cparmerlee,
 
I could be wrong but I've never heard Celemony advertise that Melodyne can remove anything from a track.
 
It can determine the pitch of instruments on an "isolated" track but unless they've made some stupendous inroads into removal process it cannot pick out notes in a fully mixed song.
 
Now, your background noise may actually have pitch and Melodyne will pick that up too.
 
But if I am wrong I await your results and the techniques you used to eliminate the background noise using Melodyne since I own it.

robert_e_bone
Melodyne proclaims that it can NOT isolate without the individual tracks.

Just to be clear (and I think we are clear), in my present quixotic adventure, I am only planning to use Melodyne on this noisy vocal track.  The rest is all MIDI at this stage.
 
I got most of the noise out of it using R-Mix and the noise gate.  If Melodyne perceives some of the remaining noise as notes, I should be able to easily delete those "notes".
 
We'll see.  I can't get to this until Tuesday.
==========
On edit, I installed the trial of Melodyne.  I was eventually able to get everything hooked up to insert Melodyne as a VST effect.  I transferred some of that vocal track into Melodyne.  It processed it as expected, But the resulting graph was nothing like their nice clean videos.  It plotted the various sung notes, but it didn't seem to have enough "meat" on each note for me to actually do any editing.  I could move stuff around in time, but I couldn't figure out how to do any of the other editing that looked so simple in the video.
 
I will give Melodyne the benefit of the doubt in this case because I started with a rather noisy file and cleared out most of the noise with R-Mix. In doing so, I may have killed some of the overtones that Melodyne needs to identify notes correctly.
 
I will try it on some other cleaner WAV files to see if it does any better.  At this point, I'd say they produce a great video and tell a great story, but the reality? not so much.  I hope I change my opinion after working with some other files, because I really want to believe this tool is the real deal.
 
========
On second edit, let me complete the record re" Melodyne. I tried it on a cleaner instrumental track.  The "blobs" look a lot more like what the videos show, but I have not figured out how to do the advanced editing that looks so easy in the video.  I did some simple pitch corrections, time ****s and stretching, and some copy/paste of notes to make harmonies that were not in the original file, so that is all pretty cool.  HOWEVER, it keeps crashing SONAR.  They do provide a list of tips for using with SONAR< so I guess I'll need to go through each one of those.  My biggest problem is that it seems that Melodyne is latching on to my Presonus interface and never releasing it.  That forces me to reboot and then go back into my SONAR project that fix up the routing that gets botched up each time.
If I can get that problem fixed, I'll probably buy the tool.  Otherwise it is too much of a PITA.
 
This sort of reminds me of all those programs that promised to scan printed sheet music and turn it into perfectly notated Finale files.  I never found a single case where it was faster to scan (and then repair all the stuff the scan got wrong,) than it would have been to just key in the entire score from scratch.
 
=====
One final edit so as not to leave bad information hanging.  My problems are resolved by getting everything under ASIO drivers.  I wasn't aware that the Presonus driver already supported ASIO.  I had tried to configure ASIO4All when I discovered it was not necessary.
 
There is definitely a learning curve with Melodyne, and the VST interface is not what I would call smooth or intuitive, but once one understands how to make that work, there are unbelievable capabilities with Melodyne. It seems like it is best to not leave Melodyne on an active track very long.  Get in, do your edits, then bounce the track to memorialize the Melodyne changes  and get Melodyne out of the way.  It is not just for pitch and time fixes.  You can use it to add harmonies, bring out harmonics, and all sorts of other stuff, and you can even convert audio tracks to MIDI, if that is something you want to do.  I could see converting a vocal track to MIDI, then running that MIDI through a guitar to double the vocal or something like that.
 
 

Well I am NOT happy I have it figured out.  (not really, I am actually ecstatic)
 
It's just that I now have to wade into sequencing up the drums in midi, and that's a GIANT PITA.  (still, in a good way).
 
Ah, these labors of love.  Thank God I actually love the tune.  :)
 
Bob Bone
 

wizard71
Do we get to hear the fruits of your labour when complete Mr Bone? :-)

Bibs

Well sure!  PLEASE understand that his is still VERY much a work in progress.  The violin parts are tracked, as are the bass notes, and almost all of the keyboard parts as well.  The current guitar parts are just a mixed down rough cut from scratch tracks that are here soley to enable me to track violin, bass, and keys, as well as to analyze the song for meter changes so I can replace the click track with accurate midi drums.  ALSO, please note that there has been ABSOLUTELY no mixing done thus far.
 
With the above caveat in place, here is a link to its current form:
 
http://snd.sc/1d6GPdB
 
The keyboard lead starts at around 3:25 or so, then there is a little guitar/bass break, then the keyboard solo part that generated this thread comes in.  There are a number of things REALLY not done after the end of the keyboard solo, so you can just stop listening there.
 
BUT, at least you can hear where things stand at this point in time.
 
Bob Bone
 

Thank you SOOO much! :)
 
Bob Bone

Yeah - I ended up using an EQ in Sonar to act as a low-pass and high-pass filter to knock stuff outside of the frequency range of the playable range of those notes in the keyboard solo.  
 
I imported the original Night Meets Light song file into Sonar, then chopped it down to where all that was left of the audio was literally about a 5-second snippet that was the very end of the keyboard solo - which contained the notes I was struggling with.
 
I had recreated that sound in a soft synth called MinimogueLUXUS-TD - which is a variant of the original MinimogueVA synth.  I had that synth loaded into the synth rack, and added an audio track so I could play and hear that preset I created to mimic the actual keyboard solo.
 
I then used the Sonar Analyst plugin to determine those note frequencies - from the low and high notes from that solo, then applied low-pass and high-pass filtering in one of the EQ's that came with X2 to knock out stuff outside those identified frequencies.  
 
Then I exported that section of the chopped down solo to a wave file.  That resulted in a file that had the original song's keyboard solo notes more pronounced than in the original mix.
 
Once it was in a wave file, I opened that in a program called The Amazing Slow Downer, and then slowed the song WAY WAY down, and THEN I was finally able to decode the notes played at the end of the keyboard solo.  In addition to being able to slow down songs without changing pitch, it also allows setting changeable loop points, so I could slowly repeat each little part of those notes until I could decipher them.
 
Once I wrote out all of the notes for each of the 2 parts (basically a third apart), the arpeggios were played over first a Cmaj7 chord and then over an Am7 chord.  I was finally able to then sequence them up in Sonar's Step Sequencer, and that was that.
 
It was REALLY a fun adventure - quite frustrating, but at the same time it was really a cool path through it all, and I learned quite a bit in the process.
 
I now feel I can apply similar techniques to figure out other nastily good solo sections in other favorite progressive songs I love, and that EXCITES me to no end.
 
Bob Bone