13. Polyphonic dissection with Celemony Melodyne 4

1 Celemony’s legendary Melodyne is an obvious choice for tuning up a flat vocal take or changing the notes in a chord, but it can also be taken out of context and used as a great guerilla remixing tool. Let’s run through some techniques – kick off by opening any DAW, setting the BPM to 119 and importing Dance.wav onto the timeline. 2 We’ll start by taking the drum break from the first four bars and copying it onto a blank channel after the track’s finished – this’ll be our rhythm track to layer things over later on. After adding Melodyne 4 to the Dance channel, hit the Transfer button then play the entire track from start to finish. This’ll record the full track into Melodyne ready for processing. 3 Once our track is analysed, we can start picking it apart by setting Melodyne’s Algorithm to Polyphonic Sustain, mapping our track out polyphonically across Melodyne’s piano roll. There’s a cool synth riff starting at bar 9 that we can steal first. Set up a two-bar loop, then delete the unwanted parts from the piano roll – click on the notes to audition them in isolation. 4 After isolating the synth riff, bounce it to a fresh DAW track for later on. Now we’ll pinch a chord from bar 31. Set up a one-bar loop, then delete all the notes from the piano roll except G4, G3 and C3. You’ll hear a slight bit of snare after the chord – chop it off by using the Note Separation Tool. 5 As before, we’ll bounce the chord to audio to use later, skip to bar 64, then set up a one-bar loop. The synth bass fill at the end is a great bit of remix ammo, so we’ll delete the notes around it. We can use the Note Separation Tool to chop out as much of the snare as possible, before bouncing the fill to audio. 6 We’ve stolen awesome individual samples from this full mix already, but we can take a full loop of the mid- and high-frequency synths as well. Set up a four-bar loop from bar 69 onwards, then delete the bottom three rows of notes from Melodyne’s piano roll. This’ll take out pretty much all of the kick and bass from the whole mix, leaving a usable loop. 7 We’ll bounce the four-bar loop to audio, select the notes in the piano roll and then pitch them up by 3 semitones. This’ll create an uplifting ‘key change’ section that could be used as an interesting variation in a re-edit or guerilla remix. After bouncing the key change to audio, move the audio parts we’ve created so they’re in line with the drum break we took earlier. 8 Between the drum break and the parts we’ve extracted from the full track, we have six separate samples. To finish, we’ll lay down the parts we’ve made into a brief arrangement over the track’s original drum break. The Melodyne techniques we’ve covered here also combine well with other remix tricks from this feature, so don’t be afraid to combine different strategies!