Tracks and regions

Track Edit Mode and Clip Edit Mode

In Melodyne, two different modes are available for editing notes; you switch between them using the buttons above the Note Editor. The left-hand button activates Track Edit Mode; the button to the right of it, Clip Edit Mode.

In Track Edit Mode you see the contents of the entire Logic track, regardless of how many regions it comprises.

The region borders are shown in Melodyne by vertical grey lines. The moving of borders is performed in Logic – not in Melodyne – and as soon as the next Play command is executed in Logic, the lines in the Melodyne user interface are updated. This allows you to see at once whether a region change occurs at an unfortunate moment – such as in the middle of a note – as well as making it easier, in such cases, for you to find a better place for it.

Checking “Follow the Selection in the DAW” in the Options menu causes Melodyne to display the contents of the currently selected track or region automatically in the Note Editor as soon as you commence playback in Logic. If you do not wish Melodyne to do this, you can deactivate this option and open windows for the desired Melodyne instances yourself manually.

Tip: In Melodyne studio, when multiple tracks are displayed at the same time in the Note Editor and these in turn comprise multiple regions, the gray lines indicating the region borders, due to their sheer number, can sometimes obscure the display. In such cases, you might wish to clear the option “Show Clip Borders” in the Options menu, thereby hiding the gray lines and reducing the clutter.

Most of the time, you will probably prefer to work in Track Edit Mode, due to the one-to-one correspondence of its display to the arrangement of the track in question, and also therefore to what you are hearing. However, Melodyne also offers the alternative Clip Edit Mode, which under certain circumstances allows you greater flexibility.

In Clip Edit Mode, you see only one Logic region at a time. In Melodyne studio, the track list remains in view, but in Clip Edit Mode, the Edit and Reference buttons are grayed out.

Track Edit Mode and Clip Edit Mode differ in the way notes are displayed at region borders: whilst in Track Edit Mode, only notes lying within the region borders determined by Logic can be seen, in Clip Edit Mode notes on either side of the borders remain visible; you therefore see in Melodyne – in the area with a gray background – what you would hear if you were to resize the region in Logic. This can be helpful, for instance, when you wish to shorten a note that is held too long, where the ending of the note is located beyond the border of the region. In Track Edit Mode, you would not be able to access the end of the note, as nothing outside the region is displayed there. In Clip Edit Mode, on the other hand, you can simply grab the end of the note and adjust it neatly to the length of the region.

Switching between Track, Clip and Note Assignment modes
You decide which region is displayed in Clip Edit Mode not in Logic but in Melodyne itself. Your workflow might, for example, look like this:

In the screenshot, Track Edit Mode is activated, so all the regions belonging to the selected track are displayed. Before switching to Clip Edit Mode, select one note belonging to the region you wish to edit. In our example, a note from the third region is selected. This being the case, selecting Clip Edit Mode would open this third region for editing.

Suppose, however, that instead of just one, several notes were selected, at least two of which belonged to different regions. Under these circumstances, the Clip Edit Mode button would be grayed out, as Melodyne would have no way of knowing which region you wished to edit. Before you can enter Clip Edit Mode, you must therefore limit your selection to notes (or a note) belonging to the single region you wish to edit.

The same principle applies, incidentally, when switching to Note Assignment Mode (the button to the right of Clip Edit Mode): the note selection must be unambiguous.

Restructuring of the arrangement

Until ARA came along, Melodyne’s editing was always performed on a copy of the contents of the Logic track created in the course of the ‘transfer’ process. The snag was that if you changed the track subsequently in Logic (e.g. by moving or muting regions) or if new regions were created (e.g. by recording overdubs), the whole transfer process had to be repeated. This tiresome business has now been completely eliminated. It is enough now to press the Play button once and the Melodyne display updates automatically to reflect all the region changes on the Logic track.

Fading and muting regions
Within regions on tracks with Melodyne, fades and gain changes have the same effect acoustically as they do within regions without Melodyne. The size of the corresponding Melodyne blobs, however, remains unaffected.

If you mute regions in Logic, however, the notes affected do vanish from Melodyne, the principle here being “what you don't hear, you shouldn't see”. But don’t worry: the Melodyne notes are retained “in memory” and reappear – including any editing you may already have applied to them – as soon as you make the region audible again in Logic.

Track alternatives and plug-in presets
If you switch between track alternatives, Melodyne automatically switches right along with you, so using track alternatives to try out things like alternative bass riffs or different patterns poses no problems.
Plug-in presets, on the other hand, have no effect upon Melodyne. Rather than using these therefore for purposes such as demonstrating to a producer or musician by means an A/B comparison different depths of editing (more/less drastic corrections), you should use track alternatives.

Ghost and real copies
If you copy or loop regions in Logic and then commence playback, you will see the copied notes immediately in Melodyne. In principle, Melodyne behaves in exactly the same way as Logic’s MIDI editor, with which you are no doubt familiar – only Melodyne is working with audio notes, not MIDI ones. Here the familiar MIDI distinction between ‘real copies’ and ‘ghost copies’ (whether ‘aliases’ or ‘clones’) is supported:

• If you copy regions (by using Cmd-C and Cmd-V or by holding down the Alt key and dragging), the audio notes in each copied region can be edited individually and independently of the source region. A typical application might be to introduce small musical variations to a repeating motif (such as a bass riff) that you have created by making multiple copies.

• When you duplicate tracks, too, you work with real copies. To duplicate a track, press Cmd-D or make the menu selections “Track” > “Other” > “New Track With Duplicate Settings”. You will find Melodyne has been inserted automatically into the newly created track, so it only remains to copy the regions (by Alt-dragging) from the original track to the duplicate and you will have real copies to work with. The Melodyne content of the duplicate track will then be independent of that of the original. A typical application here might involve copying a vocal track with the intention of creating a second voice from it using Melodyne.

• If, on the other hand, you use the Loop function in Logic, the iterations (i.e. the successive repetitions of the loop) function as aliases, so any changes you make to the original will be heard every time the pattern is repeated. A typical application in this case might be another bass riff – this time, though, one that is initially in the wrong key. Here, thanks to the alias behavior, correcting the first appearance of the pattern (something easily done with Melodyne) automatically corrects all the others.

• As an alternative to the loop function, you can clone an audio region by holding down Shift+Alt and dragging it to a new location; like those of an alias, the Melodyne contents a clone are identical to those of the original region.

• Finally, you can make multiple copies using Cmd-R (or the menu command: “Edit” > “Repeat Multiple”). In this case a dialog box opens allowing you to determine whether the iterations created should behave like real copies or like aliases/clones.

Bounce and Convert

Bouncing in Logic is a very user-friendly, and at the same time extremely flexible, process. As a Melodyne user, however, you should familiarize yourself with the details of the Bounce dialog in Logic.

When using the Bounce function, you can choose whether or not you wish the effect of any plug-ins on the track to appear on the bounced track. As a rule, you will want your Melodyne editing to be included but not the effects of other plug-ins, such as compressors and equalizers. So, in this guide, whenever we recommend you to bounce a region, the procedure we intend you to follow is this:
i) set all plug-ins except Melodyne to 'bypass'
ii) open the Bounce dialog and make sure the option “Bypass Audio Effects” is left unchecked
iii) perform the bounce
iv) reactivate the other plug-ins

With this procedure, all the enhancements you have made to the track using Melodyne will be frozen into the bounced track, and this will then form the starting point for your future Melodyne editing.

In other places in this guide (such as when we are dealing with Apple Loops), we may recommend that, instead of the bounce function, you choose “Edit” > “Convert” > "Audio Region to New Audio File". When you use this function, plug-ins are not included; you are therefore creating a new region identical to the original and none of the changes you have already made with Melodyne will be retained.

Vocal comping

When comping, you are typically dealing with different takes of one and the same musical part that you have sliced into small regions. From these regions, you stitch together a patchwork consisting of the best individual performance of each word, phrase or segment. There are two ways of going about this in Logic: Either you save the takes on different tracks sharing the same audio channel (using the function “New Track with the Same Channel”) and then (using the scissors and the mute tool) piece together the desired running order. Or you pack all the takes into a single take folder (Functions>Folder>Pack Take Folder) and employ the swipe function to switch between them.

Thanks to ARA, Melodyne is equally happy with either method, as, whichever you use, each take retains its own ‘Melodyne memory’. It is therefore possible to edit individual notes in one take, switch to a second and perform further editing there, before switching back to the first and picking up where you left off. Thanks to Melodyne, you can begin making corrections even when you are still comparing takes; you no longer have to wait until you have settled on the final running order before doing so – which, incidentally, without ARA (much to the chagrin of many producers) was invariably the case.

Remember, however, that each time you change the running order of takes, you must press Play before the latest changes will be reflected in Melodyne.

There was one problem that was impossible to solve without ARA: Generally, when comping, you aim to position the region borders between notes (or between a breath and a note); unfortunately, since there are generally slight differences in the phrasing of different takes, you will often find that there is no gap between the end of a note in one take and the beginning of the next note in another, which means there is no good place to make the cut. Wherever you decide to switch takes, at least one of the notes involved will be sliced in two.

The solution to this problem lies – thanks to ARA – in Melodyne’s Clip Edit Mode. This allows you, as describe above, to look (and reach) beyond the borders of a region and adjust the timing of the sliced note until it fits neatly within the comping borders.