Product Review - Celemony Melodyne DNA Editor

In its new Direct Note Access, the latest version of Celemony’s Melodyne introduces what might just be the most hotly anticipated piece of music technology ever. Will mixing and remixing ever be the same again?

Mike Senior

It’s easy to forget how much of a revelation Celemony’s original Melodyne software was when it first appeared in 2001. The quality of its central pitch/time manipulation engine generated a real sense of excitement amongst musicians on account of the new possibilities on offer. Since then, Melodyne has progressed through several stand-alone versions, each refining the existing concept and ironing out wrinkles in the user experience. By the time a proper plug-in version was announced at the end of 2006, and I personally joined the ranks of its regular users, the whole package was slick and mature, and it soon proved itself indispensable for my everyday audio-buffing tasks.

However, the raw emotional impact of Celemony’s first big technological ‘hurrah’ has inevitably faded in the memory, while the competition has upped its game. But then, at 2008’s Frankfurt Musikmesse, inventor Peter Neubaecker pulled a whole new breed of rabbit from the sleeve of his conjurer’s robe, in the shape of the flabbergasting new ‘Direct Note Access’ (DNA) algorithm. This is claimed to deliver what many had long considered an impossibility: the selective manipulation of individual notes within a polyphonic audio file.

Family Resemblances

It’s taken Celemony until now, however, to make DNA available to the public as part of the new Melodyne Editor, which operates both in stand-alone form and as a plug-in for AU, RTAS and VST hosts. This replaces the existing Melodyne Plug-in in their product line as part of a general reshuffle: Melodyne Uno will become the new Melodyne Assistant, Melodyne Cre8 will be absorbed into the next generation of Melodyne Studio; and Melodyne Essentials will advance to version 2. Anyone who purchased Melodyne Plug-in after 12th March 2008 will be entitled to a free Melodyne Editor upgrade, while the watershed for free upgrade from other products is 1st June 2009. Other existing users can choose from a number of reduced-cost upgrade options.

Various resolutions and formats of audio file can be loaded into Melodyne Editor’s stand-alone version, while the plug-in requires that you first transfer your audio into the plug-in in real time before you can get to work. After import, you have to wait while Melodyne runs its note-detection analysis, following which the unravelled musical information is laid out in the editing window as a splattering of Celemony’s trademark blobs on a piano roll-style pitch display.

Three processing algorithms are available: the pre-existing Melodic and Percussive settings, and the new DNA-powered Polyphonic mode. As you’ll know if you’ve already used previous Melodyne versions in earnest, the key to getting good results is to make sure that the software’s note detection actually matches what you’re hearing — it’s pretty good, but it’s not infallible, and if it fails to detect the notes correctly, the processing won’t work as it should. Fortunately, you can control the way Melodyne interprets pitches in the audio, via a special Note Assignment mode.

With monophonic lines, the tidy-up procedure is pretty painless. Usually there are just a handful of notes interpreted in the wrong octave, and it takes no time to correct these. Melodyne suggests sensible alternatives, and if you don’t rate those you can just drag the errant blob in question to its intended pitch target. If you need confirmation that what you’re seeing in the Note Assignment mode matches the musical line you’re expecting to hear, you can now switch on a handy new Monitoring Synthesizer, which will play the detected pitches back to you in place of the source audio signal.

Detective Work

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Product Review - Celemony Melodyne DNA Editor

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