dev diary: synth v process (Patreon)

since i released 2 songs last week, i wanted to talk about how i make the vocals! i used something wrong as an example since it has a lot going on, but the tuning was relatively simple... also this vid lets you listen to the vocals on their own, which i think is neat! sorry in advance that this is a bit of a rambly infodump, i hope it's not too hard to follow lol.

singing computers!!!!

so, the first thing is that synth v has 2 modes: manual and sing. sing is the kind where it automatically generates all the little nuances that make eleanor's voice sound more natural/human (i used that mode for her tears were my light!), but i prefer manual mode where she sounds more flat and robotic.

you can change her parameters with the various sliders on the right, and that's usually what i focus more on instead of fine-tuning stuff like pitch and breathiness between each note haha. the parameters are the reason she sounds a little different from spiderweb... the rest of my earlier songs use her lite version, so those sound EXTRA different lol. her AI version is much more refined, so when i eventually make an album i plan on redoing the old songs... i want to make more polished versions while not changing them too much. anyway i'm getting off track...

a lot of the work of tuning that i do is making sure eleanor pronounces words correctly. you do that by editing the phonemes--i didn't have too many instances of that in this song, but most often i have to edit her T's because the default way she pronounces them is more relaxed, which makes it sound like a D. USUALLY it sounds better that way (which is why i leave it as the default), but some of the T's are better punctuated, like in the lyrics "wasn'T wrong"

the other thing is that you can fine-tune the timing for each phoneme, like this note for the word "spread":

it was more in sync with the instrumental if she drew out the "eh" and rushed the "spr" half. the sounds by default get split up evenly timing-wise, so i usually have to adjust them if there are a bunch of consonants in a row like this.

OH also, as for inputting the actual notes in the piano roll, my workflow tends to be that i map out the melody in FL studio and then export to midi, which is then imported into synth v. by default she just goes "la la la" and it's very cute... usually i'll adjust the length of the longer held notes, but most of the editing time goes into the pronunciation stuff above!

cool effects, wowee

the MAIN trick you can see in the video is that there are 4 voice tracks! the one for the high notes has different default parameters. i needed her voice to sound clearer and less breathy for the high notes, since it's a little outside her comfortable range... better for the emotion to come through in those parts since theyre higher tension!

the other two are duplicates of the main tracks, but shifted down an octave. this is a neat trick i learned that makes the vocals more spooky!! there's probably a filter that can do it in FL studio, but it's nice to just export straight from synth v and adjust it as a separate track. maybe that's what most people do for this type of thing... i truly have no idea. there's a shortcut for shifting octaves though, so it's just most convenient to do it in synth v!

i do also have a couple filters i put on her voice in FL studio to help mix it in with the instruments a bit better! there's a bit of reverb, stereo separation, and one to make her voice sound clearer... here's a screenshot of what those look like:

a lot of music production is just moving knobs and sliders around until it sounds good, so that's what it looks like! (all 4 vocal tracks have the same filters on them, but the backup ones are on a separate uhh insert...? on the mixing panel thingy... yes these are technical terms, i definitely know what i'm talking about lol)

hope this was interesting!

i don't think i've really talked about the particulars of my song-making process before, so i thought it'd be fun to do this week. sorry that this post is so late in the day, i'm trying to get back on a better schedule! i can't really answer the question of "but how do you think of a song" because really it's all just vibes. but maybe seeing what it's like in here will inspire someone to download synth v and try it out?? IT'S FUN!!!

thanks for reading <3