Tone Deafness and Tuning

[UsoppFanGirl]

Hiya, I just wanted to come on here to discuss something that effects me and other UTAU users: tone deafness.

Ever since I got into Vocaloid/UTAU music, I've wanted to create my own voicebank and my own song covers, like many others. I was ecstatic to find out it was pretty easy making a voicebank (even if it didn't sound good), so all i needed to do was either make or find a UST to use.
It was when I found MASA Works Design's "Country of Stars" song that I decided I'd make my own UST. SO I got to doing it, everything was going perfectly, i was so excited, so i opened up the midi in UTAU, put the lyrics in, and realized I needed to tune it.

And then I remembered something my mom had told me a few years back. I was "slightly tone deaf" in her own words. Despite knowing this, I pushed through, eager to create a UST for a song I really liked. I tuned the first three words of the song, hit play and-

It was awful, like "Please make me go deaf awful" not only was it not in key, but my tuning had somehow made it sound worse than what it sounded like with no tuning.
Seeing this (and also noticing a huge mistake in the UST itself) I decided to give up on making USTs for the forseeable future.

So, I'd like to know, does anyone else have tone deafness here? And if so, how does it effect your work? Was there a way you overcame it?

 

[Nashdas]

Exhibit A:

I tried to do a mashup of two songs I thought were similar (Two Breaths Walking and Amanojaku). After I already started, I realised they were in different keys and tempos. Oops.

Exhibit B:

A few months back I tried to make a UST for Ghost!?, one of Tatsuya Kitani's (a.k.a. Vocaloid producer Konnichiwa Tanita-san) songs.

It's a fast, jazzy song, so it was difficult to trace the melody as a midi track in LMMS and I gave up.

I then tried one of his slower songs (Bad Dream), this time directly placing notes in OpenUtau, but my issue was I thought syllables were different notes, when they are in fact all the same note. I only realised this after looking at USTs that have several one-note syllables in a row.



So, I kind of feel where you're coming from. I haven't discovered a way to overcome it yet.

I've also tried recording voicebanks in OREMO, and found that I don't exactly have fine control over the notes I hit.