The following are tips I would give my past self about UTAU. This is meant for beginners. It’s not all-inclusive, so listen to other people’s tips as well, but I’m passing on info that would’ve been good to know earlier on. If some of these things seem super obvious, it’s because some of these points are for SERIOUS noobs.


Disclaimer: I am not an UTAU expert, or very good at utau tbh. But these are things I picked up on over time, so I figured I’d share ‘em for pure newbies, who have had very little time/experience with UTAU. So i might be wrong on some of these. Feel free to correct me.


Recording:

  • Find a reclist. Don’t try to randomly record sounds for your first utau.

  • Try to find ANY microphone other than the onboard mic on your laptop, because that mic will record noise from your comp’s hard drive, too. Even headphones plugged into the mic jack would be better(i’m serious).
  • probably Don’t record in a quick, speaking voice. Record medium-long sounds in a singing voice. It’ll just sound better. Trust me.

  • (I record in audacity)Don’t fade in and fade out every single CV sound. Why? Just why. I think I saw this in a tutorial a long time ago, and maybe it is meant to do something, but when I recorded my first vcv utau years later, I realized that I didn’t need to fade in and out. If there is a small amount of background noise, you can use noise removal in audacity by selecting a bit of the noise separately from your voice, and then on any sounds that have noise, repeat noise removal. Currently I use this if it is raining, and it seems to do pretty good if I don’t over-do it. The only problem that I might be causing by doing this, is, I think that my frq files are being thrown off by something, and it could be noise removal. More on frq files later.

  • It’s not imperative, especially for your first UTAU, but at some point please consider getting a dedicated microphone. I used a (~20usd) rosetta stone microphone because I happened to have one, and it’s what made me realize that A LOT of problems I had been having were caused by using a poor mic. I’m not saying you NEED a great mic, I’m just saying, it’ll be worth it to get one especially if you can get a deal///

  • VCV is better than CV, sure, but nowadays I honestly prefer CVVC for japanese.

  • I’m not saying make your first utau in CVVC, or VCV. I still believe that CV is a good first step. It can be a bit choppy, but honestly sounds fine. The only thing is your first utau will INEVITABLY have problems, which is where CV(a frequent first step) probably gets such a bad rep. So CV is A-OK, but in the future you may want to try out VCV or CVVC.

  • Also, Japanese appears to be the easiest language for utau. So therefore, I recommend not jumping right into english or another language on your very first try. If you don’t have any interest in making japanese covers, try thinking of your first CV bank as a proof-of-concept.
  • EDIT: Courtesy of
    ☆彡иα∂ιѕ☆彡: Don't feel pressured to make a CVVC or VCV bank because CV can sound really great with a good oto!

Otoing:

  • Learn how to oto your utau. EVEN IF IT’S CV. It will sound much better.

  • Speaking of which, if your sounds are all in romaji, you should definitely alias them. It only takes a couple minutes for a CV bank.

Making Covers:

*note that i’m still not super great at this

  • Check out different resamplers and try em out..

  • If transitions between vowels seem… Bumpy or jumpy, envelope them. You can do this by going to region property and setting pre utterance and overlap to,, probably the same numbers(50 or 100 or smthn), but you can play around with that.

  • See the buttons that say acpt, p2p3, etc? PRESS EM. They are basically smootheners. I will concede I don’t know exactly what each one does.

  • EDIT: Press the OPT button last, it messes with STP. If it wants to delete a cache or smthn say yes, it’s fine. This is a very fine tuned type of thing, I don't know how to use it manually(at least not well, anyway) so pressing OPT shouldn't mess anything up, but you should definitely do this step last or almost last in tuning.


  • BTW if a song has really short note lengths you can go to region property and increase the consonant velocity to match the tempo and it’ll sound clearer.
  • Moresampler is great and it’s new, but maybe learn to use more standard resamplers first?? Also moresampler might sound crappy if you have a lot of background noise.
My favorite plugins which I think you should try:

*google search these or ask around for em, I’m just lettin ya know they exist

  • autocvvc
    • I’m p sure this can convert to cvvc, vcv, OR cv
  • If you’re using a romaji bank, there are hiragana to romaji converters

  • FRQ EDITOR FRQ EDITOR FRQ EDITOR
    • i found this via moresampler’s website, since you can use it for mrq files o.o

    • It’s wonderful

    • I will talk a bit about frq files at the end

    • but basically they are super hard to edit without this plugin
  • I don’t remember the exact english name but Pitch Tracer?? it lets you draw pitch bends and it’s great.

  • Prefix/Suffix Selector if you’re going to use multipitch banks or banks with appends
  • *New: Not a plugin, but setparam is great for otoing, although you might wanna learn how to use UTAU to oto first, so you understand it better, before moving onto setparam, which is faster.

FRQ:

  • Basically when you first go to tools>vb settings for otoing, you should also select all your samples and hit initialize freq map.

  • Then when you look at a samples oto, it’ll have an orange line showing the frequency or smthn

  • if you don’t do this, then every time you play a sound for the first time, it will take extra long because it has to make an frq file first.

  • NOW THEN. If you play a sound and it randomly sounds like SCREECH or very gravelly, or buzzing, and there insn’t just a ton of bckgrnd noise, probably the frq file messed up.
    • When you look at the frq, it will be jagged and spikey instead of smooth and straight.

    • You need to make it straight.

    • ur gonna need to hit edit freq map.

    • idunnohowtodothiseasily

    • so i use frq editor, and you can just draw it on right.

    • it’s lit

    • for sounds like K an S, try erasing some of the consonant frq line to make it less sharp??? i’m not a scientist idunno

There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t mention, but feel free to add your own hot tips. Also if I got smthn wrong you can correct me I don't mind.
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