Melodyne for acoustic guitar?

[b1j]

Originally Posted by jim1960

I'm a bit fastidious when it comes to making sure the guitar is in tune when recording so the polyphonic capabilities of Melodyne aren't critical to me. For full takes, I'll check my tuning between each one. For punching in shorter sections, I'll let it go a few takes and then re-check. Recording a poorly tuned guitar falls in the category of "Unforced Errors" to me since it's entirely preventable.

Jim, quite so. The first couple of verses came off just fine, and were well in tune. By the time I started tracking in layers on later verses, some of them suffered from a bum string here and there. Unforced for sure. Now that I know how to exercise restraint with Melodyne, though, I might temper my own fastidiousness because I know I can probably adjust small cent divergences.

I wish I had a dedicated recording space. I’d leave it set up and go in there often. As it was, I had one window of time to get the track down for the song. Otherwise I’d have checked that the winning layer for each verse was tone-perfect. Instead I tracked until I played the passage well.

In the end this will become the backing track for better tracks, as I try to do my best effort for this song. Next week I plan to send the rough guitar/vocal mix to a pair of professional musicians to see if they want to perform the song in their repertoire. There’s a mid-August deadline, so I’m stuck with an amateur performance and a fairly primitive mix. Oh well.

[b1j]

Originally Posted by Doug Young

Of course. But sometimes you do end up with situations where you (or someone else) messed up, and you can't redo the guitar part for one reason or another.

I had one interesting scenario a while back recording a CD with a violinist. She added a bunch of tracks to an older recording of mine. I don't think I even still owned the guitar used on the track. Her pitch was quite good, but there was one short spot where the string section sounded flat and sour. So I used melodyne on her tracks. Listening to the strings alone, they sounded perfect. Put the guitar back in and the strings sounded flat just on that one chord. Solo the guitar - sounds perfect. What the heck?

Doug, with all six strings actively picked, plus the various harmonics that popped in from time to time, it almost looked like two instruments at work. A fundamental might be -1 cent while the second harmonic would make an appearance at +5 cents.

This episode has taught me to listen critically and set out to adjust the fewest blobs possible, even if an occasional third interval lands slightly sharp. As you say, additional instruments can mask the apparent blue note.

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by b1j

Doug, with all six strings actively picked, plus the various harmonics that popped in from time to time, it almost looked like two instruments at work. A fundamental might be -1 cent while the second harmonic would make an appearance at +5 cents.

That could be a lot of things (the guitar, strings, etc). But keep in mind that with equal temperament, harmonics will not all be in tune. That's just the nature of the guitar and equal temperament. It ends up being part of the sound of the guitar to some extent, but it can cause issues when multiple instruments are involved.

Bob can probably comment on this better than I, but I've heard stories of pop/rock tracks where guitar rhythm tracks would be recorded one chord at a time, retuning for each chord. We know that you can get one chord in tune, and another won't be, so this is understandable. Could be a myth that people go that far to achieve a good recording, but I read this somewhere in a description of some recording session. I've never gone that far myself.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by b1j

Now that I know how to exercise restraint with Melodyne...

I should have mentioned that so I'm glad you recognized it at some point. It's easy to go too far in search of unnecessary perfection.

As an example, about 15 year ago I recorded a bunch of songs for a longtime friend of mine. He's a pretty good songwriter, a very good guitar player, but he can't sing in key to save his life. Some years back, as a surprise for his birthday, I decided to revisit a few of those tunes and spruce them up.

I added bass lines, bg vocals, and some instrumentation. But the biggest job was tuning his vocals with Melodyne. I got through the three songs and gave them all a final listen. They sounded good ...too good. I tuned those vocals so well that it really didn't sound like my friend anymore. It was way too smooth and had lost all the character of his voice. I redid them all but backed off on the corrections. I left him a bit pitchy in places where it didn't ruin the song and tuned him where it was necessary but I didn't bring him fully into the correct pitch unless it was needed. In the end, it sounded like him doing the best performance of his life. I never told him what I did the vocals but he loved the new versions.

