Finetuning synchronization

Make sure your notes start and end in the right moment

In this lesson you will learn how to

determine the correct start positions and duration of notes,
use auxiliary note playback,
resize notes - make them start or end one beat earlier or later.

Before you start

After the previous lesson you should already have a folder with the song's audio & txt file. Your txt file should contain 2 lines, the first line should already have correct lyrics in place.

You can also download the files required for this lesson here:

3MB

David Amber - Second Time Around [finetune-synchro].zip

Finetuning synchronization

Timing in Ultrastar is very important. If you specify start or end beats of the notes incorrectly, players will be confused because what they see will not match what they hear. The more effort you put into this step, the more grateful you will be to yourself while singing.

Determining the note's start beat

Theory

In the previous lesson we already roughly placed the notes according to what we heard - we verified that during playback the ticks representing note beginnings matched the audio. That's why finetuning start beats should not change much - maybe move some note's start beat by 1.

In theory note should begin in the first beat in which the note's lyrics (or more precisely - the syllable's vowel) become audible.

But how to find such beat?

Let's look at the first note with lyrics "can":

It currently begins in the beat 0 (beats are visible on the lower X axis of the grid).

To determine if the position is correct we need to verify two things, basically that:

the vowel is audible in beat 0,
the vowel is not audible before beat 0.

As you may remember, we used space key shorcut to hear the whole note. It is not particularly useful when finetuting. For finetuning we need something more fine-grained - ideally we would like to be able to listen to one chosen beat. In practice, one beat is too short - it would be hard to recognize any actual sounds.

Karedi has a special playback mode for finetuning called auxiliary note playback mode. In our case it will play the first beat of the note and some time before it just to make the sound clearer.

Check that the vowel is audible in note's first beat

If you press alt + ↑ shortcut, you will hear the first beat of the current note and 2-3 beats before it. You need to determine whether or not you hear the vowel of the note's syllable in that playback.

In case of our note "can" we can hear the start of the vowel. We are dealing with the start of the note so it means that the last beat of the playback and at the same time the first beat of the note contains the vowel sound.

We have just verified the first condition.

If you could not hear the vowel it would mean that the note starts too early. In such case, you would need to make it begin one beat later (as explained below) and try again.

Check that the vowel is not audible in the previous beat

We still need to check that the note is not audible in the previous beat. The easiest way to do it is resize the note to the left - make it start one beat earlier - and re-do the check described above.

To make the note start earlier, use ctrl + ← shortcut:

This time when you use alt + ↑ shortcut, you can't hear the vowel, you can only hear the start of the "k" sound in "can". It means that the last note of the playback and consequently the first beat of the note does not contain vowel sound - the note begins too soon now.

Let's make the note start later by using ctrl + → shortcut:

We have just verified the second condition. Beat 0 is the first beat in which "can" starts. We can now move on to determining where it should end.

Determining the note's end beat

Theory

In theory note should end in the last beat in which the note's lyrics (or more precisely - the syllable's vowel) is still clearly audible.

The valid end beat is usually more fuzzy than the start beat. Singers often reduce the volume of the syllable at the end. Therefore with increased or decreased volume of the playback, you can get slightly different duration. The best way is not to overhink it, if the vowel is theoretically still audible but barely audible compared to the previous beat just assume it's no longer audible and move on.

Just like before we need to check two things, that:

vowel is audible in the last beat of the note,
vowel is not audible in the note after the last beat.

Check that the vowel is audible in note's last beat

Just like for the start beat, there is an auxialiary note playback meant for determining the end beat of the note. It will play the last beat of the note and some time after it.

To activate the playback of the end of the note, use alt + ↓ shortcut.

In case of our "can" note, we can not hear any vowel. We need to shorten the note using alt + ← shortcut:

Press alt + ↓ shortcut. Still nothing. Shorten the note until you can hear the vowel.

You should end up with:

Now when you use alt + ↓ shortcut to hear the end of the note, you can clearly hear "a" sound.

Check that the vowel is not audible after the note's last beat

Because we were shortening the note we already checked it. However sometimes your note may be too short instead of being too long so you need to know how to do this. Just for practice let's check it again.

Make the note end one beat later by using alt + → shortcut:

Now when you use alt + ↓ shortcut to hear the end of the note, you can only hear the "n" sound which is not picked up by microphones well - we should cut it and focus on the vowel.

You can hold alt key and just press the arrow keys one by one. First ↓ (to hear the end), then while still holding the alt key press → (to lengthen the note), then ↓ again, then ← (to shorten the note), then ↓ again. It will speed up the process.

Finishing the line

In the same way please try to determine the start and end beats for the remaining notes of the first line.

Notes should never touch, always shorten the previous note to have at least 1 beat break.

Once you are ready check if it looks like this:

Final result

As explained above, some of your notes e.g. "we" or "ver" may last 1 beat shorter, it's not a problem as 1 beat difference in duration is sometimes debatable.

Finetuning may seem like a lot of work at first. Do not worry - once you get the hang of the shortcuts, the process will speed up significantly.