Hi, Andrew.

Originally Posted by Andrew Dee
I like where the song picks up intensity in the choruses, and to my ears, the peak was in ‘rabbit on the run / life has come undone’ sections - not lyrically (although I didn’t mind the words) but musically.
I'm glad that worked for you!

Quote
I thought I heard a line cliche or two in the song, which always attracts me.
Yes, you did. You've got good ears!

I didn't mention it in the writeup, because I couldn't remember what they were called. crazy

I've got a "To Do" list of things to try out in songs, and that was on the list. It made sense to use it here, because it works well with ballads. It's something along the lines of G Gmaj7 G6 Gadd2 D Dmaj7 D7.

Line cliches work well on the guitar and keyboard, but don't always translate well to BiaB, but I think it worked nicely in this case.

Quote
Lyrically, I find songs that have a ‘woe is me’ theme to be emotionally tiring - don’t get me wrong - I am not critiquing your lyrics, but my reaction to these types of songs. I think that’s because I have to fight my own negativity and pessimism. It made think … what does his former other think of this situation? Interesting if there was ever a ‘their side of the story’ response song e.g. I had to escape because you were too clingy and stifling.
Yeah, I tried to touch on that in the writeup. That's the thought I had when working on the second verse. If someone doesn't want to be around you, it sucks, but as my daughter would say - that's a you problem.

I deleted a long anecdote, but the punch line was having to explain to someone that, yes, I understood he missed my wife. But didn't he think that was a weird thing to be telling her husband? And no, she wasn't ever going to talk to him again.

Quote
Thank you for the write-up of your process - I find it interesting/enlightening to hear of the songs development through arrangement - the ideas that are inspired by the recording and arranging process. I don’t know where you find the patience for it - what seems like a lengthy process. I guess it’s about quality and the learning experience.
I figure if I suffered for my art, you need also need to. wink

Quote
I also thought while listening - acknowledging I have listened to very little, and never used, AI vocals - the North American accent and vocal stylings - what it would do to the song with a McCartney-esque or UK styled vocal?
First, some clarification on SynthV. A voice provider is basically given a "script" of words to sing at different pitches. English has a lot of phonemes, so there are lots and lots of words to sing. The original version of SynthV didn't use AI at all, it just reassembled the voice similar to how BiaB works. Later, they trained a neural network because it was better at connecting all these phonemes.

The accent of the voice provider will come through. Here's an example: https://soundcloud.com/dcuny/ive-been-down

And yes, there are a number of mis-pronounced words.

There's no way to remove that accent from that voice provider.

Most of the English voice providers for SynthV have been North American, so there aren't really many UK voices. With some effort, I do some substitutions and edits and try to approximate a Liverpool accent, but it would sound very much like an American trying to do a (poor) British accent.

There are other ways to go about this. For example, RVC is the process of training a neural network on a specific voice, so it will take an input voice and replace it with the timbre of another voice. That will get you somewhat in the ballpark, but the original singer should optimally have something close to that accent in the first place.

I suspect that eventually there will be more UK-flavored voices for SynthV.

I have ACE Studio (but the voices are IMO, not great), and none of the voices sound British to me. I just loaded the MIDI output of this song onto ACE Studio, and verified the voices aren't great. They aren't terrible, they just seem to be missing phonemes and not sound especially realistic. They're pleasant enough to listen to, though.

I can't speak to programs like Suno, though.

Quote
And given your own interest in AI vocals, do you have any views or insights into how a song is changed by the AI vocal selected! I would think a lot if we say that a vocal is an instrument and the effect would be tantamount to change of solo instrument in an instrumental.
I very much write songs to a specific voice. And each voice comes with different "modes", like "whisper", "sweet", "chest", and so on. You can easily change singers, but each voice has its own character, so it may not translate well. And you sort of hear an "attitude" that matches the voice, which helps in the songwriting process.

Quote
Anyhow, a good song and I listened three times.
Thanks! Let me know if you've got any other questions.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?