Posted
Hi,
positioning single words or syllables on different vertical positions is too „rough in scale“. With every single press of the up and down arrow key, the text item makes a huge vertical jump and its not possible to position them slightly over a symbol.
It seems that the vertical axis scale is off, or in other words with each up and down arrow key press, 2 vertical axis positions are skipped.
To make the lyrics imaginable sounding respectively sung over the notes, the syllables need to be very close to the symbols that represent the notes.
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If I had changed the vertical position of some syllables and edit the line of text afterwards, pressing enter to commit the changes, results in a complete resets of the vertical position and every thing is on a bottom line again.
And this happens also when I only add words to the end of the line of text, which is weird and makes evolving the lyrics nearly impossible - the resets drives one crazy ;-)
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The manual (https://docs.cognitone.com/synfire/EN/parameters/Lyrics.html) let me assume that it is possible to edit several lines of text, meaning they are independent of each other, but I cannot figure out how to achieve this.
How can the lyrics parameter be polyphonic - would be great for secondary voices or background singer lyrics?
Maybe I miss a fundamental workflow of Synfire like stacking several instances of the same parameter or something like that?
Mon, 2023-10-30 - 16:52 Permalink
... and by the way : appending attachments after the initial post - via edit - does not work, only with a new comment
Mon, 2023-10-30 - 20:02 Permalink
The vertical position is meant to be constant for each verse. The horizontal positions of sylables can be auto-aligned with Figure symbols.
How can the lyrics parameter be polyphonic
Pretty standard for printed lead sheets and song books. The text line for each new verse is stacked below the previous one.
Tue, 2023-10-31 - 23:37 Permalink
Just to ensure I got it right and use the lyrics feature as best as possible, whilst being most flexible for creating the melody for the vocals - the approach would be
1) use a parent container for song sections (a verse or a chorus e.g.) that contains the harmony parameter (chord progression)
2) for each row of the lyrics of a song part use a child container that contains the figure & lyrics paramter, whereby several of these will be in sequence
I attached 2 screenshot (row 1 & row 2) of this setup, which is musically nonsense, and contains the first 2 verse (in the sense of a row of lyrics and not the song section) of Hummingbird Heartbeat from Katy Perry, to have a real life example that shows the suboptimal visual alignment of syllables and figure symbols.
The syllables are aligned correctly, but the horizontal zoom factor lets the syllables overlap, which makes them hard to read (but is okay for the figure & symbols) - which would be not that bad, if we could have different vertical positions for each syllable (with the same axis resolution that is used for figures and symbols).
I think this will be less a problem the more one is really into the song - the lyrics are quite established and its all about the harmony & melody.
But the other way round it means : for song writing respectively creating and evolving the lyrics of a song, it might be a good idea to use another tool than Synfire - and when the lyrics feel right, they can be copy & pasted into Synfire. Or do I miss a another workflow ?
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And there seems to be a little bug : if I change the position of a figure symbol, the lyrics parameter is not updated (aligned to the symbols) automatically and I have to click into its texbox add a space and press enter so that it happens.
The screenshot "lyrics are off" shows this situation.
Sat, 2023-11-04 - 14:13 Permalink
The Lyrics parameter's original intention was for printing lead sheets with LilyPond or MusicXML. It was never meant to be an active component during composition.
If there is a realistic way to meaningfully communicate with Synthesizer-V or similar plug-ins, it makes sense to overhaul it and make it a more active component.
Sat, 2023-11-04 - 14:25 Permalink
As a former vocalist and songwriter, I learned the hard way that there are only two productive workflows for lyrics. Either you have some (meaningful) lyrics ready that you write a rhythm/melody for, or you have a rhythm/melody and try to write some lyrics that fit into it (much harder, much more prone to nonsense).
Both is best done away from the computer, improvising fake lyrics with your voice so you get a feel what it is like to actually sing that melody (as opposed to playing it on a piano), until you have something that sticks.
This can also be done with Synfire and a soft synth sound, but you still need to sing that line with a real voice to check if it works. Synthesiter-V could really help with that, if there was an API.