A singer does not nail it once. Melody Rack keeps the last five takes and puts a row of numbers on the take bar so you can flip between them with a click or a digit key. A take here is not just a recording: it carries its own rack, its own key and its own choice of what goes to the track, so five takes are five arrangements of one tune rather than five recordings waiting for one setting.
What you'll learn
- How the five kept takes work, and what happens when you record a sixth
- Why each take carries its own rack, key and output switches
- Copy and flatten, and what each is for
- Setting a take's position in the song, and its length
- What undo covers
5.1 The five takes
Record a second take and the first one stays. A row of numbers, 1 to 5, appears on the left of the take bar with the current one lit. Click a number, or press 1 to 5, to put that take on the roll. Hovering a number tells you its key.
Numbers rather than names or times, because a number is how a singer already talks about takes.
Over five, the oldest goes, unless it is the one you are looking at. Somebody who flipped back to take 1 and sang again has said which take they are keeping, so the one after it goes instead.
Each number carries its own delete, a small × that appears on hover. Deleting is one take at a time and undoable; the roll moves to the next take, or the previous one if you deleted the last.
The takes survive the window. They save into the DAW project along with their pitch curves, so closing the plugin window or reopening the session next week brings all five back. That is also why the limit is five and not fifty: each take carries its contours, and five takes is five times the note data in your project file.
5.2 The roll is a working copy
Every edit you make (a nudge, a join, a held note, a moved anchor) is written through to the take under your finger as it happens. Take 2 nudged, then take 4, then take 2 again is take 2 nudged. Nothing needs committing.
Two things are never written back, because they are facts about the recording that no edit changes: how the take was made, and which detector heard it.
5.3 Each take is a whole idea
A take is the hum and what the rack made of it.
Flip to take 2 and the rack flips with it. The strips on screen are always the rack of the take on the roll, so you always know whose dials you are turning. The key flips too: a verse sung in G and a chorus sung in B flat are two takes with two keys, and a key you pick on the row is written to the take on the roll alone. So are the sung and made switches: take 2 can be the arpeggio while take 1 is the bare line.
A new take starts fresh, with the rack a new plugin opens with. Whatever the last take had on it stays on the last take. An idea does not open with somebody else's modules already on it. The one thing a retake does inherit is the key, because a retake is nearly always the same tune again.
This is also what makes Morph work: it walks toward another take as you would hear it, arpeggio and all, rather than toward its bare recording. See Chapter 8.
5.4 Copy
copy, on the take bar, puts a duplicate of the current take at the end of the list: notes, rack, sends and key, with its own copies of each, so an edit to one never reaches the other. It is there from the first take, since copying is one of the ways a second take comes to exist.
Use it to try two different racks on the same performance.
5.5 Flatten
flatten writes what came out of the rack down as a new take, with a fresh default rack on it. The take it came from stays exactly as it was, one flip away.
The chain holds each effect once, in one order, so flatten is how you do the things that would otherwise be impossible:
- Arpeggiate an arpeggio, or harmonise a harmony
- Run Chance or Motif twice with different settings
- Keep the in-between position a Morph dial found, and then work on it
What gets flattened is the take as heard: the chain's output under the take's own output switches, before the roll's octave shift. Every note in the flat take becomes an ordinary sung-voice note, so the roll's edit tools reach all of it and the next rack treats the whole pool as the line. The pitch curves and any bend Expression wrote ride along, baked in. Anchor, length and key come from the take it was made from.
Flatten is one undo step, like copy.
5.6 Where the take sits, and how long it is
Both live on the take, and both survive a flip.
The anchor
The anchor control on the take bar is the bar of your song the take starts on. Every take used to play at bar 1 of the project, which is wrong the moment you are writing a chorus. You can also drag the take sideways along the roll to move it.
The length
Drag either end of the take on the roll's ruler.
- Growing is only a setting. The notes stay where they are and the loop gets longer, which is how a two-bar phrase gets eight bars to breathe.
- Shrinking hides, it does not cut. A note the edge is dragged over stays exactly where you sang it, drawn washed back and outlined outside the take. It is not played, not counted, not exported, and not read for a key. Drag the edge back out and it returns whole, its pitch curve and its pin intact. A note that merely crosses the edge is kept in full, because a note hanging over the bar line is a tail, not another bar.
This is the difference between trimming here and trimming in a DAW, and it is what makes the edges worth reaching for. Narrow the take to the phrase you actually sang well, read the key off that (see Chapter 6), then drag the edge back out: the key stays, and the bars that wandered are pulled into the key the good bars were sung in. Nothing had to be destroyed to find it.
Dragging the start hides and moves at once, since a take is measured from its own beat zero: the anchor moves the other way by the same amount, so nothing shifts in the song. A pickup sung a fraction before the downbeat is left alone; only notes the start has actually been dragged over carry the mark.
A length you set beats the measured one and sticks to the take. Until you set one, a take is as long as what was sung.
5.7 Undo
Cmd+Z, or Undo on the take bar. It covers recording (so a take you recorded over comes back), deleting a take, copy, flatten, every note edit, the take's length and anchor, and picking a key. A snapshot carries the whole take list, so undoing a recording or a flip puts the list back with the roll and the two can never disagree.
Rack settings are not on the undo stack. Turning a dial back is turning a dial.
Chapter 6 covers the key and the progression, which everything else in the rack reads.