If Melodyne Isn't Picking The Correct Notes...

Melodyne’s pitch detection is REALLY good, but it’s not perfect. It doesn’t work as well for vocals that have a rough, gravelly quality. The best solution is to make sure of Note Assignment Mode in Melodyne.

Take a listen to this vocal done by yours truly. I almost injured my vocal cords doing this… you’re welcome.

Once transferred into Melodyne, you can see that there are a couple of notes that jump way out of line:

When you try to correct them back into place, it sounds terrible because it thinks you’re really asking it to correct the note by about 11 semitones:

Go up to the top and select the wrench which puts us in NOTE ASSIGNMENT mode. You know you did it right when the grey bars turn into a nice muted orange color.

You’ll notice these little silhouettes appear, which are Melodyne’s next best guess for what the note should be detected as:

We want to re-assign the current note to be the next best suggested one. You just double click the silhouette of the note you’d like to change.

When you go switch back to the Note Edit Mode and fix the note as normal, it will sound 1000x more natural! Check it out:

Not very many people use Note Assignment mode in Melodyne, but it's a really useful way to make sure that Melodyne is detecting the correct notes so that you don't make more work for yourself later on.

I recommend that you switch over to Note Assignment mode before you edit all the notes and quickly take a look at the silhouetted notes to double check the melody.

If you need help with Melodyne, or if you'd like a quote for vocal tuning and alignment on your project, feel free to drop me a line at info@vocalsweetener.com