Virtual vocalist software that “sings” custom vocal lines and harmonies based on the lyrics you type in. VST 2.0 and ReWire.

Oct 22, 2008 6:29 PM

ZERO-G/YAMAHA VOCALOID 2: PRIMA

THIS SINGER WON’T COMPLAIN ABOUT YOUR LYRICS

Yamaha’s touted its Vocaloid singing synthesis technology for quite some time now. Nearly as long, Zero-G’s been drafting “vocal fonts” content from several angles, including that of male and female soul singers, as well as pop-rock. The latest is Prima, modeled on the voice of a professional soprano opera singer. Wait, check it out: I too was skeptical about opera vocals fitting in with anything I produced, but once I discovered that you can tweak Prima’s character and tone quite handily, I found many successful uses for it. Supplied as a VSTi and also operational as a ReWire device, creating vocal tracks is simply a matter of typing lyrics into the Vocaloid Editor, where melody can be drawn by hand in piano-roll style or imported from a Standard MIDI file. The built-in words library is pretty extensive, but you’ll almost immediately need to construct a custom library for unrecognized words; the lyric-to-phoneme auto-translator works marvelously for this. Next, you draw in Prima’s expressions, such as attack and vibrato (type/position/amount/frequency), alter her breathiness, brightness, clearness, timing on each note (to precise position and length) or even adjust the way she transitions between words. Rendering is done in a fraction of real-time.

Admittedly, I didn’t use Prima for her intended purpose of lead soprano. Instead, I found her perfectly suited in creating “dream” harmonies in trance numbers and soaring, lush, expression-filled backing vocals to edgier pop singers I’d been working with. By playing around with syllables and phonetics, you can literally make Prima sing anything, and in any language. Inspired by this, I created some very cool ethnic vocals to drop atop World beats, and by using the gender-bending parameter, I even coaxed out a male falsetto perfect for sample recreating experimental post-rock work a la Sigur Ros. Prima does take some work to achieve convincing results, but the time invested can definitely be worth it.

ZERO-G/YAMAHA (DIST. BY EAST WEST/SOUNDS ONLINE)

VOCALOID 2: PRIMA > $179.95

At a glance: Virtual vocalist software that “sings” custom vocal lines and harmonies based on the lyrics you type in. VST 2.0 and ReWire.

Contact: www.soundsonline.com

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