Waves, please out-Melodyne Melodyne

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I’ve never seen a tool call for more competition than Melodyne. In terms of sound-function it’s good, but the UI/UX experience it pretty miserable. Like it was designed by a crazy person, but more more likely just a good programmer with no UI/UX experience.

The two features to “fast follow” would be the percussion mode, which begins its view as a standard wave – but the syllables are split so you can selectively move each up or down by semitones. It’s not on a scale, it’s relative. A very different view that’s easier for certain vocals.

What’s special, though, is you can hear the syllable as you drag it – so you can find the right pitch by ear. This is 100 times faster than moving syllables repeatedly and hitting play to make sure it’s right.

The percussion view is great for people like myself who aren’t great singers. For us, the standard Tune/Autotune style view maps notes all over the place and it’s a little hard to edit. When editing loose vocals in percussion view, you just move the parts that are out of tune until they sound right… And it’s easy to tell where your edits are because you only see up or down where it’s needed. It’s not a piano roll view, it’s a relative mode view. It’s so fast, and easier to decipher than when the notes are all over the place due to the pitch detector misunderstanding octaves of a raspy voice.

Obviously the standard tuning mode is important, and moving up and down through the scale with pitch feedback is critical.

Option for snap-to-scale is a must, with ability to load in a custom scale or edit notes.

But the UI/UX experience is miserable for a product like Melodyne which costs hundreds of dollars… And that’s where I really found myself wishing for a Waves-level of usability. Specifically the newer Vx style plugins.

We really need a Waves Tune Vx Pro, basically…

Functionally similar to a modern version of Tune, but with the percussive-like mode as an option and ability to hear syllable pitches while drag-adjusting them. And scale-snapping.

This seems like such an obvious win - I’m always crossing my fingers for it… I had a similar wish for a Vocalign killer and eventually we got Sync Vx, which is awesome. They are two respectably different products, but I stopped updating Vocalign and put that money into my WUP. I prefer Sync Vx.

But Waves Tune Vx Pro is long overdue. I believe the market needs it! :slight_smile:

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Agree. As a Logic user, though, I would love to see WavesTune, or Melodyne, integrated into the built in FlexPitch/Time editor. No more floating windows while also making key commands and modifiers more accessible, speeding up the workflow.

I don’t expect I’ll see this happen, but it would be great if it was implemented.

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I’d also love an improved interface for Waves Tune (personally, I hate the sound of Melodyne more than I hate the hassle of dealing with Waves Tune and its UX glitches).

This is the worst (Melodyne struggles as well). Also caused by spill into the mic, but there really needs to be an easy way to say “yes, the original note was really here, adjust from this point please”.

Not periodically losing the start point and forcing a complete rescan, or periodically deciding that all the ratios are set to 0 despite them being 100 would just be the icing on the cake.

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Oh, yeah I did mean that issue in regard to Melodyne. But it happens in every tune software I’ve tried (except the percussion view).

That’s what makes the percussion mode special. I don’t even mean for percussion – I mean if I just want to manually correct a few parts here and there in a vocal, where I hear a problem, this is how I like to do it.

Because percussion view is relative, I can simply listen for a problem and then spot correct up or down however many semitones.

And then I can zoom out and see visually the parts I’ve changed… In the other view, pitches are all over the place (since it tracks pitch) so it’s harder to tell what has been changed.

Both views are useful, but because my voice is kinda raspy – I do get a lot of notes that are shown in the wrong octave. And that is definitely hard to edit because you don’t see a linear series of notes.

So while I’d love to see more accurate tracking (perhaps by intelligently knowing my voice didn’t instantly jump up or down an octave) — the alternative percussion mode view makes it workable even if there’s a lot of that.

And yeah, I’ve always liked Waves’s tune algorithms. I still find Waves Tune Realtime to be great for natural correction, and I even use the midi input for spot-correction. Works well.

But Waves Tune is probably the Waves plugin which needs a UI refresh more than any other… But given its age and all the competition in the space, probably a product refresh. Waves Tune Vx!!!

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Ah, I get what you mean! I haven’t used it, but that makes perfect sense.

Yeah, this is my usual process these days if I’m mixing down an entire set. Most of the time setting the scale gets the corrections in the right direction, and most of the time a MIDI input will do the rest, but there are still a bunch of times where manual correction is necessary.

A Waves Tune Vx that combines the best of the two would be awesome. Real-time by default, mark sections to capture/edit (including overriding/combining the detected notes as well as the correction), automatable MIDI input. I personally wouldn’t need ARA, but I imagine that would have to be part of it.

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Personally, I think that pitch tuning technology, even the polyphonic variety Is one of those things that would benefit greatly from neural networks and AI training. Waves has already done a few neural assisted plugins it’s entirely possible they could perhaps improve on WavesTune by taking that kind of direction with it.

In fact, anything that is “corrective” in nature I think would benefit from AI. It’s when we start crossing over to “creativity” I think it starts to fall apart. As that’s when it really needs need to be able to understand and distinguish the differences in “intention” and to be able to think outside of the box. That is why it can never be anything better than average.

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