Borrowing Pitch and Time Correction Techniques from the Pros

Suppose you are happy with a home recording of your voice or your acoustic instrument, except, rats, there were a couple of bad notes. What do you do? Sing the right note and punch it into the sound track? That doesn’t work. The seams at the boundary of the punched-in note would be equivalent to mending of clothes with a stapler instead of needle and thread. So, sigh, you have to record it again, probably the next time with less musical enthusiasm.

Recording studio professionals have tools that make mending sound tracks as easy as using a stapler to mend clothes, but with results that are as good as using needle and thread. I have recently discovered that you don’t have to be a recording studio professional to do this. The tool I used is Melodyne, by Celemony.

Melodyne makes repairing wrong notes easy, because it can “hear” notes. In a recording of a single voice or instrument, Melodyne can, with a high degree of accuracy, determine the pitch of notes, and determine where they start and begin.

When we see pictures of sound, we usually see sound waves, presented as rapid fluctuations air pressure over time, such as this recording of me singing the first phrase of “Home on the Range”:

I’ve never been able to hear in my head music by looking at sound waves that look like that.

Below is how Melodyne shows the same recording. Notice how Melody separates the notes to different pitches, and separates adjacent notes at the same pitch:

Looking at the above, you might be able to actually hear in your head the notes of “Home on the Range”. Notice some of the finer details, and you’ll be glad you’re just looking at, rather than actually hearing, how I sang this.

“Home on the Range” is a theme song in my family. One time as my kids were waiting in the back seat at Burger King, I auditioned “Home on the Range” nearly at the top of my lungs to the drive-up window clerk. It sounded about as good as you might predict by studying the details of my singing in Melodyne:

I’ll spare you the before and after recordings of my voice. Instead, here’s what my singing looks like after I was easily able in Melodyne to correct all kinds of horrors:

You can tell, even without listening, that my poor pitch singing is going to sound a whole lot better.

What’s especially amazing to me about Melodyne’s correction of my pitches is that it still preserved the personality of my voice, and the sung lyrics. Further, I was able to rewrite the melody pitch line of “Home on the Range”, dragging notes up and down, or right and left, while still preserving the tone of my voice. There was not the Mickey Mouse or Darth Vader voice effect you get by simply speeding up or slowing down a recording. Yet, if I wanted to, I could separately change the tone of my voice to be more Mickey Mouse-like or Darth Vader, by adjusting the “formant” parameter in Melodyne. I sort of like adding just a little bit of Darth Vader to my voice, to sound a little bit more manly.

All of the various types of note corrections were reasonably easy to do with Melodyne. Although it is a tool well-suited for professional recording studio use, Melodyne is also quite friendly enough for everyday musicians.

If you play around with the trial version of Melodyne, or if you own and use a copy, let others know here what your experience has been.