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Lesson Info

Tuning with Melodyne

I don't want to say we've covered everything vote we've kind of covered everything that we can for based production we talked about setting up a base intimating tuning getting dies how we would route our signal chain both mild and extreme signal change we talked about phase which is very important what we haven't really talked about much is can I sit saving your behind um and that's what I'm going to do now because sometimes you get to the point where there's not a whole lot you can do you receive something that's out of tune or something that's run through an app that you don't really like and you need to start figuring out ways that you can take this track that's not up to your standards or I guess that sounds more insulting but it's not all that you need it to be and so that's what we're going to do we're going to go in and much like the intonation portion of the classes is going to be kind of tedious and not as fun and exciting and fast moving is we don't know based production can ...

be but so we had a question yesterday about like, well why not just fix it? You know why not just tune it later so I think we're going to see during this segment why have that fund this's exactly why you don't want to do it? Yeah and I it's cool it's a totally doable thing and there's ways to do it fast and ways to do it slow but I think we're going to see that the best thing that you can do is just have a quality recorded instrument and roll with that so without further ado let me exported d I track and we're going toe started getting in tune or more in tune I'm going to go through an export a couple different I'm going to do two different songs when we have that base where I where it's just affected it's straight out of the sands amp and one where we have a d I tow work with his well one second base too session's at one fifty five court would start with this one going into melody which I already have open over there put in my tempo which was one fifty five for that song open it up I'm trying to remember where I saved it yeah I forgot that was a question yesterday why not just fix it later? So so here we have this pulled up yet so melody line does a good job and as you can see this base was actually pretty in tune but we play through and eventually it will get to the song then just take that section and show that what you can do in melody ainas you khun start shifting notes come on that's what no then allows you is really you can manipulate the pitch for what we're using now we're just going tio primarily worry about getting it in tune for the song so here you can see where the pitch travels and stuff like right here you can't go from analyze wear stuff, gets active and see all the pitch movement in the quickest way to accomplish this for me is to go I guess I shouldn't do a whole song at once let's do a section select everything that you're going to tune correct pitch in this correct pitch center is going to be where your pitcher lives, which is the main the intonation southern so to speak in the pitch drift is going to be how much variance there is in each note so right now I'm going one hundred percent on both which is getting it completely in tune I'm also starting to think that I should have turned my base worse because we're not hearing a whole lot of stuff but that either proves my point or doesn't it goes against my point that tuning your base is very, very important having your intonation something else you can do since you imported the tempo of one fifteen boobs maybe I shouldn't mess with that it can also start going in and adjusting time, which is I prefer to do that obviously I showed cutting up and that's I would always invite advise against doing any timing in melody on if you can avoid it do you usually fix your timing first and then take it in? And yes, I definitely I do all my editing ahead of time before my tuning just because I want to make sure it's locked in and often times obviously the ideal is to not have to tune whatsoever, so I'm going to tune this whole song and as I look at it it is because you can really see at home it's pretty dead on already as faras the tuning goes because we were very meticulous tuning which when every single take when tracking this song and then we're going to go find a song that's more out of tune to have more fun with what's the fix for this base track sounds at two hundred I can ask you put questions, questions while you're doing that okay mark zero had a question why are using melody line and not auto tune is that purple personal preference or do you think it sounds better personal preference all the marks of my understanding is pretty much everybody uses melody in over auto tune everybody that I know does could be I know I can't think of anybody off in that uses millimeter auto tune for base I'm sure there's some people I've used waves tune for bass and vocals in melody line for bass and vocals auto tune four vocals in graf note only, but melody lane is what we have on this computer and it's what I have on my computer at home so that's what I tend to working, I'm sure there's people on the form that could chime in that no, the positives and negatives of using auto time auto tune for base we hope my tuning was worse on this one there we go that's got more going on okay as we listened before, so go through select correct pitch go one hundred percent in these ones you'll definitely see move a little bit more everybody seeing that right? So there were too many inconsistencies there's a part where I hit two notes and I'm going to do zoom in and try and cut out the extra note, which is something you obviously couldn't do with regular added any the week that little piece and then zoom in one you can stretch out start to stretch out these notes so where the bass player would have hit some sort of extra note, you can start to patch and get that out of the way so that it doesn't send you're just kind of correcting his performance completely at that point having a hard time getting the right tools I'm having the worst luck right now with getting this to stretch andrew you know, they say a poor crafts from blames his tools now I'm blaming myself because I can't get it toe do what I needed to d'oh it's true I didn't know anything and I did not hear your comment huh? I was saying a lot of craftsman just blame pro tools and those craftsmen are probably musicians trying to stretch you know what? I'm just going to focus on what I was doing and that's correcting tuning because I would obviously have corrected all my timing in aa pro tools prior so apologize for trying to teach any other shortcuts that I am not used to using but ideally you won I did go and I cut a note that was bad out but ideally you wouldn't have that that note what we are just dealing with what would be are making a best case scenario out of this base performance yeah exactly transients and note durations and travel and right here you can start to see you and this is a good point you can see the note bend so I would go in and I'm not going toe I'm going to go in by hand and kind of handle all of those so that I'm not losing the bend at all so as I select I never actually hit the part of the note that bends up and that's important to me because if you just go through and blindly automatically do everything