I’m a HUGE fan of Synthesizer V Studio Pro, aka SynthV to its fans. I got version 1 and four vocal databases for it, and 6 songs later I’ve got 4 more songs written and I’m going to have a new album ready. Finally I could write for other singers, better and more capable as vocalists than I ever was. I felt like Alan Parsons.
I’m almost 60 years old. I’ve lost enough of my singing voice that I won’t sing any more. Ageism is a very real thing in many music genres, but on a computer and online, age doesn’t matter. People like a song or they don’t. I love the fact that I can make any kind of music I want now, and I’ve got a small group of professional singers to sing on my songs. Yes, they’re virtual AI singers, but if you do it right, they’ll fool anyone.
So when Dreamtonics, the company that makes SynthV announced a new version with better sounding voices and better control, I pre-ordered the upgraded program, and I pre-ordered all four voices. It was a reasonable discount. Yesterday I got a chance to really sit down with the new version. I brought over some of my V1 vocals, and…
There’s no other way to say this – they sounded shitty. The fidelity of the voices were improved, that part is true. They sound more vibrant. But the vocal expressions got ruined. My favorite singer is Solaria. She has a low key, kind of soft style of singing that’s very expressive. There’s portamento in just the right amount, in just the right places. And it all got screwed up in V2.
Part of this is not really the fault of the company. They’re using a different approach, so it is understandable that tracks made with the old product might not sound the same. The solution is to go through and fix, by hand, all of the damage done by the new software. A pain in the ass, but with the increased fidelity, it might be worthwhile.
Except then I discovered that they’d removed the tool we use to manually manage a singer’s vibrato. It’s gone. Now you can control how much vibrato is applied, but not how fast the vibrato is. My second favorite singer is Saros, and they have a very fast vibrato that sounds like a goat. In V1 it’s easy to slow it down. In V2, you can’t. Unless you want to hand-draw each note’s vibrato?
I posted this to their forum. There are plenty of customers who do not like V2. Best case scenario is that there’s some way to slow the vibrato speed buried somewhere, and someone will figure it out. Second best would be that they bring back the manual vibrato settings. If they don’t? Then I can’t really use this software and I’ve wasted my money.
I’m hopeful that they listen to their community and give us back at least the manual vibrato settings. It’s pretty obvious to me that they didn’t do enough testing on V2. The ball is now in the court of Dreamtonics. How will they respond to the angry customers? We’ll see.