Correcting Pitch with Melodyne

I have recently recorded a band live and have noticed after the recordings that one of the guitars have not been properly tuned, and made the recordings sound not as good as I wanted. The band I recorded didn't have a bass guitar and this particular guitar played more of the lower octave rhythm of the song, which I treated as the "bass". In every track I hear, I feel the bass takes charge of the key of the song, and by the lower octave rhythm guitar not being tuned well, it throws the tune off most times, so I had to retune it. To be able to tune a polyphonic instrument properly such as this rhythm guitar, I used Melodyne 4 Editor. Like iZotope's RX 5, I've never used Melodyne so I was glad to finally use it and learn about its features to then use more frequently in future.

For those unfamiliar with the software Melodyne, it is the go-to pitch correcting tool that helps to correct any kind of monophonic or polyphonic instruments. You are able to also pitch any instrument to any scales and tunings, edit timing and amplitude, and shape the sound to your liking, (Celemony, 2018).

Process

I loaded the rhythm guitar onto Melodyne by using the transfer button to record the track into Melodyne. The software was able to detect that the instrument was polyphonic and split the individual notes across the piano scale which was impressive. Visually I could see that most of the notes weren't tuned correctly and also towards the top, I was able to see how far sharp or flat any selected note was as it showed how many cents over or under it was from the 0 cent mark.

The highlighted red note is -21 cents below its perfect tune

Because I only wanted all notes to be tuned to 0 cents, I didn't really need to do anything else or use any other features. I first went into the pitch grid menu and made sure the "No snap" option was selected, meaning that when I tune the notes by clicking on them, it won't snap to a particular scale and will only snap to the proper note that it's in. I then selected all the individual notes by highlighting them all, and double clicked on a note, which automatically snap all notes to 0 cents. The picture below is the after-version of the picture above after I've clicked it to snap to 0 cents on its note.

Untuned guitar automatically snapped to 0 cents of its note

After tuning this guitar, and adding it to the rest of the instruments of the song, it made the song more fitting and made the key of the song more recognisable.

Even though I did basic pitch correcting using Melodyne, I was able to learn small features here and there that I knew would be helpful in my future compositions, and I was really impressed that it was able to pick out individual notes within a polyphonic instrument. Using Melodyne to correct any little mistakes such as wrong notes within a guitar chord, would save me having to make many playlists of the same recordings, and I'll also be able to add other little notes in the chords as well and be more experimental with it. Hopefully one day, I'll save up and get Melodyne as well as iZotope RX as I know it'll be a huge help, especially as I'm thinking of incorporating more acoustic instruments in my compositions instead of midi instruments, which would need cleaning and pitch correcting.

Bibilography

Celemony. (2018). What can Melodyne do?. Retrieved from https://www.celemony.com/en/melodyne/what-can-melodyne-do