Vocaloid 6

Lounge / 大厅 / ラウンジ
1

Hi All… I see Yamaha has dropped Vocaloid 6. I have not purchased it yet but it seems to incorporate many of the features found in SynthV. Has anyone used it yet? Any opinions?

Thanks

Casey

1 Like
2

It’s very similar to Vocaloid 5, with a somewhat more usable interface. That’s a bit subjective, but I found V5 quite “clunky” and V6 has streamlined a lot of the controls, especially when it comes to tuning. That said, the new Newtone/Melodyne-style tuning controls only work for AI voices, non-AI voices only have a vibrato tool and rely on drawn parameters for everything else.

As for differences between the new features (AI) and SynthV Studio:

  • V6 still does not allow drawing pitch lines directly on the piano roll in the way SynthV Studio and CeVIO do.
  • The AI cross-lingual capabilities are similar, however instead of picking a language for each track it infers which language is being used based on the phonemes. This can make it easy to accidentally end up with a single Japanese word in the middle of your English lyrics if you’re not careful.
    • If you know the Vocaloid phoneme syntax this is easy to fix, but if you’re relying on the dictionary to convert words to phonemes it can occasionally cause unexpected results.
    • This also means that V6 can seamlessly transition between languages, which is something SynthV cannot do
  • AI voices have more limited tuning capability, so while you get the additional Newtone/Melodyne-style tools you lose access to most of the parameters Vocaloid users might be familiar with.
    • The only parameters for AI voices in V6 are dynamics and pitch (whereas non-AI voices also have velocity, exciter, growl, breathiness, air, mouth, character, brightness, clearness, and portamento timing)
    • This also means there are fewer ways to customize the vocals when compared to SynthV’s options (tension, breathiness, tone shift, vocal modes, etc.)
  • V6 still has the slow rendering issue from V5, in which any change requires the entire section to be re-rendered which can take a long time if you don’t split your track into many segments with the scissor tool (which, for me, still feels clunky compared to SynthV’s speedy rendering)
  • I don’t think Yamaha is trying to achieve the same level of realism that Dreamtonics is. SynthV AI offers very impressive realism, but V6 still has some of that more robotic/synth sound to it (even if the AI voices are still much more realistic sounding than previous Vocaloid options)
    • I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, since stylistically many people expect that of Vocaloid, but those seeking more realism might find V6 somewhat lacking without a lot of work in the tuning and mixing process

While I haven’t had a chance to actually work with V6 yet outside of small tests, as someone who never got the V4 editor I always struggled a bit with V5. I’m hopeful that V6 will be enough of an improvement that I’ll use it more often, but of course SynthV Studio is hard to beat from a usability perspective.

CircusP did a stream on the release day in which he went over many of the features and tried out the AI tuning tools:

11 Likes
3

Excellent. Thank you so much for the comprehensive description and comparison, greatly appreciated!!

4

I heard that Yamaha bought a patent license from dreamtonics for Vocaloid 6, but I’m not sure if that’s true

1 Like
5

I’ve tried out the trial. In my opinion, the quality is on par with 1st generation Synth V. It is better than Vocaloid 5, but their implementation of AI disappointed me because a while back, they showed off their Vocaloid:AI technology when they released that song using the voice of that Japanese singer who had passed away a while ago. I was expecting THAT level of quality. I don’t want to say Yamaha can never catch up, but they are really behind when it comes to deep learning AI.

Also, Vocaloid 6 is still heavily based on Vocaloid 5. It still has the really irritating inability to keep focus during autoscroll if you use multiple parts. The reason why I break up sections into verse / chorus parts is so I can move things around easily, and it also renders much faster this way. But autoscrolling is a fail if you use parts.

4 Likes
6

Thanks for the great insight!!