User manual CELEMONY SOFTWARE MELODYNE ESSENTIAL 1.2 REV 2

[. . . ] essential user manual Melodyne essential user manual rev 2 This documentation refers to Melodyne essential 1. 2. Hoenig, Stefan Lindlahr, Alex Schmidt Translation: Ewan Whyte Layout: Saskia Kölliker Celemony Software GmbH Valleystr. 25, 81371 München, Germany www. celemony. com Support: support@celemony. com The manual and the software described therein are supplied under formal licence. They may be used and copied only under the conditions of this licensing agreement. [. . . ] Please note that for technical reasons, when you switch to this mode, the Undo history will be deleted, so any actions taken prior to the mode change cannot subsequently be undone. The editing background is indicated by different coloring to remind you that in Note Assignment mode, no audible editing of the notes takes place. In this mode, you check through and alter Melodyne essential's interpretation of the notes in the audio material. You assign falsely interpreted notes to the correct pitches in order to achieve perfect agreement between the displayed notes ­ and to create the essential foundation for subsequent editing. 46 S UMMARY Melodyne essential user manual Checking and editing the note detection Against the editing background, you see in this mode solid (active) and hollow (potential) notes. The active notes are those for which Melodyne essential in the course of the detection has assigned the greatest plausibility. The program proceeds on the assumption that these are the notes that were actually played and can be heard in the material. The hollow potential notes represent alternative notes with the next highest plausibility. It might also be these notes that are heard in the material, although the probability is greater that the active notes are the right ones. It is a question here of recognizing the right notes in the audio material, and although Melodyne essential has a high hit quota, the detection can sometimes be wrong. In the illustration above, for example, you will see, an octave beneath the active detected notes, the same notes again but this time as hollow potential notes. Melodyne essential cannot be sure whether the sound of the recorded instrument might not have a pronounced overtone an octave above the fundamental. If it has such an overtone, it could be that the entire melody has been detected an octave too high. The octave beneath the detected notes, in other words, is the next most plausible location for the notes of the melody, which is why these notes are offered here as potential alternatives to the detected notes. Now it can happen that one note in a melody, because of the way it was played or sung, has a different overtone structure and is for that reason detected an octave too low. A telltale indicator of such an error is often the presence of a steep notch in the path traced by the melody. Melodyne essential user manual 47 Checking and editing the note detection To correct this error of interpretation, one way is to double-click the potential note at the correct pitch. As a result, the potential note will be activated and the falsely assigned note deactivated. Alternatively you can simply drag the falsely assigned note towards the correct pitch (in this case, obviously, upwards); it is not necessary to drop the note exactly on the correct pitch. The dragging triggers a new detection for the note, with the guideline: `Look for the correct pitch higher up'. When you then release the note, it jumps to the next most plausible higher pitch, which in all likelihood will be the correct one. 48 Melodyne essential user manual Checking and editing the note detection The Monitoring Synthesizer A considerable aid when checking and correcting note assignments is accessed by clicking the Sine Wave icon, which you will see beneath the Toolbar. When activated, this causes the sound of a synthesizer to replace the normal sound of each blob. To turn the knob, click on it and drag the mouse pointer to the right or left, thereby increasing or decreasing, respectively, the volume of the synthesized sound. But why should you do this?The Monitoring Synthesizer allows you to hear the notes that you can see and that are currently active, making it easy to check whether these notes correspond to those that can be heard in the material. Think of the solid blobs as representing a transcription of the music in the audio file. The synthesizer allows you now to check this transcription with a MIDI tone generator and therefore easily determine whether all the notes are at the right octave. You can carry on reassigning notes as described above and arrive more swiftly at the ideal: where the solid blobs displayed represent all, and only, the notes actually played. Melodyne essential user manual 49 Checking and editing the note detection Note separation When you place the mouse pointer somewhat above a blob, the arrow turns into the Note Separation Tool. [. . . ] Since in this case, we want to halve the current tempo, we select the entry beginning `1/2' from the list box provided. When we now exit with `OK', we will find that the one-bar loop extends over one bar only in the grid, and that the value in the Tempo box has been halved. Problem solved. Defining a constant tempo If you choose the option `Define constant tempo', you can enter in the box provided a new value for the tempo. When might you want to do this?There is one case in particular where it might be desirable to define a fixed tempo. Suppose you are editing a guitar track recorded in time with a playback running at 120 BPM and the player has introduced slight Melodyne essential user manual 93 Special functions of Melodyne essential Stand-Alone tempo variations to his or her performance. [. . . ]