If I have a vocal take that is dynamically loose but also needs pitch adjustments is it better to compress it first before tweaking in Melodyne or the other way around?
I’d do the pitch correction first. I think when compressing you want to hear the effect of that compression within the context that the audio will ultimately be heard. Compressing after is like compressing what you have, compressing before pitch correction is like compressing what you expect to have later on.
Plus you can change the dynamics in Melodyne in addition to the pitch which is basically like being able to compress individual blobs as desired. If you edit the dynamics in Melodyne you can tame any blobs that are too loud (or soft). Then if you later apply compression it won’t be to fix outliers but rather to congeal the entire vocal.
Thanks, very good point.
I have only just got Melodyne 5 and it does have extensive dynamic tweaking included. I could always run the whole thing through another compressor after all the targeted editing to smooth out my inabilities.
Often doing very small amounts of compression along the signal path several times (always for a particular purpose) can be better than trying to use a whole bunch of compression all at once to solve multiple problems.
You can change the dynamics of individual notes (or even segments) in VariAudio too…