you're going toe said for correcting pitch one hundred percent me see right there the bend in my notes starts to disappear, which obviously that was an intentional part of the performance. It wasn't just bending so you can do it in a no sound tighter, but I would personally rather keep stuff like that natural and just go through up until the bend correct from that bend correct e carry on through there, and I think this is one point where having the affected amtrak is actually working to my advantage because it is offering some degree of compression when it goes through the transformers and everything in the amt, because it's distortion of ananth at a certain point is just a compression, so versus the d I would having something more while it's, a less pure it's, easier to work with as faras keys go almost hear this song, and then we will start implementing into the track and see how it affected it. Question from mark zero why're you on polyphonic mode just what I opened it in in case I'm hitting anything extra, which I knew there were some corded notes in this song, can you maybe, sir, can you just maybe quickly is blamed like modify polyphonic and how that would affect, you know when to use either one and basically he mentioned courted notes? Yeah, paulie funding would generally be like a guitar, a piano when you're dealing with things that are voiced in court format, whereas mano phonic, I'll use polyphonic on base just because there's the chance that you hit cords and there are rare opted points in this song mano phonic mody would use on vocals because you're not going to hit chords with your vocals, so you'll have ah, easier graphical representation and more accurate pitch correction. At that point, I'm sure I probably for the most part would have more accurate pitch correction in mono phonic mode at this point, but I'm already won on that so might as well just exporting yes, they have been a lot of mode instead of mono, phonic mina fox a lot if in reenact all the plug ins to where we had this mix going and duplicate the base and just listen to the differences between the tune base in the antoun base and ideally, they would be subtle because you would hope that you had the best most in tune track that you could get, but I'm sure there will be a noticeable differences just lose this file they are pretty close, but as we saw in melody line and within ideally hear with our ears there's a slight difference in it'll start of london the mix a lot better being in tune with everything than not two the reason they're phasing out because that's where all our corrections and at that point is generally where if we're dealing with a d I I would want to tune my b I which I talked about briefly yesterday but I would tune the die before I ramped anything just to make sure so if you try you can obviously hear is the tuning inconsistencies change if you were to go in and hand tune five different tracks you would have more phase issues than you could even imagine because you would have that times five going on and it would be a royal pain in the butt so if you are going to use the tuning method instead of just making sure you're tuning is dead on prior to tracking the real trick would be rehabbing afterwards timing, tuning re having if you're going in that order ideally it's tuning before anything real tuning and I have to worry about tuning at the end it all but you also wear melody and I think should really be used as if you I had one bad notes in an entire song like going in and really fixing everything ideally you never have to do that boat when you have a bass player that's kind of a bass player and doesn't hear exactly what's going on all the time that that that happens you can go and fix when they hit in f and you were hitting any you can just going tighten that up there was now I'm going to go in with the heavier session that we had and start just showing how you can transpose the tuning upwards, or even transpose it downwards, which will utilize something, an example that I, uh, I am, let me open it and go into it don't have it, okay, what I wanted to showcase is using you can track a lot at half speed in pro tools, and I don't really I wonder what the best way to pull up an example of that is, yes, I can't really I don't have this after it, but if you just show half speed played back in pro tools and then trying to explain it a little bit invalid and without really drawing the two together. But I think this is worth noting, especially for people that aren't based players of themselves, and it might be a little bit harder for them to handle the instrument I say we were tracking on a new track, it's farmed. It doesn't really matter. You should shift command space bar way you to report it. Obviously, we're not tracking anything live right now, but when that plays back, it would play back an octave higher because you attracted at half speed and a lot of times what I will dio if I had a base run and set up right now I would recorded at half speed because I didn't know the song very well and then I would go in melody I know shift everything exactly knocked it down and although there would be some artifacts you can usually get away with that and then we amp and have a tighter based performance because of the fact I just show what an octave drop would sound like in melody line right now no we'll go out on the water it would shift obviously you'd be much higher but you could shift down we're so that point your shift I I guess you have to be very careful you can shift the pitch of everything and now I'm having artifact city after I said that you want to hear many artifacts and take this section shift it it doesn't sound as good as if you actually recorded it at that volume but it is a way in start dealing with it and reacting accordingly to just get that well in bottom in your mix do we have any questions about this very boring portion of class well there was one that kind of you you just thought you touched on this a little bit which is from sampson what are the limitations of tuning too much doesn't sound weird if you tune too much and how do you know when you've done judge yeah can definitely you khun you can only pit shift aware of, like when I e you go too far, you sound like an instrument. At that point, you need to use your best judgment, and I've noticed in vocals more so than based, even because bases obviously usually pocketed into the mix a lot. But when it sounds even start to hear artifacts where stuff over corrects too fast and everybody knows the t pain sound, I think and well, I would say, for the most part that gets done on vocals and that's where it's a real problem, we can definitely happen on anything where your pitch travel sounds completely unnatural and stuff is either shifting too fast because it's correcting pitch instead of whatever lite, vibrato or pitch just travel that you have and just over correcting and ending up in the wrong spot, which is generally that's. The part that I usually have the most problems with is if I go through an auto, correct everything, I'll find a lot of notes where it's like, ok, the player was closer to the wrong note to you need to end up going and fixing that and that's just the issue with any type of editing, being tedious and paying attention can't let the computer make up the mind for you because you need to actively listen, use your ears