Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-216.186.132.194-20151001032234/@comment-32500188-20151003001730

Kudos to anyone who can get the tuning they want within 2 hrs... my tuning ritual may take 4-7 on and off over a course of days (or weeks... or months if I'm REALLY bogged down for time) with a Japanese VOCALOID. (Spacing out the time also helps in giving my ears a chance to reset themselves.) Tuning an English VOCALOID actually does take a little bit more time for me as well, especially when trying to achieve results that don't sound so over-enunciated, garbled, or choppy.

I'm one that sort of aims towards adding more expressiveness and character to the vocals I use... not necessarily "realism", but something that I consider pleasing to the ear. I've settled into the process of programming the melody and lyrics via Anvil Studio's MIDI interface, then importing that track into the editor and tuning from there, since it's a lot easier for me to draft out parts with notation rather than drawing on a piano roll. (This is something I kind of wish FL Studio had... or if it does have it, I haven't been able to find that function yet.) (・///・)

When tuning, I tend to avoid the built-in vibrato settings, because even after altering all the options, I'm still never satisfied with the results it gives me. As I had heard of its release, I've been using Drak-pa's Expressive Vibrato plug-in for several months now. It gives a lot more control on both fading in/out the pitch depth, as well as allows for the additional altering of GEN & BRI on top of PIT and DYN. Before this, I was using the Sine Vibrato plug-in and making adjustments via the note lengths, which felt a lot more tedious to me now that I think back on it.

I also play around with phoneme "mushing" when it seems lowering the Opening parameter just doesn't cut it with certain V/CV combinations. (It works pretty cool with IA from what I've done, yet I still haven't had the chance to see if it works for others as well as it does with her banks.) It's kind of hard to explain it... might have to put out an example when I get a chance.