Best Auto-Tune Software for Vocal Pitch Correction

Melodyne comes at pitch correction in a completely different way. It has the ability to somehow work with a sense of musical and emotional intelligence. The algorithms Celemony have developed grasp the feel of the music to enable it to achieve quite extraordinary acoustic faithfulness. And this is not necessarily all about the vocals, it can just as well be about solo instruments and polyphonic instruments, too.

It’s quite fascinating to watch Melodyne work. You give it a piece of audio and it graphically pulls notes out into an editor for manipulation. It’s impressive on a solo melody but it’s like sorcery when it does the same thing to polyphonic instruments. With Melodyne, you can now edit a single note in a strummed chord. It sort of makes anything possible and has earned it the headline of “Photoshop for sounds.”

Melodyne recognizes digital audio as music as opposed to simply data to process. So, when you edit notes the character is retained, the emotional elements are dealt with sympathetically and then the musicality becomes part of the process. You can move and tweak notes for sure, but then you can add vibrancy, increase expression, deepen the emotion, widen the dynamics and alter the structure. Melodyne speaks the language of music.

The graphical interface appears at first glance to be a bit dated. But these blobs of data with pitch lines give you all the information you need about the character of that note. These are not waveforms; these are notes. Vibrato, sibilance and movement aren’t lost as you change things, it adapts to the new position or you can redesign it. Overtones can be accessed alongside giving you full control over the tone and feel of the sound.

Melodyne invented the ARA protocol along with PreSonus that Auto-Tune now supports. It allows you to use Melodyne purely on the parts of the track you want to edit. It also now lets you see and edit multiple tracks simultaneously.

What it doesn’t do is real-time live performance processing. Melodyne is an off-line process. It does the work in post-production. It offers the producer a fantastic range of possibilities after all the musicians have gone home to tweak, reshape or even rewrite the music. And not just of the vocals, but of every instrument.

Street Prices:
• Melodyne 5 Essential (Monophonic pitch and scale correction) $99
• Melodyne 5 Assistant (Monophonic pitch editing, formant control, vibrato) $249
• Melodyne 5 Editor (Polyphonic pitch editing, single track) $399
• Melodyne 5 Studio (Polyphonic pitch editing, multi-track and overtone editing) $699

celemony.com