Need help with vocaloid song!

[larrynachos]

I'm having some troubles with my newest song. I've finished up the music portion, and I've finished placing the lyrics, but I still don't know many of the advanced vocaloid techniques, so it sounds pretty rough. I'm using Megurine Luka V2 japanese, and I was wondering if any other vocaloid musicians would be nice enough to help "clean up" my track, and make it sound awesome. I want to release the best song possible, because I've put close to two weeks into it, and none of the tutorials I watch help me with Luka (Brightness and Clearness don't seem to effect it).

If you would like to help me, please download the files below and see what you can do!

Main problems I haven't worked out yet:

- Luka sometimes doesn't sustain a note for very long.
- Volume goes down when forced to sustain a long note
- General cleanup (minor note adjustments, etc)

I'm begging you, please help me. This song is so beautiful, and I don't want my poor vocaloid skills to prevent it's full beauty from showing.

Project: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ivxfq2hja5cxa6m/Captive+in+darkness.zip
Exported file: https://soundcloud.com/larynachos/captive-in-darkness/s-Nca9m

I do most of the mixing and effects in fl studio, so reverb isn't really the issue.

Luka's settings:

Clearness: 20
Brightness: 170

All of the notes are set to "normal", I believe. Some might be accented, I'm not sure.

[MetalRenard]

I know nothing about this vocaloid itself but have you tried using a compressor to even out the volume differences?

[Back-From-Purgatory]

I've taken a quick look at your VSQX file, and it doesn't look like you've done any editing to the control parameters.

If you want her maintain volume and she naturally falls out in long notes, try increasing the dynamic parameter as the note carries. You might also want to experiment with the velocity and brightness parameters to achieve more consistent volume.

Just writing in lyrics in vocaloid is not enough to get a good result, you really have to mess with the parameters as well. When I was writing my song "We Know" with Gumi, I spent more time messing with the parameters than I did actually writing or planning the vocals.

[larrynachos]

At 1/20/14 03:41 PM, MetalRenard wrote: I know nothing about this vocaloid itself but have you tried using a compressor to even out the volume differences?

Yeah, I've been experimenting with fruity compressor, and getting some promising results.

[larrynachos]

At 1/20/14 04:08 PM, Back-From-Purgatory wrote: I've taken a quick look at your VSQX file, and it doesn't look like you've done any editing to the control parameters.

If you want her maintain volume and she naturally falls out in long notes, try increasing the dynamic parameter as the note carries. You might also want to experiment with the velocity and brightness parameters to achieve more consistent volume.

Just writing in lyrics in vocaloid is not enough to get a good result, you really have to mess with the parameters as well. When I was writing my song "We Know" with Gumi, I spent more time messing with the parameters than I did actually writing or planning the vocals.

Those bloody control parameters always give me a hard time, but I'll give them another shot. Say, which parameter do I use to reduce the "punch" in the beginning? at around 13:1-25:1, the vocals just seem to "POP" in, and it kinda ruins the whole intro.

[Back-From-Purgatory]

At 1/20/14 04:18 PM, larrynachos wrote: Those bloody control parameters always give me a hard time, but I'll give them another shot. Say, which parameter do I use to reduce the "punch" in the beginning? at around 13:1-25:1, the vocals just seem to "POP" in, and it kinda ruins the whole intro.

They can be intimidating for sure.

As for the "punch", I believe the parameter you'll want to tweak for that is Velocity. And while Opening doesn't directly have an effect on the attack time of a word, you could mess with it a bit in conjunction with Velocity to try achieve a more natural sound.

Also, I'm gonna drop this link here for you, as it describes the parameters, and what they do, pretty well:
http://vocaloid.wikia.com/wiki/Using_the_Parameters

[larrynachos]

At 1/20/14 04:51 PM, Back-From-Purgatory wrote:

Also, I'm gonna drop this link here for you, as it describes the parameters, and what they do, pretty well:
http://vocaloid.wikia.com/wiki/Using_the_Parameters

Ah, thank you. How did I not see this earlier?

I'm gonna run past some other tutorials as well, see what I can learn. Thanks again for the help!