Technical information

Chapter 10: Audio Recording and Rendering
162
Melody Pitch Tracking
Now let’s use the Audio Harmonies for a different purpose, to “fix” pitches that may be out of tune, or to change
some pitches to more interesting notes.
For this, reload the song Listen.MGU. Now resave it by [Save As] and give it the name “Listen Pitch
Tracking.MGU.” Now, we’re going to change some notes of the MIDI melody. Open the notation, and
change the pitch of the D note at the end of bar 2 to an E. Also change the ‘B’ at bar 7 to a ‘G’ below it.
At bar 10, change the ‘E’ note to a C#.
Now, choose Harmonies – Audio Harmonies, and select “Melody
Pitch Tracking” and press OK to again launch the TC-Helicon
Harmony Dialog. Now, we’re going to be changing the vocal track
into a different vocal track that instead is matching the pitches of the
MIDI melody (without any harmony).
So the dialog reflects this, by only showing one of the columns with a track name, and it is “Melody (BB).”
For this one, we should leave the original voice at ZERO (so we don’t hear any of it), and put some humanization
settings as shown.
Now try the [PREVIEW] button. You’ll hear that the harmony is ONE OCTAVE TOO HIGH. This is because the
MIDI melody is one octave higher than the vocal track (males sing in the bass clef!). No problem, just adjust the
Octave setting to –1, and try the preview again.
You’ll hear what sounds like the original voice, except you’ll notice that the pitch is fixed to perfectly in tune, and
some of the notes are changed in pitches (the ones we changed above, for example the E note on end of bar 2). Now
press [GENERATE] to hear this whole song.
If you want to hear what the pitch tracking final file should sound like – we have included a completed version of
“Listen Pitch Tracking.MP3” in the “c:\bb\Tutorial - Audio Harmonies” folder. (Play this file from Explorer by
double clicking on it.) Your tutorial example should sound very close to this.
Chordal Harmony
For the last example on “Listen,” we’ll do an example of the “Chordal Harmony.” This is a 4 part harmony based
only on the chords, when we don’t have a MIDI melody available.
Load in Listen.MGU. Save the file as “Listen – Chordal Harmony.MGU.” Now erase the Melody (just to convince
yourself that the Melody is not going to be used). Melody-Edit-Kill Entire Melody. Now choose Harmony-Audio
Harmonies to open the dialog, and then choose Chordal Harmonies.
You’ll see that the only harmony type available will be the Chordal Harmony, because there is no Melody available.
You can choose many different harmony variations, such as Four Above, or Three above etc. Let’s choose Four
Above. This will give us 4 harmony voices above our original melody. We want to include the original vocal track
as well, so we will mix the “dry voice level” up into the mix. Make the settings as shown in this dialog, and press
[PREVIEW], and then [GENERATE].
Playback this demo song, and also play the included “Listen Chordal Harmony.MP3” file – your file should sound
similar.
Audio Harmonies Pitch Styles (automatic “Vibrato” and “Scooping”)
When you generate audio harmonies to your recorded vocal tracks, you can select Pitch Styles, which adds vibrato
and scooping effects to the vocal harmonies. Choose from many vibrato/pitch presets, including “Ballad,”
“Broadway,” “Pop Diva” and more!
When you launch the TC-Helicon Audio Harmony dialog, you can see that there is a new drop down combo list at
the bottom of each voice. You can choose a type of “pitch effect” (combination of vibrato and scooping) called a
Pitch Style to be applied to each harmony voice. In the example screenshot, we have chosen “Natural Vibrato,”
“Ballad,” “Broadway,” and “Crooner” – different vibrato types for each harmony voice.