From the course: Learning Melodyne 4

Exploring the interface - Melodyne Tutorial

From the course: Learning Melodyne 4

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Exploring the interface

- [Voiceover] Before we dig into all the great features and tools in Melodyne, let's take a minute to explore the interface. If you don't have a project open, just create a new one. From the Melodyne menu, open the preferences. The first option is shortcuts. Assigning shortcuts to the tools and functions you use most frequently, can make working in Melodyne extremely efficient. And the best part is, they work in the plugin as well as the standalone application. If you find yourself using a specific function frequently, come back here and assign a keyboard shortcut. You can use the user interface tab to change the language, set the default tuning, A440 or some other tuning, change the maximum levels of undo, and enable or disable tool tips. Tool tips can be helpful when first learning the application so let's leave them on. The recording options allow you to set the audio cache directory, the size of the cache, and the file type for when recording. We've already checked out the audio preferences, but you can use these to set your audio device, the sample rate, your buffer size, and your master output and input. Last, you can set Melodyne to check for updates here. Now let's close the preferences and go back to the main window. Pretty much everything you need to do in Melodyne can be accessed here, and in most cases, the standalone app and the plugin will look and function very similarly. I'll point out the differences throughout this course. In the top left-hand corner are the show/hide buttons for the info pane, the tracks pane, the note editor, and the sound editor. Let's click each one to show and hide the different panes in the window. And you can see, we already had our tracks pane and our note editor open. The highlight around the icon indicates this. You can also show or hide the panes from the options menu. There are other options here for controlling things like the pitch grid and the time grid, and details about the info pane. We'll be coming back to these a little bit more throughout the course. Here we have our master volume, our playback controls, navigation, and meter and tempo settings. To the right of this is the auto-stretch button. We'll talk about these in more details in other videos of this course. On the far right is another info pane button should you prefer to use the info pane on the right. The advantage to the right info pane is that you have a little more control over its layout. Just click and hold to see the options. You have top-only, whole window height, or bottom-only. You can also have both info panes open at the same time. And this can be helpful for using each one to show different information about the selected notes. Our next pane down, as we've seen, is the track pane. The track headers show the track name, the mute button, the solo button, and the record enable button, and a fader for each channel. In Melodyne, the solo buttons cancel the previous solo, so hold command and click to solo or un-solo additional tracks from the solo selection. From here, we can also rename tracks by right-clicking and choosing, rename tracks from the context menu. Just above the volume fader are the reference button and the edit button for each track. The reference button will make the note blobs on that track or on multiple tracks visible but grayed out when displayed in the note editor. The edit button makes the enabled track or tracks available for editing in the note editor. We'll get more hands-on with this later in the course. But for now, I just want to point out what everything is. And keep in mind that you can command-click on a Mac or control-click in Windows each edit button to edit multiple tracks and command or control-click again to turn off edit in one of several selected tracks. Let's create a couple new tracks and take a look at this. So, let's say that I want to make all three of these available in the note editor. I'm going to hold command or control and click, and if I want to remove one, I hold command or control and click again. And you can just click with the reference button. To reorder tracks, just click and drag the track you want to move up or down. In the plugin, reordering tracks is not possible in all dials. Now I'm going to open the left info pane. In each info pane we have four tabs for the different inspectors. We have the track inspector, the note inspector, the project inspector, and the file inspector. You can view one inspector at a time or view several at the same time by command-clicking on a Mac or control-clicking in Windows to add or remove an inspector in the info pane. So, just to view one, click each one, and to add one, command-click or control-click. In the track inspector, you can edit the track name, set the tracks IO and control parameters for one or more selected tracks. To reset a parameter, just command-click on a Mac or control-click in Windows. You can even type in precise values for volume, pan, pitch offset, and formants. It's important to note that the pitch and formant offsets are only real-time previews. Once you've set these values where you're happy with them, click apply offsets to commit those changes. Applying the offsets will update the note blob display to show you the changes and will also result in improved sound quality. To select more than one track to alter in the track inspector, command-click on a Mac or control-click in Windows the track headers in the track pane or shift-click to select a range of tracks. Changes then made in the track inspector will affect all of the selected tracks proportionately except when typing in values directly, which will apply that specific value to all the selected tracks. And that's a pretty important distinction. Also notice that when multiple tracks are selected and they have different values, you'll see a dash in place of the value. Let's take a look at this. So we'll first select one track, change the volume, and then another, and leave it at the original volume. Now we see a dash when both are selected, and that indicates that they have different volumes. The note inspector is where you can see and edit all the data related to the selected note or notes, and the project and file inspectors display data related to the audio files and folders associated with your project. The main windows where you'll do the bulk of your detail work, are the note editor and the sound editor. We'll delve into these in much more detail in separate videos. There's just a few more things to point out before we move on. In addition to accessing the time grid from the options menu, you can also access it by clicking the quarter note icon or the second icon here. If you click and hold, you can change the base for the grid. You'll either see a note icon or seconds if you're using minutes and seconds as your reference. Also notice that the grid is highlighted when it's enabled. Also, the time grid is accessible from both the tracks pane and the note editor. Here's our pitch grid, and it functions in a very similar way. Another option that we'll look at in this course is auto-scroll. Auto-scroll can be enabled in both the track pane and the note editor by clicking this button. And each of these are independent from one another and will affect playback when started from either the track pane or the note editor. You can also enable or disable this from the options menu. With auto-scroll enabled, the timeline view will jump ahead when the playback cursor reaches the end of the window. Let's check it out. I'm going to position the cursor here, and press play, and we can see that our window jumps when the cursor reaches the end of the window with this option enabled. We can also zoom in and out, both horizontally and vertically, by clicking and dragging the ends of the scroll bars. You can click the center and drag it to reposition the view itself. I'm going to import an audio file so I can point out one other thing. Or a few of them. So now I'm going to click here to enable note editing for this track, and now, notice that the wave form for that track appears underneath my scroll bar. This makes it very easy to zoom in just on a piece of the wave form. Zooming in or out vertically functions the same way, and we can also slide to move our position. The blob magnification slider in the bottom-right corner allows you to zoom in or out on the blobs themselves, and just above it, the spread units and tracks will spread out tracks that overlap so they can viewed simultaneously. Let's add this track to our view and since they over lap, we can see how this works. We'll be using this feature later in the course, as well. With only a few exceptions, the standalone program and the plugin have nearly the same look and functionality. We've covered a lot in this video, but we'll be coming back to these areas and using them much more through the rest of the course.

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