Select display options

In this tour, you will learn about the options Melodyne offers you for working with your audio notes. All the following options are to be found in the View menu.

Auto Scroll

If you activate auto scrolling (by checking the Auto Scroll entry in the menu), the note display in Melodyne will follow the playback cursor.

If you have selected one or several notes, Melodyne assumes that you want to see the selection and edit it. For this reason, the auto scroll function is temporarily deactivated at such times. As soon as the note(s) are deselected, as a result (for example) of your clicking in the editing background, the display will resume tracking the playback cursor.

Show Pitch Curve

If you check the option Show Pitch Curve, a thin line tracing the exact pitch of the tone at each instant will be superimposed on the corresponding blob.

On the left, you can see the ‘naked’ blobs (with none of the View options selected) and to the right, the same blobs with the pitch curve.

Regardless of whether or not this entry is checked, the pitch curve will be displayed whenever the pitch tool is selected.

Show Note Separations

If you select the option Show Note Separations, gray vertical lines appear at the beginning and end of each note marking its boundaries.

With notes that are fully or semi-detached, the note separation lines are replaced by somewhat bolder brackets.

Note separations are always displayed when the independent note separation tool is in use, regardless of whether or not the menu entry is checked.

Show Note Tails

In the detection and display of notes, Melodyne editor draws a distinction between the notes themselves and their tails – notes being the events of musical relevance and tails depicting the ‘non-musically-determined fading-away of the sound’. The share of the reverberation ascribed to a given tone, for example, is reflected in its tail. The Show Note Tails option allows you to decide whether the reverberative phase of notes should be displayed or hidden. This is likely to depend upon whether you prefer to concentrate upon their musical or their acoustic aspects.

If the tail is not displayed, the end of the musically relevant part of the note provides the ‘handle’ you can drag with the timing tool to make the note longer or shorter. Any reverberation present will in this case automatically be governed by the changes made. This display option serves, where there is a great deal of overlapping of notes, to provide a clearer overview of the musical context.

If the note tail is displayed (assuming it has one), it is this that provides the handle for the timing tool. Show Note Tails is the option most suitable when as authentic a picture as possible of the tones actually heard – including any temporal overlapping attributable to reverberation or some other cause – is what is sought.

Show Blob Info

With the option Show Blob Info, you can elect to show or hide a variety of display elements designed to facilitate working with individual tones.

The most striking of these elements is an additional pitch ruler that appears directly in front of any note over which you move the mouse pointer. Within the blob itself, thin red lines mark the drag zones of the context-sensitive tools.

If you drag a blob when the Show Blob Info option is checked, a vertical line also appears in the bar ruler aligned with the exact start of the note. This makes more precise positioning possible.

Show Intended Notes

If you check the option Show Intended Notes, gray frames appear around each blob.

These invariably lie directly on the semitone and coincide exactly with a gridline. They represent, in other words, Melodyne’s assumptions (based on its own analysis of the audio) as to the intended pitch of the note and its intended position within the measure or bar. These assumptions generally turn out to be correct, but are not inevitably so. They are to be thought of as suggestions.

The frames also display the positions in pitch and time towards which the notes in question will gravitate if partial quantization is applied to them with the macros, which are also the positions they will snap to if you double-click on them with the timing or pitch tools.

Show Notation

If you check the option Show Notation, a staff will appear just below the ruler displaying information about the pitch (though not the rhythm) of the notes in the form of conventional musical notation.

This offers you a further insight into what is going on musically, though no editing can be performed on the notes on the staff.

Show Replace Ranges (Plugin only)

If you check this option, those passages will be indicated that have been transferred to Melodyne Plugin from your host and for the playback of which, in consequence, the plug-in rather than the host is responsible.

This information is conveyed by the fact that the ruler is shaded more palely for the duration of all such passages.

Highlight Playing Notes

By checking or clearing this option, you can determine whether or not the outline of the note or notes currently sounding is displayed more boldly than that of the other notes. In dense musical material, you can often obtain a clearer overview by instructing Melodyne to highlight each note as it sounds in this way.

Show real-time controls (Plugin only)

Here, in Plugin, you can show the real-time controls that influence the pitch, formants and volume. These controls can be automated via your DAW. The control ranges for the pitch and formants can be selected from the context menu that opens when you right-click the control in question. [Command]+click resets the control to its neutral starting value. Please note that a change of pitch effected with the real-time control does not sound as good as one effected with the pitch tool. Do not therefore use the pitch control for normal transposition but only when you wish to use your DAW’s automation for special effects.