Auto-syllabification

In this lesson you will learn how to

• check currently defined metadata,

• add new metadata,

• use auto-syllabification of lyrics.

Before you start

This lesson requires a songfile with first chorus ready. You can either do it yourself for practice or download the files from here:

3MB

David Amber - Second Time Around [auto-syllab].zip

archive

Auto-syllabification and tags

In one of the previous lessons we learned how to add lyrics. We pasted them and later manually split them into syllables. In this lesson we will revisit the topic and learn how to use Karedi to automatically split lyrics into syllables.

Auto-syllabification requires the song's language to be specified.

Specifying the language of the song

Each language has different rules of syllabification so Karedi needs to know what language it is dealing with. Song's language is not directly related to the vocal transcription - it is a metadata. As you probably remember, Ultrastar format expects metadata to be stored in the form of tags.

To specify the language of the song, we basically need to add the LANGUAGE tag.

Reviewing current tags

Let's open the song first

and review the current values of the tags. To do so activate tags editor tab by clicking on its caption (it is next to the lyrics editor, marked with yellow border in the picture above).

You can either scroll down to see the rest of the tags or temporarily expand the tags editor:

As you can see, the LANGUAGE tag is missing from the list.

Adding a new tag

To add a new tag go to the menu Tags -> Add new...

When you start typing language in the key field, Karedi will autocomplete the tag for you:

Set English as the value and click ok:

The value of the LANGUAGE tag should be the language name in English e.g. English, German, Polish, Spanish etc.

You should see the new tag on the list:

Specifying other tags

In the same way you can specify some other standard tags like CREATOR (your nick), YEAR (year in which the song was first released), GENRE etc.

Normally you fill these basic tags at the beginning of the process in new song wizard. We simply skipped that part for simplicity.

Auto-syllabification

Once the language is set all we need to do is paste the lyrics into the lyrics editor. Syllabification will be performed automatically.

Our song has now 8 lines and the first line's lyrics are already defined. The lyrics for the rest are:

or is this really the end
And now I wonder if I'll ever see you again
I hope you know, boy, that if you need a friend
I promise, I won't ever let you down the second time around

Let's copy these lyrics and go back to the editor. Switch back from tags editor to the lyrics editor. Select the first note without lyrics (on line 2) and press F2 to switch focus to the lyrics editor:

Make sure that the lyrics editor is focused (white instead of gray) and press ctrl + v to insert the copied lyrics:

If you just want to paste the lyrics without syllabification, use ctrl + shift + v shortcut instead.

Adjustments

As you can see the lyrics were already split into syllables. All we need to do now is review the result, merge some syllables that should not be split and split some words that the tool did not know how to split.

Firstly we need to remove the separator between re and al in really. We can either remove it in the lyrics editor or select re note in the editor and use roll lyrics left option (ctrl + shift + r). Either way the result should be:

In the next line:

we can see that the lyrics do not include the pitch change. Word wonder has 2 pitch changes at the beginning and der should be were currently I'll is. So let's select note der and roll lyrics right (ctrl + r) twice.

Continue with the other lines in the similar fashion. The result should look like this:

Cleaning up the lyrics

Finally, we need to clean up the lyrics.

Commas and dots

There are different conventions. Some people leave punctuation marks in, some people leave some, other people remove all of them. Either way the resulting lyrics should still make sense and the approach should be consistent.

For example we currently have know,-~-~ with the comma in the middle. Let's either move it to the last ~ (know-~-~,) or remove it.

Same with "boy," or "prom-ise," the comma at the end of the line is not needed and can be removed.

In Ultrastar we do not have to care about correctness so much - it's more important to make the lyrics as simple as possible so getting read of unnecessary dots or commas will make them shorter and easier to read.

Capitalization

There are various approaches to capitalization as well e.g.:

• capitalize first words of all original sentences,

• capitalize first words of all lines in the mapped song file,

• do not capitalize unless the word has to be capitalized (e.g. words like I or German in English).

In reality people singing the song do not care much about the sentences. They read the song line by line, not sentence by sentence, so as long as it does not change the meaning, you can be more liberal with the lyrics.

E.g. if the sentence changes in the middle of your line, you can change:

first sentence. Second sentence

to

first sentence, second sentence

or if you want to capitalize all lines:

First sentence, second sentence

The important thing is to choose one approach and stick to it.

For the sake of practice let's choose the second approach (capitalize all song lines) and adjust the lyrics accordingly:

Remember to regularly save changes by pressing ctrl + s

Video

Shortcuts summary:

Let's summarize the shortcuts that we have learned in this lesson:

• paste lyrics & apply auto-syllabification (language tag must be specified and language must be supported): ctrl + v

• paste lyrics without any modifications: ctrl + shift + v

As a reminder:

• roll lyrics right: ctrl + r

• roll lyrics left: ctrl + shift + r

What's next

At this point we have finished the first chorus. It repeats itself several times in the song so in the next lesson we will learn how to copy-paste it.

To learn more refer to:

pageAuto syllabificationpageEditing tags