Golden notes
In this lesson you will learn how to
turn notes golden,
determine which notes should have golden bonus,
check if the total golden bonus amount is optimal.
Before you start
This lesson requires a duet songfile that we have worked on in this tutorial. If you don't have it, you can download the necessary files here:
Adding golden bonus
If you take a look at the warnings section in Problems tab, you can see that we have 2 warnings related to golden bonus, one for each track.
Theory
What is golden bonus?
By marking some note as golden, you increase its worth in points. Therefore golden notes are a way to reward players for singing hard parts of the songs correctly.
But what is a hard part?
It is subjective, but holding very high or very low notes can be hard. Singing several notes in the same pitch is not hard, however transitioning from one low note to the next high note or vice versa is hard. Singing one long note in the middle of the average person's pitch range is not hard, but correctly singing several short notes with various pitches in a song with quick tempo is difficult etc.
How many notes should be marked as golden?
Not too many, it is adviced to make the golden notes be worth 10-15% of the points. So if in Ultrastar the maximum number of points you can get for a song is 10000, then your golden notes should be worth 1000-1500 points. Remember that every track is graded separately so you must choose golden notes on each of the tracks.
Marking notes as golden
We will first focus on the female track. Let's look for some parts that are hard to sing.
Transition from "I" to "want" can be one of them:
To mark these two notes as golden, select them and press g.
If you take a look at the warnings at the bottom of the editor, you will notice that our bonus is now worth 96 points.
We can also say that "er let you" - is a difficult part to sing. We could mark these notes as golden on this line, but since the chorus repeats itself several times, let mark these notes as golden on the second occurence of the chorus:
In the third chorus we can for example make "I promise" golden:
In the last chorus we could mark "If I'll ever" as golden:
Our bonus is now worth 321 points so we still should mark even notes as golden. You can do it as you wish. As long as you remember to choose difficult parts, distribute golden notes evenly throughout the song and try to diversify the notes patterns, it will be OK.
Male track
For the male track the rules are the same. Just note that you can make rap notes golden as well:
Only freestyle notes can't be marked as golden since they are worth 0 points.
Shortcuts summary:
In this lessons we have learned/reviewed the following shortcuts:
make note golden or normal again:
g
What's next
In the next lesson we will learn how to define medley boundaries.
To learn more refer to:
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