Logic Pro X - FLEX PITCH vs MELODYNE | Which is best for vocal tuning?

hey guys this is music tech help guy and in this video I'm going to do a side-by-side comparison of using flex pitch versus using melody n-- for vocal tuning now whenever I do videos on vocal tuning or melody n-- one of the most common questions and comments is why don't you just use flex pitch it works just fine and it comes with logic you don't to pay anything extra for it now my gripe with flex pitch actually there's three main gripes with flex pitch the first is that just the act of turning on flex pitch can introduce artifacts into the signal so sometimes I find that even when I try to turn off flex pitch there'll be pops and clicks in my audio signal even when you're not using it so just turning it on can cause the signal to have pops and clicks in it too one problem one he like a big problem with flex pitch is that it doesn't handle more complex vocal Tambor's very well it handles clear tone female vocals clear tone male pop vocals really well but it doesn't handle more raspy rock or blues vocals or deeper sounding vocals so that's a big gripe with me any time you try to tune amay any time I try to tune a male vocalist with flex pitch typically I'll just get a lot of warbled and wonky sounding artifacts in there that I really don't like and number three is kind of a continuation of one and two but it's just not as transparent as Melodyne one of the things I love about Melodyne is if you if you tuned the vocals correctly you can do it in a way where you can't even tell that any vocal tuning was applied given you have to have a good vocal recording to start with you're not going to be able to start with a terrible vocal recording and make it sound perfect you know it's you're gonna hear lots of artifacts and a bad vocal recording but if you have good vocal recordings and you tune the right way you can actually make the vocal tuning sounding very transparent with Melodyne which I can't seem to do with flex pitch let's just hear this as is I've taken the reverb off there is some EQ and compression on it though but here this as is no vocal tuning whatsoever you wasted so much of my time I thought that I'd found everything now realize you were nothing I hope she made you feel alive [Music] so it's not a bad singer at all she's very good singer there's a few little pitchy notes here and there that we could clean up to make her fit better in key with the that with the guitar and also this is a high pretty high quality recording this is done with like $1,000 vocal mic and a professional studio and a treated space so let me just solo out her vocals here and let's try flex pitch first so just turn on my Flex I'll show flex on that channel so it analyzes it and then I'll put this on flex pitch now I'm not sure if this is gonna happen or not but I'm gonna play this back just as is without doing anything to the audio and let's see if we can hear any artifacts being introduced into the signal tell me why you wasted so much of my time I thought that I'd found everything no realize you were nothing I hope she made you feel alive I hope you're happy to see me cry it's it's handling it pretty well here and I think it's because she's got a brighter brighter voice so it handles female vocals relatively well and brighter singers relatively well there's a few little spots or I heard just maybe like a minor click way in the background but it's nothing not no big deal so I don't like tuning out here I like tuning in the separate editor so I'm just gonna double click up here so I'm not gonna try to scale quantize this or anything I'm actually gonna go through and just manually tune it up here so one of the things I do love that flex pitch does that Melodyne actually doesn't is when you have syllables like this you wasted so much the consonant sound it actually leaves the note out for anything that's consonant sound because you don't want to tune the consonants you know if there's no tonality to a note you don't want to tune it so that's actually an advantage of flex pitch over Melodyne yeah that even that first note there tell me it's got out some weirdness to it and I haven't even done anything to it okay so I've tuned up this first phrase here just by double clicking on the notes and setting them to the intended target so far so good some of the notes sound a little overly tuned but that's just because I'm tuning them perfectly to the grid you could apply less than a hundred percent pitch correction to these but for this video I'm going to apply a hundred percent pitch correction in in all of my examples now another thing you can control here is you can adjust the pitch drift on the front end and back end of the note so you can see on this high note here on a-flat the pitch sort of sort of starts lower and then comes up it drifts up so I'm gonna pull up the pitch drift here and then pull it down here now one of the things I don't like about Melodyne is there's no pitch drift center control across the whole note like instead of adjusting the front and back end let's say I want to adjust the pitch drift overall you can't do that in flex pitch you can do that in melody and pretty easily you can pull down the vibrato