The Best 4 Melodyne Alternatives (And 3 Free Alternatives)

Celemony Melodyne is the industry-leading vocal pitching and production tool. It’s the most used for pitch correction, and can even be used on instrument editing, entire key changes, and sibilance removal.

However, Melodyne has a big price tag, and might not be affordable for some. In this article, we’ll run you through the 3 best Celemony Melodyne free alternatives, and the 4 best paid alternatives.

The 4 Best Paid Melodyne Alternatives

Here is the complete list of the best 4 Melodyne paid alternatives:

Plugin Name	Key Features	Comparison with Melodyne
Antares Auto-Tune	Real-time pitch control, various versions, graphical note editor	Better for real-time control, less intuitive note editor
Waves Tune	Real-time autotune, natural sound, robot voice effect	Better for hard-tuned sound and live performances
Soundtoys Little Alterboy	Pitch knob, formant, drive, mix, 3 modes (transposition, quantize, robot), MIDI input	Less feature-rich but adds unique character
Logic Pro Flex Pitch	Graphic pitch interface, edits pitch, formant, vibrato, quantisation	Similar to Melodyne but lacks polyphonic editing

1. Antares Auto-Tune

Antares’ Auto-Tune is one of the most famous music production tools ever made.

It has been popular since the 90s and it is the reason that hard-pitching T-Pain style has become such a staple in modern music. However, Auto-Tune can also offer seamless natural sounding pitch correcting in real-time. Auto-Tune works in real-time with next to no latency, meaning you can use it for live performances. It combines automatic tuning with a graphic pitch interface to give you the choice of how you want your vocal to sound, down to every detail.

The core of Auto-Tune is in these three controls:

• Re-tune Speed – controls how quickly the plugin corrects for wrong notes. a fast re-tune speed will give you that Cher – stronger kind of sound, while a slower speed will give you a more natural tune-up.
• Key selection – controls which key your auto tune will lock into.
• Humanization control – applies a slower re-tune speedduring sustained or longer notes, so that the entire performance sounds both natural, and in tune.

Antares Auto-Tune is available in 5 different versions and you can check out our comparison here.

How Good is AutoTune When Compared To Melodyne?

Auto-Tune has the upper hand over Melodyne in terms of real time vocal pitch control. Melodyne requires a lot of input in terms of correcting pitch, however this generally means it is a lot more transparent and has higher tuning quality. Auto-Tune Pro addresses this as it has a graphical note editor, like Melodyne, which allows for MIDI output control. This allows you to control the pitch of every individual note or even the key of a whole performance.

When I tried Auto-Tune I was blown away by how powerful it was but I found that the graphical note editor was not as intuitive or effective as Melodyne’s. Auto-Tune and Melodyne are both very powerful and Auto-Tune is a good alternative.

2. Waves Tune

Waves Tune is one of Waves’ best-known plugins, offering graphical pitch editing, real-time autotune, and loads of tools for editing your timbral and vocal quality.

Waves Tune’s ability to work in real-time makes it great for live performance and incredibly quick when it comes to vocal tuning. The sound quality is very natural and smooth, but it also gives you the ability to have a robot voice effect.

Waves Tune sounds super transparent, clean and natural. If you’re doing subtle tuning, and not doing very drastic changes, you won’t run into any issues with sound quality.

How Good is Waves Tune When Compared To Melodyne? 

Waves is much better for a hard-tuned sound and live, low-latency autotune than Melodyne. However, Melodyne is better for in-depth, meticulous vocal editing and provides a more natural sound.

I found that when I started using both, Waves was much easier to use and navigate, with all the options much more clearly laid out. I would definitely choose Waves Tune over Melodyne for live auto-tuning, hard-tuning and also in terms of price – Waves plugins are always on sale and Waves Tune is a fraction of the price of Melodyne.

3. Soundtoys Little Alterboy

Little Alterboy is a simple, versatile plug-in, that offers a great deal of variety. You can do anything from bringing more dynamics into your vocals to achieving that classic hard tune effect. 

