OMNIVOCAL - duplicating first word?

Cubase
1

I’m an OMNIVOCAL first time user so I might be missing something.

I’ve entered a lyric for a harmony vocal and for some reason OMNI is repeating the first word? That first word lands on the last note of a bar, the remainder of the phrase continues on the next.

The line is: | — some | days I feel the distance-- |

but what I end up with is:

| — some | some days I feel the distance- |

Another quirk - I was getting to to span a syllable across 2 notes. I’d seen some something about using a hyphen, but that didn’t seem to work as described.

The word in question is “again” across 3 notes. After much time faffing about what did eventually work was:

1st note = “ahh”

2nd note = “ga-in” - this then split the syllable acrose notes 2 & 3.

Just curious if there’s any quick answers, otherwise I’ll abandon OMNI and fall back my usual method for harmony vocals etc - just sing the part myself, tune it up and then just run it through Replay voice conversion. It’s much quick and easier, and more significantly, that method always works. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

2

The key early confusion I had with Omnivocal is that, if you are entering a phrase (e.g. “some days I feel the distance” in your example), you have to enter it on the first note of the phrase, with only that note selected. I initially tried it with the entire phrase selected, and it got some weird stuff (I don’t recall the details at this point as it was a long time ago now).

See also the note above regarding the first syllable entry, but if you’ve got three notes and you want “again” to span three syllables with the "a’ on the first note and the “gain” as a melisma on the second and third note, you’d enter “again-” with only the first note of the 3-syllable phrase selected.

3

I tried all of the above, for both situations… and it simply didn’t work. :thinking:

“you have to enter it on the first note of the phrase” - that’s precisely what I did initially.

And, “again-” - that’s how I understood it, and so that’s what I first tried. That didn’t work either.

4

The only other thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes short notes will have problems, and extending the short not a bit may help get things right. However, from my interpretation of what you’re saying you are seeing, I doubt that is applicable. In particular, it wouldn’t result in a repeated word or just an “ah” (which is the default if there isn’t a text entry corresponding to a specific note).

As for Omnivocal and doing background vocals, I’ve only used it on one song (“Yvonne”) and only to double my own BGVs to try and get a richer texture. It was a real hassle trying to extract MIDI from my BGVs and clean it up to be able to use with Omnivocal. While I did end up using it for the one song, my method on newer songs where I want other vocals to double my own is to just clone my own BGVs and use IK’s ReSing to get a different voice for the double. I’m not trying to use it for separate parts, though. (I’ve also used ReSing to change the voice of an Omnivocal part – I really only use Omnivocal for temporary lead vocals at present, and running it through ReSing can get a voice that is at least somewhat closer to where my own lead vocal will end up fitting once I record that.)

5

Yes, i went through this a couple of years ago with Synthesizer-V (free version). I rebuilt 20 old tracks using ‘Solaria’ as the AI vocalist. It was an incredibly tedious process I have to say.

That’s been my process for some time now too, except I used Replay (it’s free) for the voice swap.

6

I’d never heard of Replay before, but I just looked it up, and I see it also uses RVC voice models to replace a voice. The big question mark, though, is how to find licensed RVC models, in the sense that the person whose voice is modeled has agreed to the use of their voice (and, at last potentially, has been compensated as part of that agreement – recognizing, of course, that some people might be okay with essentially putting their voice in the public domain, or some other arrangement – Creative Commons? – that doesn’t involve payment for the use of their voice)?

One of my collaborators is really into RVC voice models, and he familiarized me with some of this (even using a model of his voice to “sing” one of my songs as an experiment). But, when I looked into a few sites that were repositories of models, there were all kinds of voice models that were clearly not authorized (e.g. popular singers, cartoon characters, politicians, etc.). And, just now, in looking for information on RePlay, a short video I saw was using a Tom Waits voice model – I’m guessing that was not authorized. :slight_smile:

That is the consideration that made ReSing appealing to me for this application as IK deals with the business side of licensing and compensating the singers whose voices are modeled. IK was also smart enough to create a free version, and use of the free version (which only includes two voices, one male and one female, and a couple of instruments, and I believe restricts import of RVC voice models to one), which let me check out how well it would work on one of my recordings and thus get me interested in a higher-level version if/when I could afford it. (I ended up picking up ReSing MAX back in mid-May, when IK had a 60% off promotion on all their software, for $80!)

In the past, I’d tried a whole bunch of other techniques to change my voice to get a similar effect for background vocal layering, including iZotope Nectar’s Backer module, but the results decidedly left a lot to be desired (and sometimes were pretty cringeworthy). I’ve had much better results with ReSing thus far (at least once I find a voice that works for whatever context I’m for a specific part in a specific song), and the tuning options ReSing provides can also make a difference on that front.

7

I obtained a selection user-created own voices - from a site which now appears to have disappeared? I’ve also used Replay to recreate my late mothers voice using a few recordings of her singing a couple of her original tunes which I produced, around 20 years ago. Admittedly though, I didn’t actually get her permission… for fairly obvious reasons! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: