Spent most of the day with the new Vocaloids VST, both Leon and Lola. Pretty neat as you might expect. Not as hard to use as you might expect once you get used to all of the parameters that go into making a track.

First thing I did was dive in over my head and tried editing one of the included demos to make it sing what I wanted... it went better than it should have and in less than an hour I succeeded so it gets good points for the intuitive factor. But the real steps to creating a fresh track are:

1. Create new sequence, select voice (singer), set tempo/time signature.
2. Play in the notes, or step-enter or import midi file.
3. Enter the lyrics for each note.
4. Click Phoneme Transformation, which converts the lyrics into phonetic data the Vocaloid can sing. It does this pretty well but some editing may be required - and you have a list of phonemes to choose from that are easy to understand. At this point your track is very dry and computer-sounding.
5. Add expression per note. The options are for attack, vibrato, dynamics and crescendo. You drag the expression objects to the note and then stretch them as far as needed. I don't know yet if real-time MIDI controls will work for adding expression but so far I don't think so.
6. Add Control. This includes brightness, noise, clearness, gender control, resonance (with frequency, bandwidth and amplitude), harmonics, and pitch bend.

By now you have something pretty decent and you can tweak to infinity. Besides editing the sequence track you can also edit the singer's overall vocal characteristics. I should mention that the program has to render the tracks like in video editing, so you get a long pause the first time you hit the play button after editing.

It's not hard to use really but you can definitely go deep into the synthesis aspects if you want. The owner's manual is clear and concise (and in full color!) and is only about 100 pages in English. There's more I haven't mentioned like a simple mixer for controlling the mix between singers (you can have up to 16 if your computer can handle it). As a stand-alone app it's great for barbershop quartet stuff and it will export both midi and wave files. It'll really hit the spot as a VST in combination with other instruments. It's a bit expensive for hobbying around with (I will have to try sending some pornographic singing telegrams to some friends though) but this could be priceless for commercial apps like singing radio station logos, jingles and the like. Yeah I know - I'll post some demos when I come up with something worth hearing. If you haven't heard it at all yet: http://www.vocaloid.com/

[This message has been edited by The Pro (edited 01-28-2004).]