but that's something else completely that's uh that's pulling out the vibrato in the voice you wasted so much of my time I also don't like that there's no integrated way to just join clips or separate them you actually have to use the scissors tool to separate and then you have to use the was the glue tool to glue them back together so I'm not a big fan of that but it is what it is it's it's a minor it's a minor thing let's go ahead and tune this back so I'm just double-clicking to set these to the closest pitch found everything I'm going to pull down the pitch drift here pull it up here I'll do the same here just trying to center these notes a bit better not trying to make them sound crazy you know auto-tuned or anything like that yeah sometimes having the pitch drift in there makes it something a little more natural [Music] I find myself often cunning the front end of notes like this they've got like a bit of a pitch scooped up on them it ends up sounding more natural that way and I think this is nothing those need to be joined back together should I go for both of those glue them back together play with the pitch drift a bit here no real as you learned nothing pull that wiggle up a bit if you learned nothing I hope she made you feel five it's tuned these up now this nuts got a bit of a blue note in it so I'm probably gonna tune that one a little bit differently let me try separating that blue note out there we go I think the key the song is D flat major I hope she made you feel alive here's another blue note this is why I'm not snapping to a particular key I'm not using the scale snap because when there's blue notes there's notes that are sort of chromatically in between notes within the key like normally if this is in the key it would go up to B flat like this I hope she made you feel alive but that on the word on live live it's too much she made you feel alive and actually you probably go up a little bit just a little bit it's almost like in-between there we go [Music] yeah a lot of her low notes are where she's out of tune I hope ya hear all that hear all that those artifacts in there and I hope you I hope you're happy I hope you're happy I hope you're happy it's got a real weird almost like a distortion saturation to it I hope you're happy see me and I'm gonna leave most of this little rundown alone except for the very last note and this long note here I don't want to get into the habit of breaking this up and trying to tune all these little ornaments in her voice it's not gonna sound good if I try to do that I will pull up this pitch drift though as I wipe the falling tears from marching let's just separate this here as I wipe the falling tears from Matty yeah I mean that's just really really noticeable that that's been tuned and again I know I'm tuning a hundred percent as I like the falling tears from Matty it's not it's not great alright let's give that a listen now with the music back in whole thing [Music] I thought that I'd found everything no realize you were nothing I hope she made you feel alive I hope you're happy dear me like the father imagine ya handled it pretty well let's mute that and let's try melody on and I'm gonna go through like most of the same you know pretty much all the same motions alright so I've got everything printed into the melody and plug-in let's try this out again so the way I like to use Melodyne one of the great things I like to do is hold option and you can move the notes around fine tuning wise not necessarily chromatically so if you know there's a an intended position for a note you can get it close then drag over the notes go up to the pitch correct pitch macro and then Center those pitches again one of the things I love about melody I know I was talking about before is when you're trying to adjust the pitch drift you you can do it with just the standard pitch tool here you can adjust sort of like the glide and drift at the beginning and tail end of of each note but what I generally like to do I don't use that tool much unless there's like a problem I'll usually use the pitch drift tool yes and this allows you to Center the vibrato on the note it doesn't reduce the vibrato it just centers the pitch drift on the center of the note which to me sounds much more natural and also that tell the T until has a very clear transient to it we're just turning on flex pitch softened that transient again it may sound like I'm I'm nitpicking here but I am that's the point of the video let me tune all these up now this is that area that's got that little blue note right here I'm going to separate that out and I think everything that's will be okay so we drag over all of those notes tune those up you wasted so much of my time so like I said her low notes are kind of where she's falling flat what I could do here on these low notes because I could Center the pitch drift a bit and if there's too much vibrato you can use the pitch modulation tool to pull out some of the vibrato mmm you wasted so much of my time like right here there's quite a bit of a broto on that note again what I'll typically do is use pitch drift first Center it and then if I want to actually pull out vibrato I'll use the pitch modulation tool again you have to be careful if