Little Alterboy has 4 knobs (pitch knob, formant, drive & mix) and few buttons to play with. What’s unique about the pitch knob – compared to other pitch shifters – is that it sounds completely natural when adjusting your vocals within an octave range.

The plugin has 3 modes (transposition, quantize, and robot). Transposition mode allows you to alter the pitch the entire vocal track. Quantize mode pushes your vocal melodies to the nearest semitones, creating a hard tune effect. Robot will make your vocals stay on one note, which you can adjust using your pitch knob, or alternatively play it with midi. 

Little Alterboy accepts MIDI input which means you can write new melodies and control the plug-in using MIDI. This means it can be utilised to create new melodies from vocal samples on a keyboard or even create a vocoder effect.

How Good is Little Alterboy When Compared To Melodyne? 

Little Alterboy does not offer nearly as many features as Melodyne or give you anything close to the control it has over pitch. However, it does give you the ability to add more character to your sounds in a way that Melodyne can’t. Where the main emphasis of Melodyne is transparency, Little Alterboy is all about experimenting with standard autotune and creating unique, creative sound design and audio manipulation.  

4. Logic Pro Flex Pitch

While it is not technically a paid plug-in, Logic Pro’s Flex Pitch is a great way to adjust pitch in a similar way to Melodyne.

When comparing Flex Pitch and Melodyne, it’s a pretty similar bit of software and offers the same graphical pitch editing. However, it’s only monophonic and it lacks some important features that make Melodyne the king of vocal pitching.

Flex Pitch offers a similar graphic pitch interface to Melodyne in which you can edit the qualities of individual notes and map them onto the MIDI piano roll. Flex Pitch allows you to alter the pitch, formant, vibrato, and quantisation of an audio file within Logic’s workspace. This allows you to edit almost all of the qualities of a vocal performance and offers limitless creative potential.

Flex Pitch is stock to Logic Pro which means it is essentially free (if you own logic) and when compared to Melodyne it is great value for money. It provides a powerful graphic pitch interface, however it does not match Melodyne in terms of the amount of features that you can modify, and the fact that it does not work very well with polyphonic audio.

I have been using Flex Pitch for a long time and I would definitely recommend it to all Logic users. Despite this, I still find it fiddly and tricky to use and the user interface makes it hard to work in close detail without getting confused.

Melodyne Free Alternative – The 3 Best Free Plugins

Here is the complete list of the best 3 Melodyne free alternatives:

Plugin Name	Key Features	Comparison with Melodyne
Graillon 2 (Auburn Sounds)	Pitch correct module, formant shifting, bitcrushing effects	Good sound quality, simpler than Melodyne
VOLOCO (Resonant Cavity)	Simple design, wide range of presets, great for iOS	Less powerful, more for creativity and inspiration
MAutoPitch AutoTune (Melda Production)	Scale lock, formant shifting, automatic gain control, limiter	Natural sounding, lacks Melodyne’s breadth of features

1. Graillon 2 (Auburn Sounds)

Graillon 2 is the best free autotune VST on the market. It’s an easy-to-use plug-in that provides amazing results, with a great looking user interface that rivals most paid plugins. It provides a fantastic artefact free auto tune effect, that trumps all of the other plugins we tried and tested – giving you a clean, tuning effect for your vocals.

Graillon 2 has a pitch correct module which allows you to simply put the plugin on the audio track and let it work its magic with automatic tuning. This worked fairly well when putting it to the test, but it was better when manually selecting notes to tune to.

On top of this there are multiple parameters which you can adjust in the plugin to fine tune your sound. One great feature that’s available in Graillon 2 is the ability to lock the pitch of your vocal to particular notes and scales.

You can also use the formant shifting alongside this to preserve the original tone of your performance, while still transposing it. There are also controls for things like bitcrushing effects, smoothing controls and an amount + dry/wet knob.

These numerous controls make Graillon 2 a very versatile plug in and it can be used to obtain both natural and artificial results. Making it very useful if you want to improve vocal performance or even change the sound of instruments.

