You got that right. I stick with XP because I’d rather not devolve a working system. Melodyne isn’t ideal as it doesn’t play well with Audition and says so right on the web page. On the other hand, it edits waves like midi and even spits midi out of waves which is sorta cool. I can export a melody as a midi and reuse that for doubling, etc. If it would read midi and let me line up the waves, that would be excellent too.

I let a host disk die and take ten years of work with it. Disk Doctor to the rescue but trying to put it all back together without the directories was too much to contemplate. No free lunch. Still, we can do so much with this tech by ourselves that we couldn’t do without a room of gear and snarky musicians, it’s worth the risks.

I guess we could take up sailing and pour money into a hole in the water.

Thanks! Glad to see you are keeping at this. Good lyrics. I like the picking pattern.

A copy of Melodyne could be helpful for building vocals if you’re after precision. a) you can take a scratch track, process it, then play with the notes until you’re totally happy with the melody. b) take that version and learn it then record the version you learned from yourself. This will save your voice from getting exhausted and let you be focused on composing and recording in separate sessions. Don’t let authenticity be a demon anymore than you’d want to handcode machine code. Recording is composition. Also, you can use the track you finalize on to build other vocals, experiment with harmonies, etc. A Vocalist isn’t nearly as flexible for composing even if an excellent tool.

Here is what I was working on this past month.

http://youtu.be/KQ5sUIOIwm4

I wrote it for a praise band so this is MOR with other performers in mind. It’s parrothead music but me luvs a bossa/calypso feel. I performed it acoustically the week of the tornados because we had no electrical power for that service, then we did it live with the praise band and solo for traditional. Because they have me playing piano (a real stretch for me), I decided to record this in Sibelius. Another group is asking for it and I needed the score to send to them.

Live recording to produce print notation is quite tedious for reasons we both know well, but combining it with scored parts that I write in (the steel drums, marimba, bass) and copy (the drums) proves to be productive as at the end I have the complete notated score from which I can then create the recorded version and it helps for cleaning up, focusing the parts, improvements, etc. For online sales work in the choral market, this is absolutely required. The people buying it are very selective and quite critical as most are trained church musicians and many are also composers who direct choirs, youth groups, etc.

I wrote in the first melody, scored harmonies, rendered those out as horns, recorded all of that, then added the vocals and guitar work the old fashioned way (Godin nylon), then put the vocals in melodyne and reworked it back to the scored parts. Most of us are unaware how far off pitch we are, when we are singing semi-tones that aren’t there and so on. So this exercise cleans up the analog flesh mess and then I have a recorded version that comes close to the printed sheet music both of which one needs for that market. Once I have the tracks, then I can listen, do some judicious pruning of the wav tracks, then factor that back into the score. Making the video is mostly a lark in Sony Vegas but necessary these days as an indie, in my opinion. I’m very surprised at the downloads for the male soprano version of Ave Maria. Still using Adobe Audition for recording. The church loaned me an Alesis for performing on keyboard. I’ll never be more than a chord pounder but hey, rock ‘n roll doesn’t need appreciation societies to keep it alive.

As to subject matter, the Old Testament is a much bigger market. The folks who want this want it for a Yom Kippur service and that delights me to no end.