 |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
THE MELODYNE CONCEPT Let's take a simple look at Melodyne's contribution to the world of digital audio technology. It represents an exciting new era in audio recording where recorders understand what is being recorded. Melodyne exposes detailed musical information held deep inside the recording and allows you to edit them. You can change pitches, formant, lengths, rhythm and even vibrato. Digital recording will never be the same. LET'S START AT THE START In the beginning there was analog tape. And analog tape was good. You could record very high quality signals onto reels of tape. You could put on a new reel so back up was automatic. You could also re-use the tape at a later date. As I said, it was good. 24 track tape became the standard for professional recording and this was also good. Recording studios around the world shared a common format and you could begin your record in New York, complete overdubs in London and do the final mix in Toronto. And since every major city in the world had a 24 track analog tape machine it was a very good thing.
Analog tape machines were part of a very expensive recording paradigm where a professional studio would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This price tag kept large numbers of musicians out of the professional music production loop. Another really bad thing about analog tape was the difficulty associated with editing what was recorded on tape. To be blunt, editing on analog tape sucked. Editing tape required jogging the tape slowly over the heads for cueing and using a razor blade to physically cut the tape on tape blocks. Needless to say, this methodology was cumbersome and very unforgiving. DIGITAL INVASION Then along came Digidesign and others introducing a digital recording system that stored recordings on a hard disk. This system was not as good as analog tape at first because the computer technology available in the 1980s didn't allow a complete simulation of the analog recording process. By the early 1990s though the computer technology was able to provide multiple linear tracks of digital recording to hard drives. By the end of 1991 there were more than 8,000 ProTools systems installed worldwide.
One of the really significant contributions made by digital audio recording was the audio waveform. This graphic display of what was recorded on a track made it very easy to edit material. A musician could clearly see where there was silence, gaps, noises and more. Using a mouse you could now highlight then cut, copy and paste recorded material the way you could copy sentences in a word processor. Music production would never look back to the days of the razor blade. Digital audio was here to stay. Digital systems were far more affordable than their analog counterparts and resulted in more and more young producers getting into music production. As computer technology delivered more powerful CPU and faster bus speeds and RAM, digital producers were able to do more and more for even less. With the costs of production falling dramatically, digital production hit a critical mass in the late 90s. By the 2000 the Billboard chart was beginning to be populated with more hit songs done digitally than recorded on analog tape. The game was over. Analog production had served us well but it was time to move on the a much better way. AUDIO WAVEFORM AGES But not so fast. The audio waveform, which first gained popularity in 1985, has served us well but is an dated method of editing audio recordings in 2005. Think about this for a second: If I were to hand you a 6 foot piece of tape and ask you to look at it and tell me what's recorded on it you probably couldn't tell me. There is no visual indication on the tape to tell you where the recorded material is. Even an electron microscope won't help you visually decipher what musical information was on the tape. Similarly, the audio waveform displays instantaneous amplitude information so I can see where there is silence and where there is a signal. I can also tell by controlling zoom low frequencies versus high frequencies, transients and distortion, but I can tell very little else by just looking. Just looking at a waveform it can be hard to tell the difference between a recording of a toilet flushing and the fifth symphony.
Imaging looking at a waveform of 2 vocal recordings. The first is by Stevie Wonder and the second by a first round reject from the TV show American Idol. The waveform cannot help us much. It cannot display which notes are sung, cannot show how sharp/flat each note is, cannot show us the vibrato of the singer, cannot show the rhythm, basically the waveform is a blunt instrument. You can cut and paste but the musical intelligence of the recording is shrouded completely. VOCAL RECORDING = MONTHS OF HARD LABOR Vocal recording can be the most laborious and challenging tasks for music producers. For the modern music producer getting that perfect performance means recording dozens of takes, listening through each one to discard sub-par sections and the compositing of the multitude of remaining 'good' fragments into one new file. The process works, but is like trying to fish by emptying the lake. You will definitely get the fish, but why do all that work? There is a better way and that way is Melodyne.
MELODYNE = VOCAL RECORDING HEAVEN Melodyne can display these two vocal recordings the way a music producer needs it. It will expose all the inner musical details held deep inside the audio and beyond the reach of the 2 dimensional audio waveform display. Melodyne goes further by offering you the chance to edit these parameters with virtually no audio degradation and no artifacts. Melodyne is the next generation of audio editing technology. If you are not using it then you are simply spending too much time editing solo performances. It is real liberation for the creative souls who labor editing and weeks and months.
Melodyne is a complete audio recording and editing application and comes in three flavors - Studio, Cre8 and UNO. You pick the level of intensity you need and it delivers. Melodyne is not an island and although you can use it as a stand alone application, you can also use it in conjunction with your favorite DAW like ProTools, Cubase, Logic, Reason, Live and Digital Performer. CELMONY MAKES HISTORY That small team at Celemony have changed the direction of audio production. They have pointed the way forward for the industry in this segment. The users of Melodyne are working faster and more creatively with recordings, be they vocals, guitars, percussion or saxophone. They are now able to go beyond just note fixing and do brand new things like: extract the pitches from a sax and put it on a vocal; quantize rhythms of a vocal using a conga pattern; feminize a vocal performance by tweaking the formant of individual notes; reducing the vibrato of a young singer; using Melodyne as a vocal coach in education; on and on. Creative people have millions of brand new possibilities that no other program on Earth offers. Congratulations to Peter, Carsten, Hildegard and Anselm, you guys have changed the course of recording history. We will never look at an audio waveform the same way again, ever! PRODUCT DETAILS
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2006 Music Marketing, All rights reserved. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
