Wiki Wednesday #322 - CZ-Speaker's Václav

I was going to cover a different utau, but I couldn't download the bank because of a detected virus?!

Wiki Wednesday #322 - CZ-Speaker's Václav

This guy is pretty cool! This 60 year old guy is a jinriki of the railway announcement voice in Prague. At least, that's what I thought from reading the wiki page. This sounds like a regular human recording a regular human bank!

Who is Václav?

Art from wiki

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Here's some tips for mixing! I struggled so much with mixing in the past and I probably gave some really bad advice. I apologize for that! 

Let me start with the most important thing: the point of a vocal synth cover is to show off the voice. If you mix perfectly, you'll actually be missing the point a bit. You'll generally want to boost the voice louder than it should be. I did not get that for way too long. 

If you're using an official render of the instrumental, it's very likely that you're at a huge disadvantage. If that original mix had a limiter or compressor on the master track and then simply muted the vocal track for the instrumental, the instrumental won't be the same as the original. You would need to know where to bump up the vocals to trigger the compressor. I definitely do not like the idea of this because an irrational part of me feels like it's rude to change the instrumental in any way. Note that I do realize it's very silly and irrational! 

You wouldn't think it, but using an AI separated instrumental will help a lot! You can directly compare your vocals with the original. You can mess around with the equalization, you can make sure the volumes are the same... Though, you'll want to boost up your vocals a bit to read extra clearly! 

When you're mixing a vocal synth cover using a premade instrumental, you have a lot of things keeping your mix from being perfect. It's important to learn what you feel is good enough and cut down on the time you spend mixing. There are things in the way that will make getting to 100% extremely difficult! 

However, if you for some reason have access to stems, using VSTi instruments on a midi, or are making an original song, that is when you could go crazy and have fun! Spend five hours on tiny details! Play around with every single setting! Make it beautiful and make it shine! 

My test for if a mix for a cover is good enough is just to send the mix to my phone. If I can make out the vocals, it's good enough! A better test is if you can hear the drum beat through the vocal, though. If the voice completely drowns out the drums, you know that the voice is way too present and laying on top of the mix. 

If I could give my past self any advice, it would be to just stop taking these things seriously. Just throw things together in fifteen minutes. Use a dummy note to determine how to line things up instead of just guessing and making everything off time. (Hi, I'm mentally very disabled and I still refuse to try and line everything up. I go out of my way to make sure I use methods that make it impossible to actually need to move anything.)

So yeah! Don't take things too seriously :)

How Is Václav's bank?

Václav has a three pitch CV-VV bank. His voice is very nice and high quality!

Where Can I download Václav?

You Can find him on his wiki page!