i drag the vocals or whatever sample i'm
attempting to pitch into an fl project, along with the base
song, making sure to set bpm correctly and whatnot
i splice and arrange the sample to match
the rhythm of the base song using the old fashioned splice,
make unique, stretch, repeat method
if there are parts that i know are
going to overlap (ex. chords and/or harmonies), i
intentionally arrange them in a way so that they don't
overlap, otherwise it wouldn't really be managable in
melodyne
i also typically don't do the same
pattern of samples more than once if i already know it's
going to be identical rhythmically. if i want to do
harmonies with a particular pattern, i simply copy and
paste that pattern in melodyne itself
for stretching, while i do stretch
parts of the sample in fl to be shorter, i typically don't
make them longer as melodyne is usually better for making
samples longer than fl, more on that later
at this point in the process i should
have something like this:
from here, what i do is temporarily set
the project bpm to half speed, thus making the sample sound
like this:
i do this to try and prevent unpitchable
notes during melodyne detection
i mute everything except the spliced
sample, and then export it as wav (this is important as
melodyne can only work with wav files)
once i open melodyne, i usually double
click and set the bpm (that's up
here) to the fl project bpm (either the normal or half
speed one) before importing. if i forget to do so beforehand,
melodyne will attempt to automatically set the bpm. in case it
gets it wrong the way to fix it is
right click the tempo in the top
right
choose Assign Tempo
click on the new grid that pops up
and do ctrl+a
right click and select Free Tempo
Assignment
set your desired bpm at the top
right click the tempo grid again and
select End Free Tempo Assignment
click the button to the right of
where you set the bpm to hide the tempo grid
visual example:
upon importing into melodyne the first
thing i do is flatten the pitch of all notes like so:
ctrl+a
Edit > Macros > Correct
Pitch...
set Pitch Center and Pitch Drift to
100% and hit ok
select the Pitch Tool
hover over the right side of any
note
left click and drag down to
straighten out pitch bends
select the Pitch Modulation Tool
(hold left click on the Pitch Tool icon)
left click on any note and drag down
until all of the pitch modulation is straightened out
visual example:
next i pitch everything to the melody of
the base song. transcription is outside the scope of this
"tutorial", but using something like demucs and importing the
Other stem into melodyne can often be a decent way to get a
transcription of a song. alternatively if you want to
transcribe by ear, doing so in fl with a basic sine/square
wave synth (ex. 3xosc default preset) is your best bet
for stretching notes, what i like to do
is
chop off the bit of silence at the end
of a note using the Note Separation Tool and then delete it
chop off the end of the note tail.
this will usually result in the tail snapping back to its
original pitch, in which case you just switch back to the
pitch tool, hold alt and drag it back into position
optionally do the same to the very
start of the note, though it's only really neccesary if the
note has a particular plosive sound at the start which you
don't want to be stretched
switch back to the Main Tool
holding alt, click on the tail and
drag it to the right, thus stretching the note behind it
when dragging, don't be afraid to have
the tail overlap with the next note just a little bit
visual example:
you'll notice how for the long "pen"
notes, i split the tails in fl and rendered them in the
position i want them to be in the final rip. this turned out
to be a bad solution though as the notes didn't line up as
well as i thought they would and i ended up having to fix it
in the project file, would not reccomend.
for harmonies, simply copy the pattern
you want to harmonize, paste it to another part of the
melodyne project, and pitch it like before
