Originally Posted By: MarioD
I have Melodyne Editor that I rarely use. I prefer a good raw first or second take. I try to go for the emotion and not total perfection, you know like the good ol' days, i.e. learn your parts then record. I think a lot of AT is used due to the fact that everyone wants perfection immediately and AT gives it to them. If you are a singer or instrumentalist practice, practice, practice and then record. An occasional use of AT on a couple of bad notes on an otherwise good performance is ok but to rely on it is something else.

I tried to sing once. It was so bad that Melodyne gave me this error message "just shut your pie hole and play your guitar - I quit!"


Melodyne doesn't erase the emotion and feel.... it simply makes the track easier on the ears. One of my pet peeves is to hear a really nice instrumental bed with a singer that's slightly sharp or flat in some places. I'm fairly sensitive to pitch and can hear things that others miss. That stuff bugs me.

AT is not so much about "perfection" as it is "effecting" the vocals..... Melodyne is about "perfection" in a transparent way. More that one time, I have run ME on a track, corrected a vocal to pitch and in the playback after the fix realized that "perfect" wasn't good enough. I went in and added a few cents to the note because that's what made it sound the best. Ultimately, it's about the ear, not mathematical perfection in the track.

Talking about the "good old days"..... we glorify those days but in reality, the reason singers were singing raw tracks was not about the art so much as it was that they didn't have Melodyne or anything else like it back then and most of the artists were on record company defined budgets and didn't have the time or the money to spend endless hours in a studio doing retakes to get a part pitch perfect. It was a rare artist who had the luxury of huge studio budgets back in the day. So they did the take, and lived with it.

My official 3 cents on the topic.....

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