Cleaning up

Before you start

This lesson requires a songfile with exported single-player track that is yet to be cleaned up. You can either prepare it yourself for practice by following the previous lesson or download the files from here:

3MB

David Amber - Second Time Around [clean-up].zip

archive

Cleaning up the single-player version

Let's open our single-player version in Karedi

If you look closely, you will see that we have some overlapping lines.

Removing background vocals

Let's start from the easy ones - at the end of the song. While the female sings last choruses (starting at beat 4097), male just raps in the background - in this case we will remove the rap part altogether and just leave the female part.

Let's go to the first overlapping line at the end of the song:

Now let's select the rap notes that should be removed e.g. by dragging the mouse:

And press shift + delete to remove the notes together with lyrics.

Continue reviewing line by line and remove all rap notes together with their lyrics.

If in your song there is a background vocals line that does not overlap with normal lines, do not remove it. If you don't want the player to sing it, just leave it as freestyle.

Dealing with overlapping lines

That was the easy part - we resolved the conflict by chosing the main vocals. However, we still have 2 lines in which two main vocal lines overlap like here:

We can approach it in 2 ways.

Giving priority to the first line

Since the player has just sung the whole male verse, we can let him finish it. In this approach we obviously need to remove at least the first 4 notes from the female line since they overlap with male part.

There is not enough female line left for it to make any sense - therefore let's just remove the remaining notes as well:

In some cases you may leave part of the next line.

If after removing overlapping notes and leaving several beats (at least 4) of pause between two lines, the remaining notes from the second line still make a sensible phrase, you do not have to remove them. In our case here it simply made no sense to leave "~~ver"

Giving priority to the second line

We can of course give the priority to the second line arguing that it is more important as it is the beginning of the chorus.

In our case 2 notes from the previous line overlap.

If we just remove them, the result will be:

The lyrics of the first line now are "Don't say that it's" / "Can we start o~~ver". We theoretically solved the issue, but the player may be confused why "too late" is not being sung.

Instead of deleting them, we can turn them into freestyle by selecting them and pressing f shortcut:

Now the player will know that there is some remaining part of the line that is not supposed to be sung.

But we still have the overlapping notes. We can remove the second note with delete shortcut to leave the lyrics and shorten the resulting note so that we have several beats of pause between end of this line and start of next line:

We could even freestyle some more notes if we feel that this setup is still confusing to the player:

Or even the whole line:

Which approach should I choose?

It depends on the situation and the song.

You can start from analyzing what part of the first line and what part of the second line is left if you remove all overlapping notes. In our case it would be "Don't say that it's" and "~~ver". Since almost all of the first line is singable, it is better to prefer it over the second line.

However if the situation was e.g "Don't say" and "start o~~ver". Choosing the second line may be a better option.

If only the last note (a long one) of the previous line overlaps the second line, you may also simply shorten and freestyle the last note.

There may always be a hybrid option available - leaving half of the first verse and half of the second verse, but in such case you must leave a relatively long pause between two parts so that the player realizes the change.

Remember that player will automatically continue singing the same part.

In our case, player will automatically want to sing the male part since he was singing it so far. Take this also into consideration. Whatever approach you choose you must leave a sufficient pause between a part that is cut short from the previous vocalist and the new part from the next vocalist.

Also if you artificially shorten some notes, freestyle them to warn the player that there is something changing.

If unsure, sing various version in Ultrastar and choose the least confusing one.

Solving other conflicts

As argued above, in our case prefering the first line seems like a better idea. We should choose the same approach in the second occurence, because is is almost exactly the same situation, just with different lyrics:

Shortcuts summary:

In this lessons we have learned/reviewed the following shortcuts:

• delete selected notes with lyrics: shift + delete

• delete selected notes (leaving the lyrics): delete

• freestyle notes: f

What's next

We have completed mapping the vocal track of the single-player file. However our song still needs some finishing touches like golden bonus or a cover file.