It’s doesn’t work as well on instruments though, so we’d advise using it on vocals.

How Does Graillon 2 Sound?

Graillon 2 has a great sound – especially if you’re looking for that hard-tuned T-Pain effect on your vocals. It can also be used to add subtle autotune to adjust vocal performances which aren’t quite in tune – and it does this with a fairly naturally, so you can’t really tell it’s autotuned (depending on the settings).

Here’s what Graillon 2 sounds like before and after:

How Good is Graillon 2 When Compared To Melodyne? 

When compared to Melodyne, Graillon produces good sound quality but doesn’t come close to the audio editing capability.

It’s difficult to compare because it’s a free plugin, but it’s not going to do natural correction or pitch editing as well as Melodyne will. However, I was very impressed with the simplicity of Graillon 2 and I picked it up much faster than Melodyne.

Considering the quality of the sound and ease of use I would definitely recommend this to all producers – especially those who are new to autotune. Graillon 2 gives quality results instantly and is a good alternative. But, it’s important to know that it is no match for Melodyne and, unfortunately, there’s no free option on the market that will truly live up to the capability of Melodyne.

2. VOLOCO (Resonant Cavity)

Voloco might not be the most technical autotune plugin but it is included here because of its ultra-simple design and its wide range of great sounding presets. This plugin is also available as an autotune app and it offers, even more, presets that the plugin version.

This is great because if you install the plugin in Garageband, you can use it as an auV3 plugin inside Garageband.

One benefit of this is if you’ve tried to autotune in Garageband and didn’t like the sound of the built-in autotune. Additionally, you can use auV3 plugins in Cubasis on iOS too. Making Voloco the best app and plugin for iOS users.

Voloco works best for creative hard-tuned and more extreme settings similar to those of T-Pain and Daft Punk. It allows you to select a scale to lock on to, choose one of the presets, and dial in as much autotune as you want (like a dry/wet control). This super simple design allows users to quickly create great sounds and is a great tool for being creative and getting inspiration.

In the VST plugin you have 6 presets to choose from, & we’ve left sound examples of 2 below:

• Hard
• Natural
• Super Vocoder
• Alien Warlord
• Big Chorus
• Night Chorus

On the app there are also some much cooler preset features that you can use like Daft Punk & 8-bit modes, that add modulation and gating effecting to your vocals. This is great for creative sound design.

How Does Voloco Sound?

Here’s what Voloco sounds like before and after:

How Good is Voloco When Compared To Melodyne?

Voloco does not come close to matching the power of Melodyne and it does not have any of the same features. I personally found that the great thing about Voloco is the ease and creativity it gave me to come up with ideas, which I could then explore further using Melodyne.

As an autotuning tool it does not compare, but as a tool for creativity and inspiration it is brilliant. I love resampling for sound design and Voloco is great for running an audio source through over and over.

3. MAutoPitch Autotune (Melda Production)

MAutoPitch is an extremely capable autotune VST plugin, offering almost the exact same pitch correct features as Graillon 2, but with a bit extra included. It is extremely simple to use but it does not restrict any essential features or the overall sound – which is great.

MAutoPitch has options to lock to a certain scale, automatically guess pitch, a Dry/Wet knob, formant shifting, a preserve formants knob and more. On top of this it has options for mixing like automatic gain control, limiter & stereo width adjustment.

But, it’s a pain to install.

MAutoPitch comes as part of a free suite that contains 37 separate effects, analyzers, EQs and more.

While some of these plugins are good, it’s actually more of an annoying process to remove the plugins you don’t want. Similarly, this suite takes up room on your hard drive and slows you down when you’re working.

With everything considered, MAutoPitch is a great pick for people looking for a free pitch correction plugin that’s simple to use and has an intuitive GUI.

How Does MAutoPitch Sound? 

MAutoPitch is great at both hard tuning and natural autotune sound. It is good at picking up the pitch and correcting it and does not wrongly reassign notes like other free autotune plugins.

Here is a before an after sound example of MAutoPitch free autotune plugin:

How Good is MAutoPitch When Compared To Melodyne?

