A lead player did some studio work for me, but I need to recreate his part using a virtual instrument (RealStrat). I upgraded to the polyphonic version of Melodyne specifically so I could load his guitar part and see what he played. (It is somewhat complicated, with multiple strings bending, and some fast passages.)

I exported the guitar part as a wav file and loaded it into Melodyne stand-alone. So far, so good.

What I am finding, however, is that there are blobs everywhere. Apparently, every noise and harmonic is registering as a note. I tried manually deleting some of these, but that is very tedious. Even understanding the musical context, it is hard for me to know which blobs are important and which are not because the blobs are not always showing up as the fundamental tone. I tried a MIDI export and it was a mess with notes everywhere.

Is there some trick to reducing the sensitivity so that only the real fundamental pitches will show up and there will be less clutter? What am I seeing looks nothing like the nice, clean, organized display in the demo videos.

The player is not playing sloppily at all, but he is playing with a lot of bends, pinches, and other things.

After rereading this, I felt I should clarify. What is happening is that the guitarist is playing a note (D, for example); but overtones and sounds are appearing as many blobs in the vicinity of the note. In some cases, deleting those affects the sound. In some cases, deleting them has no obvious effect on the sound. In any event, I wish I could see only the actual notes played and not all the harmonics and overtones and sounds.

Is there some way to filter this? I tried the melodic option, but that unfortunately did not work since this is a somewhat polyphonic part with 1, 2, or 3 strings involved at any given moment.

Hi Konrad,
 
Have you tried running both high and low pass filters prior to viewing the part in Melodyne?
That might help cut down on extraneous noise/overtones.
 

Maybe you could thin it out to the primary tones with an EQ or R-Mix, bounce then load the bounced wave into Melodyne. If the part goes across the full spectrum (like he moves around the fretboard a lot) then chop up the wave or automate the EQ to move to the current frequency range. One fretboard position only covers 2 1/2 octaves so it might make things more manageable.
 
Just a thought. I have no idea how that program works.

Once the track is analysed, click here:

 
Then adjust the slider till you're happy with the results (Clicking back on the tools re-renders the results):

Good luck!

Does Melodyne have a threshold setting? It may be that these extraneous sounds might be grouped as lower in gain?
 
Keni
 

What RY said...   the threshold slider can help reduce the number of partials being "blobbed".   But it's also not a bad idea to filter the audio before adding Melodyne.   Unfortunately the fatter or more resonant the tone, the more likely you'll see the extra data. 
 

Excellent guys!  That slider thing is exactly what I am looking for.  I am super-familiar with Meldoyne single track (Melodyne Assistant) but have not upgraded it in a while and have not used the polyphonic version before.  That threshold control seems to be like the "sensitivity" control I was seeking.
 
The filtering/EQ options also sound good if the above doesn't work.
 
Here's how great SOnar people are: I didn't get an answer on the Melodyne forum (although I'm sure I would have eventually) but you guys solved it immediately!
 
Thanks!
 
PS Off topic a little, but i installed the polyphonic version on my laptop and not on my studio computer because I did not want to screw up my existing Melodyne files while in the middle of mixing an album.  I will install it on my main studio machine later at some point and will continue to use Assistant in the meantime for vocals.

Melodyne Editor rocks!  
 
Assuming the X3 theories are accurate, I may be tempted to dip my toe in the water way sooner than I usually do.
 

I have learned a lot of little tricks along the way, some of which are not documented by Melodyne (that I know of).
 
One example:  if you hear a click in a note, the cause is very often reducing pitch variation (the vibrato control) too much on the PREVIOUS note.  Lots of little things like that.
 

There are some great tutorial videos for melodyne.  Save yourself SO much time and frustration by watching them.
I wish I could direct you to the "best one", the one that really got me started, but I'm at work and don't have time to look for it.  I think it was made by the melodyne company tho, not a third party.