Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Vocaloid Quick Tip: Stringing Vowel Sounds Together

In a previous tutorial, I talked about how to stretch a single lyric across several notes using pitch bend. The other option is to enter the lyric as separate notes. For instance, let's say I have:

I say

And I want to stretch the lyric say across several notes. I can enter the phonetics like this:

s eI

followed by a bunch of

eI (which is the "ay" sound).

Go ahead and enter that in and see what you get. Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Vocaloid is singing it back as separate notes. Obviously we don't want that. Nobody would sing it as Say ay ay ay ay. We want a smooth blending of the sounds, like Say-a-a-a-ay.

We can accomplish this by putting a hyphen in front of the phonetic, like this:

s eI, followed by - eI.

In the picture above, the first notes have been entered without altering the phonetic. Those notes are sung back as separate sounds. But in the second grouping, I've added that hyphen in front of the phonetic eI. This tells Vocaloid that this is connected to the previous phonetic sound.

You can listen to the difference.

Important: you can only string together the same vowel sounds. If you try doing it with two different vowel sounds, like in Day O, it won't work. Well, actually that's not true. It will change it, but it won't necessarily blend the two different vowel sounds across different notes the way you want it to. Best thing to do is to just try it and see if it works for you.

Anyway, I hope this tip helps! Keep rocking!


1 comment: