User manual CELEMONY SOFTWARE MELODYNE EDITOR 1.2 REV 2

[. . . ] editor user manual Melodyne editor user manual rev 2 This documentation refers to Melodyne editor 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 bear in mind that for technical reasons, switching to this mode causes the Undo History to be deleted, so any actions performed prior to the change of mode can no longer be reversed. ) If you select the Note Assignment Tool whilst editing polyphonic material, additional control elements will appear beneath the Toolbar. The color of the editing background changes to remind you that in Note Assignment mode, no `audible' editing is possible. This mode is used to check Melodyne editor's interpretation of the audio material and correct it where necessary. Notes that have been `swallowed' (where a fundamental has been mistaken for an overtone) can be activated, which makes it possible later to edit them. Conversely, overtones that have been mistaken for fundamentals can be deactivated. In this mode, the outline of active blobs is filled in (i. e. they are solid) whereas, with inactive blobs, only the hollow outline is seen. 62 Melodyne editor user manual Checking and editing the note detection When you click on a blob, you will hear the pitch of the corresponding tone. Where a solid blob has been assigned to what is, in fact, merely one of the overtones of some other note, you can deactivate it by double-clicking on it. Now only the hollow outline of the blob will be seen and its energy in the frequency spectrum will be attributed to the note of which it can most plausibly be assumed to be an overtone. In the example above, you can see that, in deactivating the higher A, we have caused the lower A to be redrawn more thickly: this is because the spectral energy previously ascribed to the higher note (when it was assumed to be a separate note) has been reassigned to the lower one (of which it is now considered to be an overtone). Conversely, by double-clicking on a hollow blob, you can turn a potential note currently interpreted by Melodyne editor as an overtone into an active one. Only active notes can be edited later using the tools in the Melodyne Toolbar, which is why all the notes played and only those notes should be represented by solid blobs. Otherwise you may find yourself editing, not whole notes with their full overtone spectra, but stray overtones divorced from the fundamentals to which they belong, which will yield poor results acoustically. Now that you know how to activate and deactivate blobs, you have mastered the basics of Note Assignment in Melodyne editor. The more complex the overtone structure of the audio material, the more open it is to different interpretations when it comes to note assignment, and therefore the more work you will have to do to correct manually the inevitable errors of interpretation. Melodyne editor does offer you, however, a number of aids to ensure the procedure is as swift and effortless as possible. Melodyne editor user manual 63 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. This is both a switch and a rotary control. When activated, this causes the sound of a synthesizer to replace the normal sound of each blob. To control the volume, click on the icon and drag the mouse pointer to the left or right. This synthesizer replaces normal playback of the original recording when Melodyne editor is in Note Assignment mode. This allows you to hear the notes that are currently `active' ­ i. e. 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 undistracted by the original sound. With it, you can very quickly determine whether all the notes actually played have been identified correctly as fundamentals as well as weeding out notes that were never played ­ i. e. overtones that have been mistaken for fundamentals. [. . . ] Suppose you are editing a guitar track recorded in time with a playback running at 120 BPM and the player has introduced slight 136 Melodyne editor user manual Special functions of Melodyne editor Stand-Alone tempo variations to his or her performance. When you now open the recording in Melodyne editor Stand-Alone, you will see that these tempo variations have been detected and are preserved in the playback. If you watch the Tempo display during playback, you will notice it constantly changing, with the values hovering around 120. Now, however, the tail is wagging the dog. [. . . ]