VOCALOID 5 Tutorial - Creating a Melody #1

Using VOCALOID5 to Create a Melody

Lets start inputting a melody for our songs.

Singer Settings

Because we have a dance-style J-pop song for a male singer, we have selected Ken from the voice bank.

Using Phrase Features

When you first start creating a melody, you may struggle to come up with a central melody line, and we recommend using the phrase feature to do this.
Vocaloid 5 contains over 2000 phrases that can be used in an array of genres.
Find a phrase that you like, and put it into your song to help you find more melody ideas when writing.

We will start narrowing down the results by selecting “Ken” for VOICE and “Soulful Phrase” for TYPE.

Before putting a phrase into a track, you must first match the phrase key with your song key.
We have selected the key of Eb from TRANSPOSE.

Once you find a phrase you like, drag it into your track to add it in.

We have used the same method to add in another phrase.
By adding phrases together, you can further expand on your song ideas.

You can customize phrases you add into your song to bring them closer to your ideal melodies as well.
Double click on a desired part and simply edit the notes to your liking.

By using the very expressive phrases, you can expand on your melodic ideas and use a new approach to production.
Though YAMAHA owns the copyright for the phrases, because you can use them freely for the most part, you can use them to sequence in melodies that come to mind.

In addition, we have taken a look at the phrase features in more detail in the article/video below so check it out!

Reset the Phrase Singing Nuances

Phrases taken from the phrase area have attack and release effects (which we will look at in detail in our next article) already set, and already contain lyrics.
Though we will eventually use these to make final touches to our vocal track, if it makes it difficult to compare the phrase and your own vocal lines less subjectively, we can flatten these settings.

Select multiple vocaloid parts and right click.
Select combine vocaloid parts from the displayed menu.
Now the various parts become 1, making it easier to edit and apply similar settings across the board.

First we will change all of the lyrics to “a”.
Right click on a part and select pour in lyrics from the menu to change all lyrics in 1 go.
We have change all notes to be “a”.

After selecting the area we will set the attack and release effects to 0 to remove their effects.
Now all notes will be expressed flat, and remove the cut and paste feeling, allowing you to focus solely on the melody line.

Using Style to Create a Human Feel

After sequencing a melody line with the flat settings mentioned above, we will need to add some nuance to create a human feel.
By using STYLE, you can easily add nuance to a vocal track.

STYLE contains a variety of presets with various tones and nuances.
Each preset has it’s own unique character, and can be incorporated into your own music right away.

Because we are making a main vocal melody, we have selected Lead Vocal. We have select Clean from COLOR to get a more simple tone, and selected Deep Shimmer from the results.

Though this alone gives us a good starting point, if you want to make detailed edits to the nuance,

select the CUSTOMIZE menu,

and go to SINGING SKILL.
Because we want to limit the pitch motion, we have lowered the Soulful amount slightly.

STYLE contains effects as well.
If you don’t need an effect (if you want to edit from a flat/clean slate), you can click the power button on an effect to turn it off.

We hope you found this article useful.

Phrase functions allow you to quickly begin putting together melody lines and prove useful when writing songs.
In addition, by using Style to add nuance, you can easily obtain the kind of vocal sounds that you are after.

Next time we will look at editing each note in detail, to create a vocal track with a more human feel to it.

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