitch processing, Melodyne includes anumber of other useful vocal editing tools. Listen again to the final tuned and edited vocal (audio example 7). It already sits in the mix better than it previously did, and to me it makes sense to perform such adjustments while tuning, as you're already listening critically to the vocal part.

Formant Tweaks

The Formant tool is another useful feature. In very simple terms, formants are the harmonic frequencies that occur in the human voice. They help to define its timbre and play avery important part in how we identify the sound of words as they're spoken or sung. Changing the formants can enable you to alter the perception of how avocal has been performed. Let me explain this with another example...

The vocal line in audio example 8 is "I'd love it if you loved to watch”, and it has already been tuned using the processes explained earlier in this article. It's now ready to be printed back into my project. However, if you listen to the long, drawn-out word "loved”, you can hear alot of mid-range and high frequencies around the 700Hz-8kHz region. In fact, using afrequency analyser on this note reveals that the fundamental, at around 350Hz, is quite quiet, but that there's alot of upper mid-range energy. It's not hard to guess that this will need to be controlled in the mix in some way, to prevent the vocal from sounding harsh.

Traditional mixing tools such as EQ and compression will help, of course, but the Formant tool can also take us in the right direction. When the tool is selected, Melodyne displays formants as thick lines. If Iselect the long, held note, Ican drag all the formant bars down, lowering the harmonic frequencies atouch. In performance terms, this gives the impression that the note is being sung more from the diaphragm than the throat, as you can hear in audio example 9.As you can see from the spectrum analyser screen (bottom left), the fundamental of the unprocessed vocal part is quite weak relative to the mid-range harmonics. The Formant tool (see the 'Tools Of The Trade' box, eslewhere in this article) can be used to drag down its formants (bottom right), creating an impression that the part was sung more from the diaphragm than from the throat.

Final Thoughts

As Iwrote this article, Irealised just how difficult it is to articulate the judgements I make and the processes Iapply when tuning avocal track. But while it may take me afew thousand words to explain the processing of only afew vocal lines, the job itself becomes quick and intuitive once you know what to look out for. The key thing that you need to keep in mind is that your aim is always to enhance the vocal take where needed, while striving to preserve the expressiveness of the vocalist's performance. It's a real balancing job, and neglecting either side of the scales will leave you with a less than perfect result. Get both right, though, and you'll be surprised at the difference subtle tuning makes to even the best vocal take. Do remember, however, that vocal tuning is a tiny part of the overall production process, and that it's only going to make asignificant improvement if the vocal performance and recording are good to start with.

Finally, note that humility and diplomacy are required skills: this is absolutely not about crushing egos! Tuning is usually an operation best performed when the band aren't around. I'd much prefer avocalist to come into the studio during mixing and think that their vocal sounds amazing, without knowing that it has been tuned!