Autotune is a pretty popular audio software, which corrects the pitch of a singer’s vocals in real time. Melodyne has gone even further now. They found a way to separate the harmonics of each note in a chord, allowing individual notes to be manipulated at will. Really impressive stuff even if you don’t know anything about audio. How will this affect those of us who don’t play with audio and do not care about it? It will affect us by giving our media more untalented singers the chance to seem talented. You will be watching untalented singers on MTV on a more frequent basis. Reminds me of the “how to make a pop star” post I made few months back. VIDEO->
Check Out The “Electric Guitar With Touch Screen” and “Digital Turntables“.
Thats pretty amazing stuff. I have messed around with MIDI in the past, and its awesome to be able to have that flexibility with live instrument samples!
wow.
I’m not even into music editing, messed around with Audacity when I was younger, but just for fun. But even then, I was annoyed by this problem. This just makes my mouth drop.
Although this is extremely impressive, it has had a profound effect(no pun) on my opinions, in the last 5 minutes.
I had no problems with copying and pasting, quantizizing,,then pitch correction and time shifting,,but this is too much. Now truly, anyone can push some buttons and the program will dissect the chord and create other notes/chords in the same key. Plus, it sounds perfect,,and I’m tired of chopping off takes, and Po Tooling tings. Part of being a musican is knowing what type of guitar suits your needs, what effects to use, where to apply them, how to mix, and what technique to use to numb out extra notes,,this is a sign to completely almost toss out computers until it is time to do mixes.
I am very glad I saw this. If you can’t play, you shouldn’t be insulting those who spend 20 years learning how to do things you could never do. You are a hack.
Milli Vanilli should have their Grammy returned.
You are fucking retarded. This software has to do with anything but singers. It seperates the notes from chords, you can’t sing in fucking chords.
YOU are fucking retarded. The software doesn’t differentiate between voices and instruments! In case you didn’t notice, it separates sounds. This could mean multiple voices, or both a voice and instrument in harmony.
To say that it doesn’t apply to voices is idiotic.
I myself actually like playing an instrument, making mistakes and learning from these mistakes. This software is clever but all it will accomplish is that producers will pick pretty people that can sing a little and then beef up their voices. Actual talent or skill won’t be important anymore just good looks will count. Like the atomic bomb it will leave its inventors filled with horror when it’s way too late…
Wow… OK, I’m with y’all in spirit, and I hate to break it to you guys, but Melodyne has been around for years, and it’s not necessarily as simple to use and flawless as the demo videos make it out to be. This appears to be an update that will (incredibly) alter one voicing of a polyphonic (ie, containing multiple, simultaneous, voicings) sample/recording while leaving the others unaltered. That means that the only new thing here really is the ability to correct or change chords, or previously mixed material, or single track recordings of choral vocals. The old version of Melodyne could already “make a pop star”; but let’s be real; there are a lot more qualities to good singing than pitch. If someone has an annoying singing voice, it’ll still be annoying even if it’s pitch perfect. For that matter, by this definition of “making a pop star”, it’s been happening for years, even decades. Pitch correction is not a new technique, and you’d be hard pressed to find a singer or musician who NEVER messes up while recording, records everything in one take, and consistently sounds as good as they do on the final mix. Even the Beatles used Punch-Ins. Yeah, it’s possible, but we’d miss out on a lot of great music if it were necessary. Finally, this is not just an effect someone can run their PA through, this is an editing application; any such “pre-fab pop star” would be quickly shown as a fraud at a live performance.
The only people I could see this adversely affecting are session musicians for electronic music producers, who’ll be able to get a lot more out of a good sample of a guitar chord than before.
Even so, any big time producer would probably rather just record the notes he/she wants. They’re a quirky, stubborn lot, you know…that’s why ancient analog equipment is still so expensive. Plus, you have too little faith in the buying public; yes, I know crappy pop acts with corporate backing are as popular as ever, but they ALWAYS HAVE BEEN, and people do gravitate towards talent, pretty face or no. Even Milli Vanilli were skilled dancers. I mean, if talent COULD be removed from the equation, don’t you think we’d have songs sung by Speak N’ Spells at the top of the charts by now? I mean, they wouldn’t need royalty checks, booze, amphetamines, and rehab to keep them going, which would seem ideal for a record company.
Like I said, as amazing as it is, this is really a relatively minor improvement in production technology, and won’t necessarily change much of anything, except maybe in the world of electronic music. To me it seems more of a neat studio toy than the end of music as we know it.
Oh please…we have software that simulates being in a band that has nothing to do with playing instruments and now clubs are having “rockband” and
“guitar hero” nights…not to mention those insanely idiotic “air guitar” contests. Pitch correction software is the very least of our problems. DJs have long been a more popular attraction than bands anyway. On a more positive note, this software will not keep a bad song from sucking. “You can’t polish a turd” as the saying goes.
I hate to tell you guys this, but computers will eventually have the ability to simulate anything. Pretty soon, entire movies will be computer generated and look so realistic that nobody will be able to tell that it’s fake. Entertainment will eventually be ruled by the computer industry.
How close are we to new songs out of recordings from dead musicians and singers?
Curious about one thing – as a former knob twiddler, would this software be able to pull apart an old minimoog tuned in 5ths? it seems to be differentiating the notes not just by pitch but also by their start times. Since a “thick” sound from a synth is made up of many harmonics (sawtooth, or mod 12 on the old Yamaha SY series synths), I wonder what it would do? Hope I can noodle with an eval copy so I can find it’s limits.
Personally, I’d rather tune a piano than a song, at least you can play a lot of different songs on a piano once it’s set (and I hate tuning pianos). Ah well, going off to listen to some unamplified acoustic music played live. Thanks for the interesting article!
re: new songs from dead singers – Rosemary Clooney sings AC/DC? Hell’s Bells!
I don’t have Melodyne… and yes, it will make it easier for untalented people (with the help of a talented engineer) to appear as if they have talent. But that’s all smoke and mirrors. Any software/hardware is just a tool to help you make music. It’s not going to “tell” you how to write a good song, or a make a good recording.
Like giving an amazing camera to a lame photographer. Will a 6,000 dollar Nikon DSLR make them suddenly take superb, artistic pictures?