SOUND ON SOUND MAGAZINE REVIEWS CELEMONY MELODYNE 4:
Just occasionally, however, a product comes along that is genuinely revolutionary, and when Celemony first showed me a beta of Melodyne 4, it was immediately obvious that they had come up with something a bit special. A couple of months down the line, it’s ready to be unleashed on the world, and if anything, I’m even more impressed. Without wishing to give too much away now, I think it’s fair to say that this is not your average software update.
The first question on some readers’ lips is likely to be “What happened to Melodyne 3?” The last full release of Melodyne to be reviewed in SOS was Melodyne 2, as long ago as December 2009. This was the release that introduced Celemony’s landmark DNA technology, and it’s a mark of how advanced their algorithms are that, more than six years later, Melodyne is still almost unique in its ability to manipulate individual notes within a polyphonic audio recording after the fact.
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Ever since the launch of the very first version of Melodyne, Celemony have been at pains to present it as more than just a tool for correcting wayward pitching. It does, of course, excel at correcting wayward pitching; but it also lets users explore new creative pathways, working with recorded sound in ways that were never previously possible. Celemony’s data apparently indicates that about 60 percent of existing users employ Melodyne primarily as a corrective tool, with the remaining two–fifths of the user base exploring the creative side of the program. And in Melodyne 4, they’ve added features that will be very interesting to both camps.
It’s truly awesome technology; as I wrote in my review, I found the previous version of Melodyne to be incredibly easy to get started with, and it quickly became indispensable to my music. I used it for pitch correction on vocals (I need all the help I can get!), replacing the odd muffed note in an otherwise usable solo, modifying drum loops, and radical sound-altering “science experiments.” And once my home studio is finished soon in Texas, I will start working with the new version.
But Melodyne does beg the question: music recording technology has never been more powerful. Yet, as this recent Wall Street Journal article on the making of “Strawberry Fields Forever” highlights, the Beatles and George Martin recorded masterpieces on four track analog recorders. As with a movie industry that went from making Casablanca and Citizen Kane in black and white to digital effect-heavy movies featuring cartoon superheros, at what point — if ever — will we once again get a popular music again whose output is equal to the massive amount of technology that goes into it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol0OZ3xzsjs