Adding lyrics
Last updated
Last updated
add lyrics,
divide lyrics,
join lyrics,
change the way lyrics are assigned to notes.
After the previous lesson you should already have a folder with the song's audio & txt file. Your txt file should contain 2 lines.
At this point your txt file can be loaded into Ultrastar and played, but since we haven't yet set any lyrics or pitches it is still not singable in practice.
You can also download the files required for this lesson here:
Let's go back to the first line of the song
When you press p key to play the visible range, you will hear that the lyrics are "can we start over". To add the lyrics to the notes we have to go to the lyrics editor.
Currently lyrics editor is grayed out and inactive:
To activate it you need to click on it, the background color will change to white. Alternatively, you can select some note and press F2 key - you will be able to edit lyrics for the chosen note.
Lyrics editor behaves pretty much like any other text editor - you can move around, copy & paste parts of lyrics, remove them or undo & redo changes.
The main difference is that the lyrics are linked to notes and therefore the line's structure is set in place. Our songs has 2 lines, 5 notes in the first line and 1 note in the second line. Therefore first line of lyrics can have only 5 chunks and the second one can have only 1 chunk. A chunk of lyrics is a part of lyrics that belongs to one note - usually a syllable, sometimes 2 syllables.
If you try to add a 6th chunk of lyrics to the first line, it will be automatically moved to the next line due to lack of notes in the first line.
Let's try it in practice.
Firstly let's copy the lyrics of the first line - can we start over. Put the cursor at the beginning of the first line in the lyrics editor and paste the lyrics.
The result should look like this:
Space is treated as a separator of chunks of lyrics so four words were automatically distributed over the first four notes.
We still need to distribute over over 2 notes. Words can be divided into syllables using hyphen symbol. Simply place your cursor between o and ver and press - key.
There is an extra ~ at the end, let's just remove it.
First line of lyrics is now ready. Save the changes before going further.
After saving the changes, we can play around a bit to learn more about lyrics editing.
To join notes' lyrics you just need to remove the separator. Let's remove the space between "can" and "we".
As you can see, not only "can" and "we" were joined but all other notes's lyrics changed as well - they were moved to the left. This happens because lyrics are not permanently assigned to individual notes. The assignment is dynamic - for example 3rd note always gets 3rd chunk of line's current lyrics.
By removing space, we have rolled all subsequent lyrics over notes to the left. We can now roll them to the right. Select second note with "start" lyrics and press ctrl + r shortcut or go to menu Lyrics -> Roll -> Right:
As you can see, rolling lyrics to the right is equivalent to inserting one more chunk of lyrics (~) for the selected note.
To go back to the correct lyrics assignment you can either undo changes by pressing ctrl + z twice or just re-add the space separator and roll the lyrics left (ctrl + shift + r).
You can also just reload the song with F5 key (if you saved the changes when the lyrics were done and didn't save since then) or use the history tab and click on the first "Delete text" action to go back to that point of history:
Let's summarize the shortcuts that we have learned in this lesson:
switch focus between lyrics editor and main editor: F2
with focus in lyrics editor, split lyrics into words: space
with focus in lyrics editor, split words into syllables: -
roll lyrics right: ctrl + r
roll lyrics left: ctrl + shift + r
reload the song: F5
Before we set the pitches, we still need to adjust the duration of the notes. In the next lesson you will learn how to finetune synchronization - determine the correct start and end beats of all notes.
