Should I bear down and learn Melodyne?

[Suntower]

This may seem like a silly question, but.... I'm getting old. And I'm becoming less and less willing to learn -any- new 'tech' unless someone convinces me to bear down and do it for my own good.

I'm a 20 year user of Cubase. I own AutoTune and Melodyne 4, but I honestly cannot remember the last time I used either. Frankly, most of the time, I would either have the players redo parts -or- in the case of drums, just chop and align manually the odd bit with a timing issue.

But recently, I'm getting projects that need more help. I dunno if people just stopped singing in tune or what, but I find myself using the audio editor in Cubase a -lot- more. And that's happening just at the time in my life where I'm losing patience with this sort of thing.

This weekend I figured out how to use Cubase 11 with ARA and Melodyne 4. But it's -waaaaay- slower for me than using the Cubase editor.

SO MY QUESTION IS TWO PART:
1. Is Melodyne 4 actually worth learning? ie. is the automagic results it provides really worth the extra effort? (ie. really superior to the pitch fix capabilities of Cubase 11)

2. Is Melodyne 5 worth the upgrade, just for the simple pitch correction I do. (I read some reviews and wasn't clear as to how much it helps in my very simple use case.) Again, does it create better (more natural?) results than the built-in tools in Cubase.

EDIT: I am actually mostly fine with the Cubase audio editor for simple non-vibrato notes. Where it often totally falls down are notes where this a lot of vibrato. Trying to fix those to sound 'natural' is often impossible for me. I wonder if Melodyne handles that kind of thing more gracefully.

TIA.

---JC

[Magnetic Services]

I just got the Melodyne 5 trial to pitch-correct an album's worth of out-of-tune piano, and it's been a total lifesaver. I'm not even scratching the surface of everything it can do, but it's amazing at differentiating notes and overtones, etc. And yeah, you can tune the "pitch drift" (vibrato) without tuning the note as a whole. It's also got tools for changing the timbre and envelope of each note, crazy shit like that. I found it pretty easy to learn in a couple hours with their tutorial videos.

The trial is 30 days with total functionality, which is all I need it for, but it is a hefty investment if you were to buy it. Upgrading might be worth it, though.

[Suntower]

But you're finding it mostly automatic? ie. you just run the track through it and don't have to edit individual notes? That's the dream, of course.

[alexdingley]

I haven’t touched cubase since my original Cubase VST|32 on MacOS 9 (then I moved to Nuendo and Pro Toold and eventually Logic... but I can now say:

Melody me is more subtle and transparent than the built-in tuning in Logic Pro X, and definitely smoother than what I recall from Antares.

I tended to do a lot of manual tweaks in Logic, and in my first learning pass in Melodyne 5, I struggled with the UI for a moment, and had to keep the manual open for the first 20min, but then I was really flying and got 3 vocals done for a song, in a very short time... and I cannot hear ANY artifacts... and it’s got plenty of vibrato... and the original vocals had enough pitch problems that my fiancé noticed them and called them out. So... I’m fairly impressed (with her, and with Melodyne)

[roscoenyc]

There's a reason why there aren't really Melodyne jokes.
It can work that good.

It is kind of a drag the way it works in PT though. I usually either wait till late in the work on a song to use it because of how it behaves.
It was vexing to me before I realized that phrases or words loaded into Melodyne would defeat clip gain and also nudge.

Sometimes I commit or print to another track after using it.

I have been using it for a long time. I upgraded to 5 recently. I don't use it on 'automatic'. I usemore for going after specific spots.

[Magnetic Services]

For pitch-correcting piano, I just set it to maximum sensitivity to detect every note and overtone, then selected everything and used the pitch macro to nudge it all to 50% in tune. Worked like a charm as far as I can tell, and I might even start using it in a more subtle way for individual fretless bass notes.

The only catch is you have to set your buffer super high (ideally 1024) when using it as a plugin, or else it makes some awful noises. It also takes a while to process things, even on a pretty souped-up PC I built just a few months ago.

[Suntower]

Thanks for the replies. Helpful.

Apparently, there is a bug in Cubase 11 wrt Melodyne, so I'll probably stick w v4 and keep playing until it's resolved. Thus saving myself another $149 which I can use for another creativity enhancer. Beer.

[digitaldrummer]

It is kind of a drag the way it works in PT though. I usually either wait till late in the work on a song to use it because of how it behaves.
It was vexing to me before I realized that phrases or words loaded into Melodyne would defeat clip gain and also nudge.

Sometimes I commit or print to another track after using it.

Yes, it took me a couple times to figure this out too - no other plugin works like this that I am aware of. But now as soon as I do any correction, I "commit" the track in PT (but keep the original and set it offline). Then you can do any other processing (clip gain, nudge, cut and paste, etc.). anyway, once I learned to use it "correctly", it goes fairly quickly.