Some Melodyne Tricks

Here are a couple of little things to know.
 
1.  Copy a section.  Suppose you edited chorus 1 and want to paste it into chorus 2.  Naturally, you select the blobs, click copy, position the cursor in the timeline for the second chorus, and hit paste.  The problem is that blobs do not always start right on a beat and it is hard to get the cursor in exactly the right place.  Here is what I do:
• Suppose the first blob starts somewhere between beat 2 and 3, for example.  I click a single small blob from anywhere, copy it, paste it exactly on beat 1, and use the volume tool to give it zero volume.
• Then I can highlight the whole section and paste it exactly on beat 1 of the next chorus.
• You can leave the zero volume blobs, or delete them later.  In fact, as long as you remember to delete them, you don't HAVE to make their volume zero, but it is safer to do so and the clear outline makes them easier to find and delete later.
 
2.  Move timing at once.  Some singers I know tend to rush.  When this happens, I highlight (select) a whole section of blobs and use the timing tool to slide them over a little.  Just be careful to positon the timing tool correctly so you slide the notes instead of stretching them.
 
3.  Sometimes if you hear a click in a note, it is because you used the pitch variation tool—the vibrato thing that looks like a triangle wave—to flatten out the PREVIOUS note too much.
 
4.  I always turn pitch snap off.  You can always double click a note to snap it to pitch, but sometimes you need to slide a note up or down just a little, especially when the singer is bending or sliding a note.
 
5.  My procedure for pitch is: a-position the notes at the correct pitch/note, then use the pitch drift tool to make sure they don't slide up or down too much, and c-finally use the pitch variation tool as needed.  My reasoning is that this order seems to make the best sense for hearing what needs to be done.  Your mileage may vary.
 
6. Formant.  For whatever reason, Melodyne seems to handle formants automatically better than V-Vocal, but I am seldom happy with the results when I try to edit formants myself in Melodyne.  If you watch the formant video on the Celemony site, you will notice that the narrator talks so loudly and so much that you can't really hear what he is doing.  Maybe it is just me, but I pretty much leave the formants alone.
 

Totall agree about moving the clips prior to transfer into Melodyne; unfortunately, sometimes I don't notice the little timing mess ups until I am in Melodyne working and matching doubled parts, etc.  But for sure, it would be easier to move a whole section before going into Melodyne or after bouncing.

Sanderxpander
4. You can leave snap on and use alt to move freely between snaps. I wish Sonar had this feature. Maybe it does and I should watch a tutorial?

Holding down the "N" key temporarily overrides the active Snap value.
 

stevec

Sanderxpander
4. You can leave snap on and use alt to move freely between snaps. I wish Sonar had this feature. Maybe it does and I should watch a tutorial?

Holding down the "N" key temporarily overrides the active Snap value.
 

Awesome! Thank you! Gah I use so many DAWs one after another and nearly all of them use ALT or CTRL or SHIFT for this. Serves me right for not reading the manual. Thanks again!

Err... how do you mean? For me it turns snap on and off, which I already knew. I would really like to be able to increment/decrement the snap values with a key command. I searched my ass off for this in the key bindings.