Hey guys, I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place to post this but I thought I'd pass on a bit of wisdom to people who are new to the recording biz. (This can apply to recording audio for videos as well.)
This me assuming if you were in the same boat as me finding out about utau and vocaloid on your own and really want to record your first voicebank...but didn't have any irl friends who shared the same interest to help and had to rely on people who made videos on the subject and were too shy to leave a comment to ask them questions and you were recording in your normal voice.
Let's say you understand all the characters to record and how to pronounce them, know what pitch to sing in and ready to begin. As soon as you hit that record button to record the first wav file.....you freeze...stop the recording ....and restart get the sound correctly....but you're not sure if its good enough or if its the exact tone you want. So you keep trying to record that same thing until you get it the way you want it. GREAT! but then you get the sense of dread of being able to get that same tone as the first....and then you start questioning your voice again....Well Don't!....Because what is happening there is that your brain is trying to trick you into thinking you have a terrible voice when in actuality. Everyone has a unique and beautiful voice EVEN YOU!
The Reason why our brains makes us think that our voice is terrible and that we shouldn't sing or record is because we constantly hear our voice when ever we talk to people..and sometimes to yourself when your deep in thought. In fact, in actuality of the whole "god i can't stand how that guy sounds" spiel...the real sound that's annoys us is our own voices and we really don't realize it until we start recording ourselves and listen to the playback for the first time. But that doesn't mean you should keep your mouth shut and give up on the idea of recording.
So how do we combat these thoughts of self doubt when recording. For me, I yell out loud "I HAVE A BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE VOICE! F**** YOU BRAIN!!!!".....But sometimes, practicing the pronunciations and easy to remember songs helps too on the sidelines before recording. Really it all depends on raising your self confidence and how you execute raising it.
Now on to the next bit. Otoing and finding out how powerful your Utau can be. There are plenty of tutorials on how to oto utaus...but that leaves the question...."how powerful is my utau? what is my utau's range?" There's a song that was recently released that i personally think is a good test song to see how powerful an utau is range wise. "Otome Dissection by Deco*27" it has a good range of notes and a really high note to see if your utau can hit it with no problems and I would recommend if you're not familiar with tuning or editing notes to use Tanjiro's ust. If you are familiar with tuning and editing notes use Mocha/Lui' ust. Reason why I suggested both of their usts is because everyone has a different way of recording utaus (They might use the same reclist yeah but more than likely they might add a few things to reclist to spice things up).
When I oto, I like to do the first few lines of the song until either the first long rest (or incases of songs that doesnt' have long rests and keeps going I'd say stop after the 5th or 6th line.) and play those lines that I otod to make sure that they were otod properly, and when I get a sense of self doubt...render the ust without any flags (even if it's just a few lines) and then mix that line into the song and hear how it sounds...and yes, there maybe a bit more self doubt because it's just the main vocal but when you save the ust and open up the harmony render that and mix it into the song (in this case trying to make it sound like duet but the harmonies lower but still audible) Sometimes the harmonies can help erase the self doubt, another reason why I recommend Otome Dissection as a test song..and once those doubts are gone, oto the entire voicebank....just don't do what i did and only oto song after song after song XD
This me assuming if you were in the same boat as me finding out about utau and vocaloid on your own and really want to record your first voicebank...but didn't have any irl friends who shared the same interest to help and had to rely on people who made videos on the subject and were too shy to leave a comment to ask them questions and you were recording in your normal voice.
Let's say you understand all the characters to record and how to pronounce them, know what pitch to sing in and ready to begin. As soon as you hit that record button to record the first wav file.....you freeze...stop the recording ....and restart get the sound correctly....but you're not sure if its good enough or if its the exact tone you want. So you keep trying to record that same thing until you get it the way you want it. GREAT! but then you get the sense of dread of being able to get that same tone as the first....and then you start questioning your voice again....Well Don't!....Because what is happening there is that your brain is trying to trick you into thinking you have a terrible voice when in actuality. Everyone has a unique and beautiful voice EVEN YOU!
The Reason why our brains makes us think that our voice is terrible and that we shouldn't sing or record is because we constantly hear our voice when ever we talk to people..and sometimes to yourself when your deep in thought. In fact, in actuality of the whole "god i can't stand how that guy sounds" spiel...the real sound that's annoys us is our own voices and we really don't realize it until we start recording ourselves and listen to the playback for the first time. But that doesn't mean you should keep your mouth shut and give up on the idea of recording.
So how do we combat these thoughts of self doubt when recording. For me, I yell out loud "I HAVE A BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE VOICE! F**** YOU BRAIN!!!!".....But sometimes, practicing the pronunciations and easy to remember songs helps too on the sidelines before recording. Really it all depends on raising your self confidence and how you execute raising it.
Now on to the next bit. Otoing and finding out how powerful your Utau can be. There are plenty of tutorials on how to oto utaus...but that leaves the question...."how powerful is my utau? what is my utau's range?" There's a song that was recently released that i personally think is a good test song to see how powerful an utau is range wise. "Otome Dissection by Deco*27" it has a good range of notes and a really high note to see if your utau can hit it with no problems and I would recommend if you're not familiar with tuning or editing notes to use Tanjiro's ust. If you are familiar with tuning and editing notes use Mocha/Lui' ust. Reason why I suggested both of their usts is because everyone has a different way of recording utaus (They might use the same reclist yeah but more than likely they might add a few things to reclist to spice things up).
When I oto, I like to do the first few lines of the song until either the first long rest (or incases of songs that doesnt' have long rests and keeps going I'd say stop after the 5th or 6th line.) and play those lines that I otod to make sure that they were otod properly, and when I get a sense of self doubt...render the ust without any flags (even if it's just a few lines) and then mix that line into the song and hear how it sounds...and yes, there maybe a bit more self doubt because it's just the main vocal but when you save the ust and open up the harmony render that and mix it into the song (in this case trying to make it sound like duet but the harmonies lower but still audible) Sometimes the harmonies can help erase the self doubt, another reason why I recommend Otome Dissection as a test song..and once those doubts are gone, oto the entire voicebank....just don't do what i did and only oto song after song after song XD
