In Note Assignment Mode, there are three tools for note separations. Depending upon the tool, vertical lines and triangles appear that can also be edited. And there are menu commands for additional functions. We will deal with these in a moment one by one. But first let's understand what a separation actually is. Melodyne detects in its analysis not only the pitch of a note, but also its beginning and end. These two are marked by delimiters. Pretty much like MIDI Note On and -Off. Notes can be separated in two ways: soft separations are indicated by thin vertical lines and hard separations by brackets. Notes either side of a soft separation adjust to their neighbors when these are moved or lengthened. The note transition therefore is fully preserved. With hard separations, there is no adjustment; so notes can overlap or become detached. In polyphonic recordings, separations are initially hard. Soft separations, however, allow the coherent editing of voice-leading within individual parts. The separations also determine how the attack noise of polyphonic instruments is shared out between notes. In a strummed guitar chord, for example, pick noise precedes the clearly pitched sound of the decaying notes. This noise is common to all the strings. So to allow you to create realistic arpeggios, Melodyne assigns a portion of the pick noise to each string that it can take with it when it is moved. You see, then, that note separations in Melodyne give rise to many sound design and musical possibilities. But now to the details: This is how Note Assignment Mode looks with the Separation Tool selected. Solid triangles beneath the ruler mark the points at which Melodyne has detected the start of a note. From each line, therefore, hangs at least one note – often several. The notes may begin varying distances to the left of their shared starting point line. This is because the lines indicate the point of musical emphasis. The physical start of the sound, however, may come earlier. How much earlier depends upon the speed of the instrument's attack. There are also notes that are not suspended from a line. This happens when the attack is too indistinct, in Melodyne's view, to justify the presence of such a line. Hollow triangles indicate places where Melodyne thought about placing a starting-point line but decided in the end – perhaps narrowly – against doing so. We speak in such cases of ‘inactive starting-point markers’. For this purpose, there's an activation slider. The 'parenthesis' icon on the right determines the number of inactive markers that are created, while the ‘ball’ on the left determines how many of these become active and acquire lines. You can also move, activate or deactivate the triangles manually. And even create new ones. Now to the tools. With the first Separation Tool you can remove existing separations or create new ones elsewhere. If at the time the tool is sufficiently close to an active starting point line, the note will be attached to it. The same applies to movement. Only of course, if you're to the left of the starting point line. To the right of the line (i.e. subsequent to it in time), no attachment takes place. The second separation tool toggles between hard and soft separations. And the third tool detaches notes from, or attaches them to, starting point lines. When attached, notes collect attack noise. Here, for example, where it is important. Each of these notes has a clearly recognizable attack. This is indicated visually by the amplitude, which is high at the start but diminishes rapidly as the note decays. But we are still listening to the original signal. Check the sound quality by slowing down the playback. Listen to see whether the pick noise still sounds realistic. So far, it's OK. But listen here… This note sounds anemic... How come? At the instant indicated by this starting-point line, Melodyne has found one... two… three… four different pitches. But only one plucking sound, which is initially shared between all four notes. So we see here… and here … swellings showing a rise in amplitude. But these are misplaced, because there was no contact between the plectrum and these lower strings at this instant. You correct this by attaching the note that actually was plucked to the starting-point line. This has the effect of assigning any noise coinciding with the line to the correct note. The swellings down here have now vanished. Once again, a visual comparison: this was it before and here it is after the attachment. Let's listen again… That's right, now. You can attach or detach entire selections of notes at the same time to or from starting-point lines using the context menu. And if you wish to assign notes to a particular part, to respect the voice-leading, you can convert the selection to a connected sequence in which only soft separations appear. And now a tip to speed up the workflow. Most actions in Note Assignment Mode result in the blobs being altered in some way or the other. Like, new blobs are being added, or attack noise is reassigned. So Melodyne does lots of processing.
And that takes time. You know this because after almost every action, the clock appears and you have to wait a moment. You can eliminate such delays by deactivating automatic recalculation of the signal. But be careful: this means you'll get no acoustic feedback as you are editing. If you attach this note, for instance, so its attack sounds right, at first you'll hear no difference. Only when you update the audio signal manually will any improvement be reflected in the sound. Instead of clicking ‘Now’ to trigger a recalculation, you can simply switch back to normal Edit Mode. The sound then will always reflect the latest changes.
