Vocal Tuning with Melodyne Essential in REAPER (ARA2)

hey everyone today we're going to be editing a vocal using Melodyne inside a Reaper with the new ARA technology so what I have here is a song called maybe it's from unicorn rodeo and I got this from the Cambridge MT site it's a free to use multitrack that you can download and it's a good track to practice mixing with I've done a rough mix it sounds half decent I'd say [Music] like maybe I'm polish [Music] modify one more [Music] pretty good but it could use a bit of tightening just to fit with the sins and the other guitars and things that are more perfectly in tune so I'm using Reaper 5.97 to this ara function was added in 97 0 basically what it does is instantly load in the vocal pitch information into Melodyne there have been some things in the last two updates that make this a lot easier or kind of improve this workflow a little bit and I'm sure that there's a lot more coming because Salamone and Coco's are working together to make this really good for us but I think that this is a good time to do the tutorial anyways it shouldn't change drastically from here just get a little bit better so you can see this little IRA analysis window is only gonna take a second for that to pop up and and here's our vocal already loaded in if you've used Melodyne before you know that that process is normally a real-time process you have to load the plug-in in and then click the transfer button and then play the entire song and repeat the process for every vocal layer that's in the project and so using this ARA technology it's pretty much instant takes a couple seconds and the song is loaded in working on a laptop so this is a little bit cluttered so what I'm going to do is just hide all the other tracks except for my lead vocal so we can click around in the ruler of Melodyne and it automatically moves the cursor in the Edit window and vice-versa a zoom in here much the zoom isn't linked there would be really nice thing if the zoom was linked and also if the keyboard shortcuts were the same but for now the main thing you'll have to do is repeatedly right-click switch to the zoom tool and kind of zoom into the same amount just makes it a little bit easier you can also drag in the ruler up and down to zoom in and out horizontally and vertically I'm not sure where that would be here so once you have the audio loaded in I like to go through and find any areas where it might need to be split further just so that the pitch detection can work on more smaller parts so like this here there's a bend up let's zoom in here so this P this here has a little Bend up I think it'd be good to split that first you can do that just by making sure that the cursor is this shape and you double click and it's gonna split that so no it's not going to work too hard on on things that it doesn't that should be two separate notes or if it's supposed to be one note but was sung as two different notes you can adjust that manually it's easier for the automatic detection and correction to work when there's more splits so I'm going to do that way and this is a breath here I think yeah so you can double click to to play from that position another thing I guess be important to show is that let's say is split this vocal and remove that section you can see that it's removed from inside of Melodyne as well and if I heal that split its back so that's a huge benefit working with Melodyne compared to just you know without the ARA version of melody so yeah we're just going to go through this and find some more spots where we can split this into separate notes so this is this quite a long word here what is this yeah that's a few words so we're gonna split that up yeah something like that it's not too critical but I think if we do it now it's easier to manage then then having to backtrack and fix mistakes so just a little bit of time spent going through the vocal just looking at these blobs here and seeing where there's different notes like this is quite a few pitch changes here yeah I think it'd be worth splitting this up into a couple different notes Melodyne has this thing where if you hold a note you can sustain it and get the pitch I really really hate it it's the worst part about Melodyne in my opinion I wish you could disable that but people some people like I hate it it just gives me a migraine right away so I'm gonna try not to use that feature too much because it's annoying I I can see how it's useful but I just find it very annoying so let's check this now here it will sustain whatever point you hold your mouse at it's kind of hard to get used to so it's sustaining from here on I think yeah so that's all one note that's an S and s doesn't really need to be pitch corrected we might have to watch out for s's that have been like shifted in pitch that's an S there I just hate that robot voice so much okay here's a here's a good one where it's definitely a note that's that's held for a long time and then there's some vibrato at the end it looks like it's shifts down a step yeah so definitely a good place to split that's all right right there could even split there just so that we can adjust the drift a little bit better [Music] you we found a way to express my [Music] [Music] the other versions of Melodyne have more advanced tools like you see here I have the main tool scroll tool and zoom tool the other versions have dedicated tools for correcting the pitch and other things I don't remember I haven't used the other versions in a really long time you can do most of what you need to do with the basic version of Melodyne this does monophonic instruments like vocals and bass guitar and you can also correct percussion timing I wouldn't really recommend it I I don't like pitch shift and time stretching on any instrument unless it's totally necessary as far as I know there's no quicker way to like make this split the notes more often but I know that doing it now is going to be a little bit quicker I think closer to like 80% correct something I may have forgotten to say before is that this is first in the chain and Melodyne is always going to default to the first plugin in the effects chain the VST 3 version with met with ara enabled is going to show up there there are a couple other preference things like compatibility settings save minimal undo States is going to make reaper save the plug-in settings if that's off then Melodyne will save more frequently and it can be kind of a workflow problem there's kind of a benefit to that but it saves so frequently that it kind of interrupts workflow there's a good forum post from one of the developers and I'll put that on the screen here because I don't remember the exact words at this time at this time it's it's probably best to keep that minimal undo states turned on you okay so I've gone through the entire song I've found sections of the blobs where I found that it should be split where there's two different notes that are detected as one or one note with a lot of drift whatever it is now it's time to either correct manually or use the pitch macro and so we're going to use the pitch macro today I'm