Aloha a,
+1 for Auto-Tune here.
{‘-’}
If we’re talking specific features, I frequently use Melodyne as an Elastique type of plug-in, i.e. I get so concerned about the engineering aspects during recording that my guitar or bass playing has timing issues. It’s very easy to adjust start times and lengths of notes.
Also, you can add “separators” in the middle of a “note” so that Melodyne treats it like two separate entities. Then you can drag one to a different pitch and Melodyne stretches the transition from the first “note” to the second one at its new pitch. This is very handy for playing the fretless bass when I screw up a glissando and don’t land at the correct position: just insert a separator between the starting and ending notes then use the auto-pitch correct to ensure that it sounds good.
Finally, the polyphony is exciting looking but I’ve never gotten it to work well with fretted instruments due to the fret noise that you invariably pickup. I haven’t yet tried it on something like vocals, but the videos make it look amazing if it works as advertised.
Using Melodyne isn’t that complicated in all honesty. The biggest snafu has always been that Cubase intercepts all keyboard input so you can’t use Ctrl-C to copy a note in Melodyne to the clipboard. Instead, you’re required to use the context menu for all operations. That slows me down a bit - I’m a huge keyboard shortcut kinda guy - but not terribly so.
Edit: another feature that looks great but I am not yet used is the ability to export the notes as a MIDI file. I am fairly certain that pitch bends are exported as well, but I can’t say with 100% certainty. This could be used for doubling, almost like an inverted vocoder.