So yes, restraint.

[DupleMeter]

I do this all the time with all kinds of polyphonic content (guitars, pianos, choirs, etc).

The issue you describe comes from "hard tuning" everything. You have to use your ears & just nudge the bad notes into the "good" range. The guitar is *never* perfectly in tune, so you have to be very careful on how you go about tuning it.

If you're selective you can get undetectable results. Heck, I've even saved a few guitar solos where there was just one or two bad notes that needed to be a different notes.

That said, I have Melodyne Studio (top tier). I'm not sure what difference that makes, though. I think Studio adds the harmonic shifting feature.

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by jim1960

As an example, about 15 year ago I recorded a bunch of songs for a longtime friend of mine. He's a pretty good songwriter, a very good guitar player, but he can't sing in key to save his life. .

My most "fun" with Melodyne was last summer when I did an audio mix for a local community theatre group. Due to the pandemic, they pre-recorded everything individually at home - the plan varied between doing a music video and lipsyncing live, if conditions allowed (which they ultimately did). They sent me vocal tracks recorded on everything from garage band to iphones. None of them had ever recorded before, and the group had one very good (Carnegie Hall) singer, the rest's only musical qualifications were that they had volunteered with enthusiasm.

The grand finale was an accapella version of Billy Joe's Longest Time (with parody lyrics). Twenty-Two vocals. Partly due to the inexperienced home recording, partly due to the singing ability, and so on, the timing of each track was plus or minus several beats, and pitch was plus or minus several steps. I couldn't just select everything and auto-correct it, because people weren't just a bit flat or sharp, they weren't even within the ballpark much of the time. But with Melodyne's ability to overlay instances so I could see multiple tracks on the same grid, I was able to move everyone in time and pitch, compare to the score, and basically reconstruct the vocal parts note by note. Took a long time to even make sense of what it was supposed to be, but in the end, I had 22 voices singing barbershop/do-wop harmony. The result was pretty stunning, and I bring up the before-after every now and then just for grins. I don't think I overdid it, the results were still believable because you can still hear the quality of the amateur voices. I never showed the group the before version, they only heard the final result, and they seemed to just think "hey, we're not half bad".

[b1j]

Originally Posted by Doug Young

That could be a lot of things (the guitar, strings, etc). But keep in mind that with equal temperament, harmonics will not all be in tune. That's just the nature of the guitar and equal temperament. It ends up being part of the sound of the guitar to some extent, but it can cause issues when multiple instruments are involved.

Bob can probably comment on this better than I, but I've heard stories of pop/rock tracks where guitar rhythm tracks would be recorded one chord at a time, retuning for each chord. We know that you can get one chord in tune, and another won't be, so this is understandable. Could be a myth that people go that far to achieve a good recording, but I read this somewhere in a description of some recording session. I've never gone that far myself.

First, in addition to the harmonics, I assume there are sympathetic vibrations happening across strings, so that if you nudge the main note it will be out of resonance with the note that was sympathetic with the unadjusted note. That might explain some of the phase-y sound I got from overdoing it.

Next, funny you mention recording one chord at a time. I’ve had that fleeting thought! But then I reasoned, no, that would be over the top, even for a mediocre player like me. Better to rehearse more before trying to track.

Don’t tempt me, though.

[b1j]

Originally Posted by jim1960

I should have mentioned that so I'm glad you recognized it at some point. It's easy to go too far in search of unnecessary perfection.

As an example, about 15 year ago I recorded a bunch of songs for a longtime friend of mine. He's a pretty good songwriter, a very good guitar player, but he can't sing in key to save his life. Some years back, as a surprise for his birthday, I decided to revisit a few of those tunes and spruce them up.

