Celemony Plug-In

35 years in music and as audio engineer
multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, recording artist
Platform: WIN XP, SONAR 8 PRO

Pretty easy and straight forward; I'd offer a few minor changes in moving around, but after a few hours experimenting, it's easy.

AMAZING, no artifact pitch correction, pitch shifting and tonal shaping for vocal and monophonic instruments, like horns, bass, lead guitar etc.

Manual is abit muddled but understandable(the genius who invented this is German, so it probably makes perfect sense when in it's original form before translation; I would highlight some of the most
critical isues so that they would jump out on the page, and save alot of fairly deep Geek-reading to find that critical sentence).

This is THE most amazing plug-in effect I have out of hundreds of great plugs; it is miraculous to see and hear in action.

Talk about an acid-test; I had an elderly singer in the studio recently, who had once been quite a strong singer (you could hear that she must have been able to really sing in her younger years) but now, with her hearing failing, and wearing hearing aids, with that quaver that many older voices develop, she had waited too long to make great recordings... without some miraculous assistance.

Enter Melodyne Plug-In.
I had already had some amazing experiences with Melodyne; one male "singer" songwriter was sadly severely challenged pitch-wise...
one of the worst tracks pitch-wise that I've ever kept. The guy just couldn't sing. I "selected all" and pitch-corrected 100%, got in there and shifted a few notes to make the melody abit more interesting, and BINGO...vocal track saved, and client thrilled.

Now not long ago, such pitch shifting would leave SERIOUS audio artifacts, smearing, grainy sounding...Melodyne sounds PERFECT.
Of course, if you try to radically shift notes far beyond where they began, it will sound un-natural, but MPI is clean and amazing.

Back to the miracle mentioned above; once I had pitch corrected the
woman's voice, I used the "FORMANT" tool, which functions as a tone shaper for any selected note. Think of how a vocal will change tonality as it moves from lower register (chest voice) up into it's higher register (head voice), then imagine being able to go back in and selectively adjust that tonality that not many singers are really aware of or can effectively use and control; as the melody goes lower, by adjusting the Formant control on each word, note or syllable down, you add chest resonance, and as the melody peaks in the higher ranges, you can adjust the Formants up,effectively add a lift, more "air" that allows notes to soar and sound more effortless
and relaxed in the upper range. Subtle but amazing effect !!!
It allows you to fine tune the earlier pitch shifting. In addition MPI allows you to actually move notes, stretch notes, control volume
up or down on each word, note or syllable, even split into smaller segments to have finer control potential.
End result: after Melodyne Plug-In's serious magic, some carefully applied compression, EQ etc., I took 20 YEARS off this woman's voice,
and she sounded like she was back in her prime.

One more crazy save with Melodyne:
a client wanted to add pennywhistle to an arrangement, but it was in a key that is rare for pennywhistles, so we would have had to order an expensive whistle and wait a week for shipment...
OR...
I imported a copy of the guitar track into Sound Forge and did a fast and nasty pitch shift (meaning serious audio artifacts, a usual by-product of pitch shifting) moving the guitar into the pitch range of a penny whistle we had. Using that track, the musician laid down a whistle track, but it was in the wrong key for the original arrangement. We imported the penny whistle track back in to the original arrangement, used Melodyne to pitch shift the penny whistle FLAWLESSLY to the proper pitch,used alittle Formant shaping, and BINGO... perfect penny whistle track.
Unbelieveable software with consistantly amazing results.

This is the most amazing software since multi-track software began;
seriously.
Incredible value.
Easy on the CPU.
New update includes POLYPHONIC CHORD EDITING; this means that you can actually go inside a guitar or keyboard chord, open it up into separate notes, and fix or change any note you want!!!
How many thousands of times have you dreamed of this fix?

With this in mind, it probably won't be long before we can actually
separate an old recording back into separate tracks...think about it!