Celemony’s Melodyne is a pitch-editing application that’s become near-ubiquitous in modern production, owing to its ability to break open audio and allow the user to grab individual notes and edit their pitch, timing and length by hand. It doesn’t come cheap, though, at around $399 for the full version.
Bubblegum, a new plugin from developer Your Smile Is Art offers the same kind of graphical note editing for free.
Its creator – who also records electronic music under the alias M Fusina – says that inspiration arrived when their copy of Melodyne stopped working, leading them to set about developing a free, stripped-back alternative with a simpler workflow.
The plugin works by breaking an audio file into separated waveforms, each note represented as a colourful blob on a piano-roll-style interface that can be retuned, moved and stretched independently. The best part is that it handles polyphonic material, so you can get inside a chord and edit the individual notes within it rather than being limited to single melodic lines.
To achieve this, just load Bubblegum on an audio track and hit Transfer, then run the audio you want to work on through it. It’ll record this into its own timeline, after which notes can be dragged vertically to change their pitch or horizontally to change their timing or length. This can come in useful for everything from subtle pitch correction to creative vocal manipulation.
Alongside its per-note pitch editing, there are global Pitch and Formant controls for shifting the whole audio clip, which can be linked to move together, and a Quantize function that snaps every note to the nearest semitone for quick correction. Editing is split across six modes that also allow you to adjust elements such as vibrato, slide, formants and volume on a per-note basis.
Of course, Bubblegum doesn’t have many of the bells and whistles that you’ll find in Melodyne, but it does give you the core functionality that makes the software so game-changingly useful – hands-on polyphonic note editing – at no cost.
Bubblegum is available in VST3/AU formats for macOS and Windows, and there’s a Linux version in beta. It’s free to download from Your Smile is Art’s website, but you can donate if you’re feeling generous.
