Best Melodyne Alternatives: Cheaper and free VSTs for Vocal Tuning!
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Best Melodyne Alternatives: Cheaper and free VSTs for Vocal Tuning! · Source: Celemony / Antates / Synchro Arts / Gearnews
If you’re recording vocals or any other acoustic instruments that go out of tune quickly, you’ll run into Melodyne sooner or later. The plug-in is almost unrivaled in terms of pitch correction quality. But what if you’re on a tight budget or you don’t like the workflow of the ARA plugin? Take a look at the best Melodyne alternatives.
What is Melodyne?
When Celemony CEO Peter Neubäcker presented DNA – Direct Note Access – at the 2008 Musikmesse in Frankfurt, visitors and engineers were blown away. This technology was introduced as a new feature of Melodyne, and it made it possible to change polyphonic audio recordings. With DNA, you can change an audio recording of a major chord on the guitar to a minor chord, or even transpose entire songs.
The plug-in is also central to the workflow of most vocal producers; this type of editing is known as “Graphical Mode,” as each analyzed note can be moved, stretched, and selected separately in the Melodyne editor. Melodyne has set the bar regarding audio quality and in-depth editing options for adjusting individual notes in audio recordings. And few other plug-ins have even come close.
In addition to vocal recordings, Melodyne is frequently used to correct recordings of acoustic instruments. If a piano is slightly out of tune or a string on a guitar is not quite there, Melodyne allows you to make barely audible adjustments. So, when you’re looking for the best Melodyne alternatives, these features are a must!
What do the best Melodyne alternatives need to bring to the table?
Correcting individual notes in a recording with a high quality that you can barely hear it working its magic is the basis for Melodyne’s success. The plug-in can also be used in ARA format in DAWs that support it. This means that you don’t always have to play back the track’s contents on which you load Melodyne to edit them in Melodyne.
As mentioned, the plug-in also offers the option (with the most extensive version, Melodyne 5 Studio*) of correcting notes in polyphonic audio material. The notes the plug-in recognizes can also be exported to your DAW as a MIDI clip. Since version 4, it has also been possible to edit notes from several instances of Melodyne in one. New features in the latest update, Melodyne 5, include editing sibilants separately for de-essing.
As we’ve mentioned in our “alternatives” series many times: check out the OG first! Celemony offers a full 30-day trial version. And there are four different versions with different functionalities – make sure to check out which edition is right for you.
Synchro Arts Revoice 5 – Most versatile of the best Melodyne alternatives
Freshly released with new features and improved pitch correction quality, Revoice 5 from Synchro Arts* is one of the most versatile Melodyne alternatives. It also includes ARA support, extensive options for correcting each note, and more.
Revoice offers several options for automatically adjusting vocal stacks for duets and creating natural-sounding harmonies with a vocal track. Compared to the biggest version of Melodyne, what is missing is the option to fix polyphonic audio material.
If you want something simpler, there are two versions of RePitch from the same manufacturer, RePitch Elements* and RePitch Standard*. These lack the option of aligning recordings of multiple vocals, and some of the correction tools are not quite as detailed.
Antares Auto-Tune Pro – Graphic Editor and ARA
This list of the best Melodyne alternatives is explicitly NOT about real-time correction à la Auto-Tune, which can be heard in almost every Pop song these days. Nevertheless, the original Auto-Tune plug-in manufacturer also offers one of the best Melodyne alternatives with the most extensive version, Auto-Tune Pro*.
As with Melodyne 5, Auto-Tune Pro X allows you to compare the recordings of several tracks using the multi-view function. You can also change and correct each note of the recording in detail in the graphic editor. And, of course, the legendary real-time tuning effect is also included, whether as a creative tool or gently for live performances.
Waves Tune and Plugin Alliance Bx_Crispytuner: The cheaper VSTs of our best Melodyne alternatives
Waves Tune* and Plugin Alliance Bx_Crispytuner are not nearly as powerful as Melodyne. But both are more than sufficient for straightening out out-of-tune notes of vocal recordings or gently adjusting a guitar melody. And the manufacturers of both plug-ins have sales so often that you can buy them for a very reasonable price.
Like Melodyne, Waves Tune (unlike Waves Tune Real-Time) is designed to correct individual notes of a vocal recording in a graphical editor. You can do this manually and move individual notes to the correct pitch using the mouse. Or you can set a key and let the plugin move the wrong notes to the right place automatically.
Bx_Crispy Tuner from Plugin Alliance / BrainWorx / Native Instruments includes pitch correction in the graphical mode and in real-time, key recognition, and additional tools for editing formants, vibrato, and the timing of vocal recordings. So, you’ve got quite a few features to fix your vocals!
Free Melodyne alternatives: Samplab and in your DAW!
If you’re looking for a way to recognize the chords in an audio recording, which Melodyne does as well, then there is the free alternative, Samplab. There is also a paid version of the VST. With this version, you can change the chords of a recording, almost like in Melodyne Studio. They have also included an AI audio generator to create free text input samples.
Many of you will have read this so far and, at some point, thought: “My DAW can do that!” Reaper (ReaTune), Logic Pro (Flex Pitch), Cubase Pro (Vari-Audio), FL Studio Signature Edition (Netwone), and Reason (Pitch Edit) each come with their own, perhaps not quite as robust “Graphic Mode” vocal tuning plug-in which might be enough for what you need. Users of Ableton Live and Bitwig Studio still have to resort to third-party plug-ins and check out this list of the best Melodyne alternatives.
* This post contains affiliate links and/or widgets. When you buy a product via our affiliate partner, we receive a small commission that helps support what we do. Don’t worry, you pay the same price. Thanks for your support!
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3 responses to “Best Melodyne Alternatives: Cheaper and free VSTs for Vocal Tuning!”
You should also include Zynaptiq Pitch map which can do polyphonic pitch correction and changing several notes within a chord, including real-time live adaption of the audio to whatever chords you play live via a MIDI keyboard which is very cool.
I have tried almost all alternative solutions, but they are useless. Melodyne is clearly the best. Everything else is just suffering. It cost a lot, but it’s worth it. Melodyne is the champion!
You missed RipX DAW. It really beats all of them.