I added bass lines, bg vocals, and some instrumentation. But the biggest job was tuning his vocals with Melodyne. I got through the three songs and gave them all a final listen. They sounded good ...too good. I tuned those vocals so well that it really didn't sound like my friend anymore. It was way too smooth and had lost all the character of his voice. I redid them all but backed off on the corrections. I left him a bit pitchy in places where it didn't ruin the song and tuned him where it was necessary but I didn't bring him fully into the correct pitch unless it was needed. In the end, it sounded like him doing the best performance of his life. I never told him what I did the vocals but he loved the new versions.

So yes, restraint.

I produced a song for my brother when he stayed with us for a few days last year. I made a few arrangement suggestions, and did the tracking, editing, mixing, and kindergarten-level “mastering”. The point is, when I talked about getting ready for Melodyne on his lead and harmony vocals, he wasn’t interested. After we broke for the day, out came the headphones and off I went. The next day he listened to his vocals, on which I had pitch-adjusted about 75% on most of the notes, his appraisal of the work went up. He and I both like how keeping the vocals on pitch lets the listener ease up and get involved with the melody, instrument, and arrangement.

I didn’t dwell on how much or how little correction I had done, I just said I had sweetened the vocals a bit. I left in maybe half of his naturally heavy vibrato and kept in a fair amount of pitch drift at the end of phrases to keep it real, but nailed the basic notes to within 5 to 10 cents, depending on where it was in a phrase.

[lkingston]

Originally Posted by jim1960

I should have mentioned that so I'm glad you recognized it at some point. It's easy to go too far in search of unnecessary perfection.

As an example, about 15 year ago I recorded a bunch of songs for a longtime friend of mine. He's a pretty good songwriter, a very good guitar player, but he can't sing in key to save his life. Some years back, as a surprise for his birthday, I decided to revisit a few of those tunes and spruce them up.

I added bass lines, bg vocals, and some instrumentation. But the biggest job was tuning his vocals with Melodyne. I got through the three songs and gave them all a final listen. They sounded good ...too good. I tuned those vocals so well that it really didn't sound like my friend anymore. It was way too smooth and had lost all the character of his voice. I redid them all but backed off on the corrections. I left him a bit pitchy in places where it didn't ruin the song and tuned him where it was necessary but I didn't bring him fully into the correct pitch unless it was needed. In the end, it sounded like him doing the best performance of his life. I never told him what I did the vocals but he loved the new versions.

So yes, restraint.

I’ve gone through EXACTLY THIS, but with photo retouching! We are all mostly, collections of flaws.

[Bob Womack]

One typical recording problem is guitar and piano. Pianos have "stretched" tuning, meaning that as the strings march away from the middle C octave the piano tuner will tuner the octaves slightly sharp, just a few beats, as you go up from middle C, and slightly flat as you go down from middle C. Why? Because the system of equal temperament only exists within a single octave. As you move away from that octave, the harmonics begin to clash. However, the guitar is equal tempered and left at that. So, if you tune to a piano middle octave, the moment the pianista goes outside the middle octave the guitar sounds out by comparison. It is amazing how many pianist don't understand that the piano isn't perfectly tuned, it is purposely de-tuned to sound better with itself.

There is a raging argument concerning whether or not pianos used to accompany orchestras should use stretched tuning because it clashes with the other instruments. Of course, if you tune the piano without the stretch, it doesn't work well for piano solos or piano as the lead instrument. If you were to abandon stretched tuning for accompaniment, each orchestra would need two pianos.

The result is that guitars need to tune to a tuner and pianos need to tune separately and realize that they won't be exactly in tune except perhaps in one octave. In recording, any out-of-tune moment may be jarring and as you know, a recording is for ever. You may have to touch up and punch in at points to cover. It is interesting that playing live allows humans to sympathetically cover for slight tuning inaccuracies that are profoundly jarring in a detached recording. It's a little like the fact that we can tune out room acoustics and background noise in person but can be profoundly annoyed by the same acoustics and background noise in a recording.

And yes, there are plenty of recorded examples where a prominent guitar chord hasn't matched another fixed-tuning instrument so they punched in the chord or note. There are also plenty of examples where they didn't, and should have!!!

Bob