V-Vocal Problem

Maybe you're doing nothing wrong.....maybe you're a better singer than you think??

Spacey-I have been told that I have to designate a scale in V-Vocal if I want V-Vocal to edit the pitch automatically.

Problem is I dont know what key my song is in. I just compose from instinct. I dont read or write music.

Does Melodyne auto correct pitch and if so do you have to designate a scale.Thats an important issue.

If pitch correction software is worth anything you would think it could analyse a series of notes and designate a key and scale for them or is that asking too much from software in 2008.

As for my singing abilities well be prepared to hold your hands over your ears when I post my song next week in Sonar.

Thanks Michael for your advice. I appreciate it.

Look out for my song within the next week to 10 days. Its called "Sea of Souls" and its a good one bar dodgy singing hence the reason why I started this thread to try and help that problem.

I am hoping to have it in the song section early next week but delays are possible-Steve

Why not try correcting the most obviously flawed notes manually within V-Vocal?

You can get a much more natural result this way - alright it's time consuming, but it works really well, for me at least.

I've succesfully created and run over 80 instances of V-Vocal within a single project - all processing done live, no bouncing or rendering, along with a whole host of plugins, FX etc on a 40 track song.

Maybe it's my configuration that allows me to do this, but I really wince when I read about people having to bounce a V-Vocal track down to avoid glitching/crashing/phasing. In my opinion, it's all about how your machine has been setup, but I had mine built for me so can't really offer any guidance.

When I say natural - my experience with automatic correction is that no matter how subtle you want your pitch shifting to be made, you tend to get the same process applied on every shift, it's like using the same snare sample over & over again - it's noticeable.

By manually, I mean creating a V-Vocal clip from an existing vocal clip, then using the V-Vocal editor, go through each note, one at a time and make a decision about what needs to be corrected and what you can get away with.

It's easy to drag portions of the waveform up/down as necessary, you have various tools to help - pencil, eraser, zoom, vibrato, line - usual editor stuff.

I make a point of NEVER adjusting a note to the "perfect" pitch, and where there are double tracked vocals (or more) I always treat each phrase slightly differently to the others.

I never work on more than a short passage at a time - splitting a vocal clip into smaller short phrases is more intuitive and seems to put less of a strain on V-Vocal.

Not that I haven't had problems - a few times I've finished editing a section, only to find out that the passage won't play at all! Not even the original.

My workflow is to always save after editing and auditioning the edit before moving on to the next one.

It's very easy to stray into Cher territory if the sung notes are wildly off the mark - that's a sure sign of having to re-record.

Hope this helps.

Jonesey