Originally Posted By: RichardB1985
Are there any ways that anyone can suggest to get the vocal melody right without writing it down note by note?

Hi, Richard.

When you're fitting a melody to chords, you're generally going to pick notes that match with the chords - especially notes that fall on strong beats.

If you've got a note that doesn't "fit", you should try making that a note of the current chord.

For example, let's say you've got a in the key of A Major, and on a particular bar, the chord is C♯m. The melody sounds fine, except in one place where you sang an F note.

Melodyne knows that key of A major has the following 7 notes in it:

A B C♯ D E F♯ G#

To "fix" the F note, Melodyne has to change it to a note that belongs to the A Major scale.

F is midway between two notes in the A Major scale: E and F#

How does Melodyne know which is the right note? There's really no way for it to know for sure, so it makes a guess. Perhaps Melodyne decides that you were singing the note flat, and changes it to an F♯.

Now the note is in the right key, but it still sounds wrong. That's because you know something that Melodyne doesn't: the chord that the melody is against.

The C♯m chord has the notes:

C♯ E G♯

Instead of selecting an F♯ note - which isn't a member of that chord - Melodyne should have selected the E instead.

To recap: When you've got a melody note that sounds "wrong", you should change it to a note that belongs to the chord that's currently playing.

Did that answer your question?

-- David Cuny

My virtual singer development blog
Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?

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