Vocaloid and its use in games production

[Taleweaver]

Hey everybody,

since I decided to spend some of my Christmas money on development tools, I am now the proud owner of Vocaloid4 and two voices. My first experiments so far have run surprisingly well, and I think I will be using the software quite a bit.

Anybody else here with Vocaloid experience willing to share some tips and tricks? How much do you customize your voice? What singers do you prefer?

[yuzukimasu]

hi, i used to produce only vocaloid songs but have since switched away. i use yukari and vy1, both V3. the voice takes quite a bit of tuning to get a decent sound and i'm not the best at it; i've found that there's a very narrow niche of people willing to accept the voice type over a real singer, and that it's a great way to step towards working with human singers

there's a lot of info you can find on vocaloidotaku, where i also post. you can also check out some of my vocaloid works on my channel

[Taleweaver]

As I needed the music for English-language songs, I decided to get Oliver and Avanna, and I'm quite happy with both of them.

Sure, most people won't prefer a Vocaloid singer over a living, breathing one. Then again, if the question is "no singer at all" or "Vocaloid", I think there's quite a lot possible.

Your Vocaloid songs are really good, especially 【結月ゆかり】感傷レイン. What instrument database did you use?

[yuzukimasu]

i'm pretty fond of oliver but he's one of the worst vocaloids in terms of quality; lots of bad recordings, overall muffled tone, and from more experienced users i've heard he has glitches when you use certain phonemes (this is anecdotal though). avanna is good but a little soft and thus genre-limited as a result. still, a good place to start

kanshou rain was done with libraries that came with komplete 10, primarily session strings, grandeur piano, scarbee mm bass, and stock kontakt orchestral instruments, drum kits and synths with adjusted parameters. the lead synth is synth1, one of my favorites

[Taleweaver]

kanshou rain was done with libraries that came with komplete 10, primarily session strings, grandeur piano, scarbee mm bass, and stock kontakt orchestral instruments, drum kits and synths with adjusted parameters. the lead synth is synth1, one of my favorites

Just what I thought - a professional instrument library. Guess I have to bite the bullet sooner or later and spend some money on that.

Any hints on decent English-language Vocaloids? I looked into Megpoid, but she sounds like she's on heavy Autotune in almost all of the demos I've seen of her, and English Hatsune Miku still sings with a strong Japanese accent.

[yuzukimasu]

recommend against miku EN, she's pretty much considered universally terrible

gumi EN is your best bet for banks originally in JP, but on the EN side, you should look into dex/daina and ruby. there's multiple originals and demos on YT already

[Taleweaver]

Dex/Daina actually sound as though I could get the Autotune vibes out of them. Thanks for the tip!

[LeetMusic]

Good luck!

My main gripes with vocaloid are that the English I've heard sounds uncanny and awkward (may be acceptable for your project though), and there is no dynamic range in the singing so for me it gets monotonous.

[YossarianIII]

I don't know much about Vocaloid from a production standpoint, but I love the way it's used on the Paprika soundtrack. According to Wikipedia, the composer used Lola?

Seems to me like Vocaloid could be particularly useful for genres of music where human voices are so distorted they don't sound human, like electronic or sample-based music. You wouldn't need a perfectly-articulated human voice if you were trying to do something like Aphex Twin or the Avalanches.

[yuzukimasu]

this is my argument as well, and i feel vocaloid is perfect for trance, glitch hop, and other electronic forms of music. for traditional music i think it's completely awful in its current state haha. however, vocaloid is also a very good stepping stone for fledgling producers who can't work with vocalists on a regular basis, assuming you learn all the quirks of editing the parameters, which can be tedious