Pitch Tool

Shifting the pitch center

Select the Pitch Tool from either the toolbox or the context menu of the Note Editor or by pressing the [F2] key of your computer keyboard. (If you wish to assign a different shortcut to this tool, you may do so after choosing Melodyne > Preferences > Shortcuts > Editing Tools from the main menu.)

The Pitch Tool is the topmost of the three pitch editing tools. It is responsible for the pitch center of each note, which can be thought of as its center of gravity. Melodyne allows you to edit the pitch center of notes independently of any modulation or drifting in pitch they exhibit. Press the [F2] key twice and three times in quick succession to select, respectively, the first and second sub-tools of the Pitch Tool. From the Preferences dialog, you can also, if you wish, define separate keyboard shortcuts for all three tools.

Drag a note up or down with the Pitch Tool to alter its pitch. If the note is one of several selected, all the notes in the selection will move up or down en bloc.

Depending whether No Snap, Chromatic Snap, Key Snap or Chord Snap is selected for the Pitch Grid, notes can either be moved freely or will snap to the nearest semitone, the nearest note of the selected scale or the nearest note of the prevailing chord.

Hold down the [Alt] key as you move notes if you wish the selected grid to be ignored; this will allow you to position the note freely.

Monitoring pitch shifts

As you move a note in pitch, you will hear the “frozen” sound of the note at the position clicked. By moving the mouse to the left or right while doing so, you can put other parts of the note under the acoustic microscope. If you do not wish to monitor pitch changes in this way, clear the option Monitor When Editing Blobs in the Options > Note Editor sub-menu, which can also be accessed via the cog icon in the top right-hand corner of the Note Editor.

If the note in question is part of a chord, you have the additional option of hearing the entire chord – and, with it, the changing harmonic context – as you drag the note up or down. To do this, once you have begun dragging the note, press and hold down the [Cmd] key. This is useful when you are creating or improving vocal harmonies by pitch-shifting notes within multiple tracks, as it allows you to hear and evaluate each new chord as it is created.

Editing pitch with the inspectors

As an alternative to editing the selected notes with the Pitch Tool, you can enter the desired value for the note and the deviation in cents from equal temperament in the inspector near the toolbar or the Note Inspector. The Note Inspector also allows you to determine the frequency in hertz of the note or notes selected. In each case you can increase or decrease the current value by clicking in the relevant box and dragging the arrow upwards or downwards.

When typing values into the Pitch field, you can enter either absolute values (C3, D4 etc.) or relative ones (+2, -1, etc.).

If you have selected several notes that differ in pitch, three hyphens are displayed in the boxes – followed, as you click in the box and drag, by values describing the extent of the relative change.

Correcting pitch with a double click

You can tell that a note is sharp or flat from the fact that it doesn’t lie plumb in the middle of any of the horizontal lanes in the editing display. These represent the notes of the chromatic scale, the note in question, in each case, being indicated by the vertical Pitch Ruler to the left of the Note Editor. If, with Chromatic Snap activated, you double-click the offending note with the Pitch Tool or Main Tool, it – and any other notes selected at the same time – will “snap to the grid”, which means they will move instantly to the very center of their respective lanes. The “fine offset” of the notes in question will then be 0 cents; in other words, they will be perfectly in tune.

If, however, instead of Chromatic Snap, Scale Snap or Chord Snap are activated, as well as setting their fine offsets to zero, a double-click may actually cause the notes in question to change lanes.

If, for example, as is shown here, Chord Snap is active and you double-click on an E, it could move to F if there is no E in the prevailing chord, as would be the case, for example, if that chord were F minor. In addition, the offset from the target note (in this case F) would be 0 cents, so the new note would be perfectly in tune.

If you are not interested in correcting the intonation, however, but simply in eliminating a clash between the note in question and the chosen chord, hold down the [Alt] key as you double-click. It will then snap to the nearest chord tone, as is your intention, but its offset from the destination pitch will be the same is its offset from the pitch it came from; this is sometimes desirable, as minor imperfections of this kind can contribute towards the creation of rich and vibrant chorus effects.

When you are editing pitch, the blob simply serves as a “handle”; what you should concentrate on is the Pitch Curve within the blob. For the auditory impression – if what you are seeking to avoid is the jarring effect of poor intonation – what is essential is for the “right” part of each note to reside at the “right” pitch.

The fine offset displayed in the Note Inspector, which serves as the basis for any intonation correction resulting from a double click, is based on the path traced by the Pitch Curve throughout the entire duration of the note. Here Melodyne takes a great many musical criteria into consideration – among them, the fact that the central part of a note, as a rule, plays a more decisive role in the listener’s perception of pitch than its beginning or end. The Inspector is, in effect, offering a recommendation, which you accept whenever you drag a note with the [Alt] key pressed or double-click on it.

In principle, you can rely on this; once you’ve double-clicked on a note, it will be in tune.

In addition – and this depends ultimately upon genre-determined listening habits or perhaps simply your own taste – you may wish to slice up a problematic note by inserting additional note separations and then double-click on the newly created note fragments. The smaller the fragments, the closer you will get to intonational perfection, though the emotional impact of the performance may suffer in consequence.

To learn more about the various tuning strategies available – and their application to vocal tracks in particular – and for suggestions as to how the sometimes conflicting demands of perfect intonation and emotional richness can best be reconciled, visit the “Training” section in our Help Center.

Pitch transitions

When one note follows another and a tonal relationship between the pair has been detected, the pitch curve is drawn through them, and in the area between them a thick orange line is displayed that represents the pitch transition.

If you position the Pitch Tool over the rear part of a note, click and drag vertically, you can make the pitch transition steeper or less steep.

Pitch transitions only exist between adjacent notes between which there is a soft separation. By clicking on a soft separation with the Separation Type Tool (the sub-tool of the Note Separation Tool), you can transform it into a hard separation, thereby deactivating all association between the two notes and with it the pitch transition.

Resetting individual edits and introducing random deviations

In the Edit > Reset Individual Edits > Pitch cascading menu, you will find a variety of commands that can be used to reverse the effects of particular types of pitch editing, thereby restoring specific aspects of the notes selected to their original state. The commands apply only to the current selection and are grayed out whenever no editing of the type in question has yet been applied to the notes concerned. Note that these commands operate entirely independently of the normal undo function!

With the commands in the Edit > Add Random Deviations sub-menu, you can randomly alter the pitch of the notes currently selected – introducing either slight, moderate or drastic deviations from the original intonation. You can also employ the commands several times in succession to intensify the effect. These commands are useful when, for example, you’ve doubled a track in order to obtain a fuller or ‘fatter’ sound. By introducing random deviations, so that the copy is no longer identical to the original, you can simulate more realistically the effect of two performers playing or singing in unison. All these commands affect only the selected notes and are therefore grayed out if no notes are selected.