going to right-click select all and so all the notes are selected and I'm going to click on this first button here the pitch macro and with this we can move the position of the blobs closer to the centre of the note drag that up and I'll do like 90 percent and then pitch drift is note changes within the blob so drag this up and it kind of just flattens out the the lines in between it's a little hard to tell at this zoom setting let's just change that to like 58% and we can also snap to key and I'm not a hundred percent sure that this is G minor there's a couple notes like this one here won't it's probably not in key if it is G minor and so with this enabled it will drop down the tricky thing is sometimes that's a note that's being kind of like bent up as you know in in between notes it's hard to say what's the the right thing without listening to it so we're gonna leave it with snap to G minor pitch at 90% and pitch drift at 57% so in theory the entire song is now corrected and I'll go back to the beginning with a vocal at bar 26 and let's hear if this is better or worse gotta be careful when the zooming in and out because sometimes it just stops transport good anyways let's try again [Music] like it's all about maybe you up but I'm finally show okay there's one that I probably should have split and that gives us an opportunity to do some manual edits so as I said before you can click on it and hold and that will sustain that note so that's like an S don't eat that this part here is important and in this little info area it tells us which note it is and how far off and sense it is so just dragging is going to snap it to the same plus or minus position and sense but it's going to transpose it one note up or down the arrow keys left and right or up and down will select each note option drag will adjust the note by sense so now it's at minus one the other versions of Melodyne I think you can like double-click with a pitch tool and it'll snap it I would love to have that but I don't think it's worth the upgrade cost just for that so let's see if this is it better okay that's the wrong now I [Music] think that's better than here's the original it's a bit it's kind of subtle but it's yeah it was wrong before the last way we had that headed it I can't remember how to unsplit something um reset he said pitch Center you there okay so here it is before and corrected it's subtle it probably didn't even matter at all alright let's continue okay that's a weird one let's reset this to the pitch Center and yeah it's a little weird [Music] maybe we can adjust the pitch drift a little bit better that's a little weird don't like it something's really knowing with Melodyne is that it doesn't like let you adjust left and right these these edges unless I'm missing something I can't I can't figure out a way to like change where it was split let's put these back to normal reset all pitch changes so here's the original I think that's probably the best way we can do this [Music] [Music] okay that might be a little bit off that's definitely different than the original okay so here's a situation where the before sounds a little bit better than the corrected one and I'm not sure why that is in this case about I guess this note here got moved up to a G when it probably should have stayed as a G flat that sounds more natural although that could be correct as well it goes from the F up to the G [Music] a thing like that you just have to be consistent between each section of the song so let's see if we can go to bar 93 it is you [Music] yeah so it's F and let's check what this or it was originally yeah it's sort of it was right in between so let's let's like these two and bring them up to the F or sorry the G sharp G flat I don't know [Music] in the comments you can tell me which of those is correct one I can't hear it right today but let's just move on so that's the basic pitch correction thing we can also use Melodyne to adjust timing I don't think it's appropriate for this to adjust the timing but essentially you can you can just drag things left and right to like stretch out notes okay that was a really bad note to do that on so yeah don't do that edit undo let's drag that out and that wasn't so bad that what that wasn't a terrible edit so there's a timing correction macro and so we can kind of make this these notes start on the the gridlines it's really more of a thing for not really for vocals I guess maybe for background vocals or especially like a rap vocal beatboxing I don't know why you would but but yeah you could use the the timing correction thing it's really for like percussion but I hate the sound of stretched percussion so I wouldn't but it's there so that's the basics of doing vocal editing in Melodyne at least with the essential version this vocal doesn't need a ton of work there's a couple notes that need help for sure but overall it could probably get away with not tuning it to summarize these things the a RI version of Melodyne instantly gets the vocal from the track it analyzes it and spits out these blobs that you can move around in pitch up and down or timing left and right you can stretch things too you've put them into time you can hold down the the option key or or Alt on Windows to fine-tune the pitch or you can select all and use the pitch macro to snap everything to the key and change the amount pitch drift and then when you're done with that you will want to save this somehow you can keep it active but for safety you'll want to render this as a new track so what we're going to do is select these other plugins we're going to hit command be our control B on Windows to bypass all these effects then we can render this to a new stem so we don't want to freeze this Melodyne is not compatible with freeze at this time so we don't want to do that but we can render to a mono stem and mute the original let's do that so I've got my vocal with tuning and I'll just call this vocal tuned this track is now offline and I can take these other plugins take my plugins and drag that over to there so now Melodyne is on this track my vocal with tuning is here and I've got my FX chain back wet how it was yeah all the sends carried over automatically the fader level which was at minus two point seven yeah fader level is fine so there you go that's tuning vocals with Melodyne and ARA and repr hope you've enjoyed this tutorial thank you so much for watching please subscribe to the channel P haven't already follow me on Facebook and Twitter support the reaper blogs for patreon and visit reaper blog net for a lot more tutorials [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 30,805

Rating: 4.8304238 out of 5

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaper mixing tutorial, reaper editing tutorial, reaperdaw, pitch correction in reaper, reaper ara, melodyne, perfect pitch vocal, how to tune vocals with melodyne, vocal tuning with melodyne, vocal production

Id: L3iZSIC5XrE

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/bbddbdb]

Your videos are awesome, but you always use expensive paid plugins. Do you use any free VSTs that you recommend?