Circus-P cover: Dawn
Vocal Design
Voice banks & V5 style presets utilized in this project:
Melody- Kaito V3 English, Deep Shimmer & To the Stars [Outro]
1st Harmony- Kaito V3 English, Filled with Sound
2nd Harmony- Kaito V3 English, To the Stars
Additional Harmonies- Kaito V3 English, Warm Whisper Secrets, Wide Open, Warm Emotion, Great Vibration
Attack & release effects include occasional vocal fry, doubleaccent 1 & 2, slight and normal vibration, and quite a lot of crescendo/ decrescendo. The first melody part of ‘fly——-’ is done with airy tone throughout, for a more delicate sound. The rest of them are untuned, except for a beginning crescendo and an ending decrescendo. There are occasional pitchbends, used on the attack end, not the release, and one enka-style attack for variability and color.
Reflections
I started out trying this cover with Len, but his range was rather disappointing, given the long, sustained notes and complicated harmonies. Kaito’s range goes both higher and lower, and while his vocals don’t have nearly as much strength compared to the original, they lend a kind of fitting lullaby-like sensibility to the song.
I got really absorbed in the tuning this time. It felt natural and almost easy.
‘Dawn’ was one of the songs featured in the video posted for ‘Better Off Worse',’ a really scathing complaint about the popularity of the producer’s most depressing songs [which, ironically, being a highly cynical and depressing song in and of itself, has a huge number of views/ listens[. It was a demo for the CEVIO voice bank Solaria. I heard it back when it was released and liked it enough to buy it, then forgot about it until yesterday, when it suddenly struck me how beautiful it actually is. As far as I know, it’s the first song Circus has produced which could be classified as neofolk, and maybe that threw people off a little, but I enjoy that genre of music and it’s captivating hearing the qualities he brings to it. It also has something of a gospel undertone, a kind of joy you find in a lot of Black Spirituals [admittedly not the kind of gospel music I was subjected to in my childhood, which I found extremely depressing[
This is the first time I’ve ever been moved to tears while tuning something.
It was also the first time I’ve used an SVP file conversion. I found it interesting how CEVIO apparently doesn’t require a word to be broken down into syllables. Instead, it seems to automatically allot them among the notes provided.
Phoneme editing was extremely extensive. My laptop hated me the whole time I was doing it, too. Kaito’s English, like many of the native Japanese voice banks, has certain quirks, some of which I’d dealt with before and some of which were new [I still have no idea how to make him pronounce ‘clouds’ with an ‘l’ sound instead of an ‘r’], but, for the most part, I think he sounds pretty clear and understandable. I also changed the ‘lai’ in the original to ‘fly,’ purely because I liked the imagery better.