you use it too much it'll sound really robotic [Music] found everything now this is a note here and everything that was troublesome in the previous one this is where the pitch tool comes in handy because I can make the pitch sort of glide up more or I can make it more intentional that's really intentional let's pull out the glide between these two notes a bit more found everything so it's not as harsh another thing you can do is you can add the pitch drift correction right here in the pitch macro so sometimes I'll add this in here like around 50% just to slightly Center the pitch drift on the note I don't know if I need to separate that or not let's see nothing and then when it comes to joining notes back together or separating and Melodyne all you do is hover over the top part of the note to double click and that'll separate and you can use that same shortcut to join notes back together so this part here right here I hope she and the flex pitch example sounded pretty wonky let's see what it sounds like in Melodyne I hope she made you feel way better to me it's it's way more precise it doesn't sound fake at all it doesn't sound like it was overly corrected whatsoever I hope she made you fit I bet even if I add in some pitch modulation flatten out the vibrato a bit I hope she made you yeah still sounds very clean to me alright so off-screen I went through and tuned the rest of it up similar to how I did in flex pitch let's give each phrase a listen back-to-back melody n-- versus flex pitch tell me why you wasted so much of my time tell me why you wasted so much of my time I thought that I had found everything no realize you were nothing I thought that I had found everything no realize you were nothing I hope she made you feel alive I hope you're happy to see me cry yeah I hope she made you feel alive I hope you're happy to see me cry as I like the falling tears from marching as I like the falling tears from marching yeah so there's a noticeable like almost like a saturated filtery sound on the the flex pitch version on all of these examples and you know you don't really notice it until you play them back-to-back Melodyne sounds crystal-clear it's not 100% perfect and you know some of that can be just user error you know just me tuning a note differently on flex pitch than I do in melody but overall in terms of just tone quality flex pitch really messes with the audio quality of this singer in a way that I don't like and yes using you know higher sample rates will certainly help this recording though is done at 88 - so it's been it was at a pretty high sample rate sometimes you'll find that using a higher sample rate really helps with the quality of time compression and expansion as well as pitch correction so that's certainly something to keep in mind but when we recorded this we recorded it at 88 - so I'm not using like a low sample rate here or something so I've got a male vocal part here - that's just singing in harmony with the female lead vocals let me play this back as is and then I'll play each phrase back-to-back with Melodyne and then flex pitch a major happy to see me cry so it's a good recording she's obviously not as good of a singer as the lead vocalist so let's tune him up and make his harmonies match up well with the leads a major fear a major fear happy to see me cry happy to see me cry love to fall in tears from my cheek left falling tears from a G yeah so the same complaint as before the flex pitch algorithm seems to make the the tone of the vocals sound like there's harmonica distortion or something in it there's some sort of saturation in it and it may just be you know part of the algorithm may just be the way that flex pitch handles format correction you know and you know this is just too vocal examples you know the kind of sound that you get may vary from voice to voice if flex pitch works great for you great you know I just don't like that sound I don't like you know what I want is I want the vocal tuning to be transparent so I'll just play the melody an example first with both voices in and then I'll play the flex pitch with both voices in I hope she made you feel [Music] I hope you're happy to see me as I love the phone oh gee I hope she made you feel let me see me God as I love the phone it [Music] yeah same thing as I said before there's some harmonic saturation or something going on bad with flex pitch that's altering the tone of the voice that I don't like all right so I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did please leave it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this you can also check me out on social media on Facebook Twitter Instagram and if you'd like to make a monthly contribution to the channel you can check me out at patreon.com ford slash music tech health guy thanks to the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 64,696

Rating: 4.9390583 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, logic studio, studio, logic x, flex pitch, flex, flex time, melodyne, flex pitch vs melodyne, melodyne vs flex pitch, vocal, vocal tuning, pitch correction, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy, tutorial, review

Id: _c6QA86jlfQ

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019