Tuning in Vocaloid vs. Tuning in UTAU?

m170

Ritsu's Renegades
Defender of Defoko
i'm just curious. even though i'm not a Vocaloid user, but.. Does Vocaloid have a lot more variety in tuning than UTAU? How does tuning work? Like what tools? For example I know UTAU is tuned by using resamplers and flags and pitch bend markers etc.. I mean, I've heard different people tune the same UTAU for a cover and it mostly sounds similar, but for Vocaloid....
For example, the way Okame-p tunes Miku(If you wanna listen to his unique tuning I would recommend listening to one of his songs called "Poetry of The Heart", "Erica", "Acedia" or his album Lamento but i think he uses dark append.) I have never really heard songs from other producers using Miku that sound like that.
And why is that? What tools does Vocaloid use for tuning? Do they use something similar to flags too and like things in UTAU?
Honestly I wanna know if I can tune like.... Namine Ritsu or like some whatever UTAU in a really unique way, like in a similar fashion Okame-p does... I wasn't sure how to word this question because I can't really describe it but I was curious I guess lol.
 
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PeriodicalUtau

Retired User
Retired User
Vocaloid's tuning is similar to UTAU, but there are different ways to do it. You can A: push the arrow at the bottom left to bring up a menu where you can do pitch-bends, or B: Add more than one note for the syllable which is what LenMJPU did for this base VSQX that I used here: . I changed the pitchbends along with editing the placements of the extra notes in order for it to fit Unity-Chan's voice better. Something you can do in Vocaloid that is a large advantage is the ability to use "-" and "ooh" to stretch out notes over different pitches. Like this: {ka} {-} It also works with certain English words as well, but you have to play around with it a little more. Engrish is a little harder in vocaloid in my opinion because it writes the phonemes differently for aliases. Like the alias for ka might be xa or something like that I don't actually know what it is but that's very common in vocaloid.

Vocaloid has less variety in the ways you can tune, but you can make the same bank (For example Miku) sound a lot different, depending on the style of the person who tunes. For example, Mitchie M tunes hyper-realistically, while RYOSupercell tends to keep her natural sound over the more realistic ones. (For further info check the songs, Odds and Ends, and Age Age Again!/Ai Dee/ News 39)
Vocaloid has built-in tools for tuning, but there are plugins like vocalistener, in which you can sing into the mic, and it will render the pitchbends to what you just sang (I think, I've never used it before...). What vocaloid 4 Editor has to offer is the ability to adjust the parameters very fine-ly, in which you can get appends like Neru Akita to sound more realistic, and not just some shitty audacity-fan-loid.

If you are interested in getting Vocaloid 4 Editor here are my bank recommendations:
Rin/Len V4x
Ruby
Cyber Diva
Avanna
Unity-chan
Otomachi Una
Miku V4x
Luka V4x
Tone Rion V4
Cyber Songman

*I do not own any of those banks except for Unity-chan and Ruby*
 
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Kiyoteru

UtaForum power user
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
Before I begin, I'd like to page @kimchi-tan , since this thread is mainly about Vocaloid and not UTAU.

Here's a partial screenshot of Vocaloid.
1ojE3rk.png


In the main area we've got notes. A few basic things that can be edited here are notebending, vibrato, and phonemes. Notebending is a common method of Vocaloid tuning where pitchbends are done via very short notes. For example, "wa" has been broken into "wa" and "-" (a hyphen continues the vowel of the previous note). There's also other effects that breaking syllables into smaller notes can have, but it depends on the language and the individual voicebank. As for phonemes- while Japanese doesn't require a lot of this, working with other languages can. And especially since I'm making Kiyoteru and Maika sing in English, phoneme editing can have a significant effect on the base sound of things. Various people have their own preferences on how Japanese vocaloids should sing English. For example, I would notate the word "winter" as "wento" while someone else might do "winteru".

In the bottom area, there's several parameters that can be edited over time. Some of them are continuous, while others are per-note.
VEL: Velocity, per note. Affects the length of the consonant. Low velocity is long consonants, high velocity is low consonants
DYN: Dynamics, continuous. Affects volume level
BRE: Breathiness, continuous.
BRI: Brightness, continuous.
CLE: Clearness, continouous.
OPE: Opening, per note. Affects the pronunciation of a vowel. REALLY useful for when you have a limited number of vowels to work with.
GEN: Gender factor, continuous.
POR: Portamento timing, continuous. Affects the timing of pitch changes between notes. High POR makes it later, low POR makes it earlier.
XSY: Cross Synthesis, continuous. If you've got vocaloids that can cross with each other, like Kiyoteru Natural and Kiyoteru Rock, this controls the amount of blending between the two voices.
GWL: Growl, continuous.
PIT: Pitch, continuous
PBS: Pitchbend sensitivity, continuous. When PIT is set to the maximum value, the PBS is the number of semitones difference from the original note.
 

na4a4a

Outwardly Opinionated and Harshly Critical
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
Well Vocaloid and Utau both have a variety of options while tuning, but those options can vary.
However, Utau is often considered the more versatile of the two as it has much wider limits and more total options.
The benefit of Vocaloid is that it's non-pitch tuning options can be more controlled and finer.

Vocaloid uses midi-style parameter controls where you have a constant curve at the bottom and you can draw in the values. Anyone who makes music digitally will be familiar to this to some extent.
Utau for pitchbends in Mode2 uses points that you drag around with a mouse, however plugins exist that let you draw the pitchbends in as well.
Utau's dynamics control is a lot more primitive than Vocaloids, using the envelope points, but is generally considered good enough, several resamplers have specialized flags to perform tasks that people using Vocaloid would have to draw in manually.
The rest of Utau's tuning options are fixed values for an entire note where Vocaloid can have a constantly changing value but it's rare for someone to heavily exploit this.

A voice such as Miku for Vocaloid is sort of unfair as Miku has many voicebanks with different tones, so it's not Vocaloid tuning as much as it is the voice being different in general. Though I am not sure for that specific song, for all I know they could of just increased the breathiness value.

Both programs support pitch bending, vibrato, dynamics/volume editing, gender(highness/lowness of the voice), and breathiness. However the way both programs do this are different.
Since Utau is just a frontend (a graphical program that generates commands for another program) for resamplers/engines you can change your tuning options greatly.

So the methods of tuning between them are very different but neither is bad.

If you want to have finer control of voices in Utau and a wider variety of sounds then you can download plugins and more capable resamplers.

Envelope editor 1.62 can give you easier control of the envelopes without messing up the crossfades, you can draw straight lines to move the points around.
Envelope editor 2 makes it a lot like Vocaloid's DYN parameter, giving you many more points than the default and finer control of the volume of the voice. However you have to use the custom wavetool that comes with it and you lose compatibility.
So if you want that level of volume control you can actually use envelopes (also called automation) inside your DAW to change the volume. Both Utau and Vocaloid users do this as it gives you immediate visual feedback on how the audio was affected.

Pitch Trace lets you draw the pitchbends freehand or using curves or lines, also it allows you to zoom it. This can give you more control.

As for more variety in tone, nothing even comes close to Moresampler. It's a very new and actively developed engine for Utau that is capable of altering the voice in many ways. If you want more options that it's probably your best bet.

Basically any of the plugins from http://z-server.game.coocan.jp/utau/utautop.html are super useful and include the plugins I mentioned.
You can download Moresampler from http://khua5.web.engr.illinois.edu/ and you can look at a list of it's supported flags.
 
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