MAutoPitch has the ability to autotune in real time unlike Melodyne however it lacks Melodyne’s huge breadth of features and control. When I tried MAutoPitch I was impressed by how well the plugin performed when creating natural sounding autotune and is the closest to Melodyne I have found in this area out of the free autotune plugins I have tried.

Autotune Navigation

Free & Paid Plugins

• Best Auto Tune Plugins
• Free Autotune
• Open Source Autotune
• Autotune Apps
• Autotune for Garageband
• Auto-Tune for FL Studio

Useful Autotune Articles

• What Is Autotune?
• How To Use Auto-Tune in Garageband
• Install Plugins Garageband

Melodyne or Auto-Tune?

• Melodyne Version Comparison
• Melodyne vs Auto–Tune
• Melodyne vs Flex Pitch
• Melodyne vs Waves Tune
• Melodyne Alternatives

FAQ

Is There A Free Version of Melodyne?

The cheapest version of Melodyne is Celemony Melodyne 5 Essential which allows you to edit vocals using the most basic functions of pitch and timing and it costs $99.

The higher tier versions are:

• Assistant ($249) – includes audio to MIDI, tempo detection and more in depth pitch control.
• Editor ($399) – introduces Polyphonic Direct Note Access, which allows you edit things like piano pieces.
• Studio ($699) – Polyphony, Quantization, Tempo, Advanced pitching tools and more.

To find out more about the features and the differences between Melodyne’s versions, check out our article here.

There are many free open source autotune plugins available as alternatives to Melodyne. However, they aren’t the same calibre and don’t allow individual note editing or sibilance detection. At best they are good for getting hard-tuned rap vocal effects.

When Should I Be Using Vocal Pitch Correction and What For?

Pitch correction is mostly used to smooth out the kinks in the vocal take, and make it sound more in key. The best time to use auto tune is when a vocal performance’s emotion is hair-tingling, but the notes are slightly flat. Pitch correction in this instance allows engineers to put the vocal exactly in key and keep the raw emotion of the take.

However, you can also use vocal pitch correction for creative effect. This is usually done in Hip Hop/Rap songs, to give that certain style vocal and vibe. It’s also done a lot in dance music, through the use of Vocoders – creating a robotic-like synth sound.

For an example of pitch correction in dance music search for Daft Punk.

Pitch correction is usually applied to a raw vocal recording before effects like compression and EQ are added. Tools like Melodyne are useful for removing sibilance from vocal performances, but can also be used to change the entire key of a melody, change the notes of chords and more.

Are Free Melodyne Alternatives Good or Should I Invest in One?

Working out which autotune plug in is best for you can depend on your workflow, the type of music you make, and how you use your DAW. There is no reason not to try out the free alternatives to see how they are, and then try out some paid trials. This way you can grow an understanding of auto-tune and work out which methods suit you best before investing.

Should You Just Get Melodyne & Is it Worth it?

If you want to work with autotune in a live setting then Melodyne is not the one for you. Similarly, Melodyne carries a heavy cost and is only worth it if you know that you are going to be doing high-level, in-depth audio manipulation. If you are a beginner or making music for fun then you would definitely be better off using one of our alternatives.

Melodyne vs The Competition

With so many different options on the market, you’re probably looking at multiple different solutions to autotune, comparing them to Melodyne to see if it’s really worth it.

We tried and tested them all and wrote in-depth comparisons to help you decide which is worth it:

• Melodyne vs Flex Pitch
• Melodyne vs Waves Tune
• Melodyne vs Autotune

Summary

There are pitch correction plugins that are great, but Melodyne really reigns supreme.

The best pick for the price, if you can’t afford Melodyne would be Waves Tune if you are on a budget. It offers a huge amount of control for a small price. That being said, Melodyne and Auto-Tune are available for free as trial versions and you should definitely try as many of the plugins we have looked at as you can before you buy anything.

Additionally, if you’re looking to get amazing deals on top-tier audio plugins, be sure to check out our guide on the best Antares Black Friday sales.