Lane Breakers

Charting Vocals means transcribing a pitch-accurate MIDI tab of the actual vocals in the song, as well as adding lyrics to go along with it. For the most part this is a very objective process, meaning you rarely have to wrap anything.

As well as MIDI notes, some things are controlled via additional text events in the lyrics, such as adding vocal slides or creating unpitched “talkie” notes when necessary.

You'll want to look up some very basic music theory before beginning. Also, make sure your song is tempomapped properly before you start charting, or you'll waste lots of time trying to fix that later.

Before you begin authoring, you'll want a soloed out vocal stem in your project to make it easier to hear what's going on, and to be able to visually see the waveform as a reference for how long notes should be. Check out the page about audio for more info.

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• A1 Notes - Where you put the playable notes you'll sing. The lowest is C1 and the highest is C5.
• B1 Phrase Marker - Where you put phrases that need to cover all notes.
• B2 Overdrive - See its own page for more info. Overdrive markers needs to line up perfectly with whatever phrase it is attached to.
• C1 Lyrics & Events - Where you put the lyrics and the events for the chart.
• D1 Not Displayed Percussion - Notes that makes a sound effect but aren't playable notes during percussion sections
• D2 Displayed Percussion - The notes you actually play during a percussion section
• E1 Lyric shift - Splits the static vocals in a phrase into two separate chunks of text. Can be used to fine tune visuals, but usually not needed
• E2 Range Shift - Shifts the visible track around. Further explanation in its own section. Very rarely used so don't worry about it

Some of these will be explained in greater detail later.

On the bottom of the MIDI editor window there are additional options next to the play button:

• Grid (A) - The note density when placing notes. Vocal-specific info about this below.
• Grid (B) - Changes which rhythm the grid uses. Straight is the default. Triplet is often used in Blues, Swing is often used in Jazz, and Dotted is very rarely used at all.

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While vocal authoring is pretty self-explanatory for the most part, here are some things you got to keep in mind:

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• Grid - In most cases you should use a 64th grid when authoring vocals, as you want it to be as timing accurate to the original audio as possible. If you wanna speed up the process, try first authoring everything on a 16th grid, then go back and adjust note length and timing, so you don't have to worry about figuring out pitches and note timing at the same time.

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• Consonants - If a note begins or end with a consonant such as S, H or K, do not include the consonant sound in the note tube. The microphone can not pick up pitches from these breathing sounds, and as such including them makes the chart artificially harder.

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• Attack of the Note - Even if a song doesn't start with a hard consonant sound, you'll still want to start the note at the attack of the word. So for example: The word “long”, you'll want to start the tube at the very end of the L-sound, just as the O-sound in the word begins.

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Just as important as the note tubes themselves are of course the lyrics to the song. These are authored via text events, and attached to the start of the MIDI notes.

To author lyrics, we recommend first looking up the lyrics on the web, such as genius.com or the artist's website, then copying it all into a notepad document. From here, format the lyrics for the game (more info below) and then import it as so:

1. Select all the vocal notes in your chart
2. Click the “Action” drop down menu at the top of the MIDI editor window, and select “Show action list…“
3. In the “filter” text box, type in “import” and an option called “Import lyrics for selected notes from file” will appear
4. Click on it and select “Run”, then open your notepad file with the lyrics in them

If you did it correctly, the lyric events will now all be synced up with your MIDI notes so you don't have to add each one manually. If something looks off after importing, simply undo the import, edit and save your notepad document, and then re-import it until it's all fixed up.

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Before putting them in the chart, you need to format your lyrics to fit with the notes:

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If a word has more than 1 syllable in it, meaning it contains more than 1 note, you'll have to split it up with a - to make it appear properly in-game. First write the first half of the word, add a dash at the end of it, and then have the second half of the word afterwards with a space between.

For example: Hel- lo

When done, it will appear as “Hello” without the dash in the in-game lyrics for static vocals.

Some words can be pronounced as either 1 or 2 syllables, such as “fire”. In those cases, pay attention to how it is pronounced in the song itself and use your best judgement if it should be split into 2 syllables or not.

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Sometimes you'll want the dash to appear in-game, like with the word “in-game” right there. To do this, simply use a = instead of a dash.

For example: Ex= boy- friend

This will now appear as “Ex-boyfriend” in the static vocals lyric viewer. If you're unsure if something should be hyphenated or not, check out some online dictionaries and the like.

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A common singing technique is changing the pitch of a note while singing.

To chart this, first put in the starting note with the lyric being sung. Then, have this first note end exactly where the slide to the next note should start.

Then, put a note where the slide ends, and have the lyric for it be a single “+” sign. If done correctly, this will now create a playable link between them.

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If a note is talked, growled, rapped or otherwise performed in a way where there is no pitch, you wanna turn it into a talkie note.

To turn a note into a talkie, add a # or a ^ sign to the end of the lyric. For example “Hey#” or “Ho^”.

The normal # talkie scores like any other vocal note, while the ^ talkie (aka. soft talkie) scores points much faster. Use soft talkies for stuff like whispers, talking without rhythm and any sort of vocal sound effects.

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Sometimes in various languages, such as Spanish, Italian and French, two syllables will be pronounced as a singular sound, and as thus be sung as a singular note. This is called synalepha.

To have a synalepha note appear properly in-game, add a § sign between the two syllables in the note. For example, “que§al” will have both “que” and “al” show up as the lyric for the same note, with a underscore marker indicating they are different syllables.

This is very rarely used in English lyrics, and should never be used for English words that can be pronounced as either one or two syllables, such as “fire”.

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Probably needs a rewrite, words are hard

Once all the notes and lyrics for the song are authored, its time to do vocal phrases. Instead of scoring each individual note, the game will instead look at how well you do within all the notes included during a phrase marker. You'll want a new phrase marker every time a new bar (in the rap sense, not the sheet music sense) occurs, and they should usually be no longer than 2 measures long unless there is a really long note in there.

Where you put the start of a phrase doesn't matter that much, as long as it doesn't touch any actual note tubes. The end of a phrase on the other hand should happen at least an 8th after the end of the final note in the phrase if possible, to allow the game to calculate your score correctly. If a song has really rapid vocals, exceptions to this rule will of course be made.

If your song has a Harmony chart, you should make sure all the tubes in the song are marked with phrases on the HARM1 track, no matter which vocal part sings it. Any notes on Harmony 2 or 3 should be marked with a separate phrase marker on HARM2. The HARM1 and HARM2 phrases work independently of each other otherwise.