Tuning (Song)

Vocals

Price $15

• She has a strong British accent and is better suited for late 20th century pop.

• SONiKA was not intended to be based on a professional singer and does not produce professional singer quality results in the same way Prima did.

• She was created by processing her vocals and this was done as an experiment. This also makes her among the least realistic sounding of the English VOCALOID2 vocals.

• She is more flexible than most other English VOCALOIDs for VOCALOID2, not having a voice so specific to a genre.

• Sound on Sound writer John Walden says her higher vocals were “better than lower” and labeled C4 as the best octave.

• At a optimum known vocal range of #D5, both Megurine Luka and SONiKA joint hold the title of second highest VOCALOID2 vocal

• SONiKA’s voice is considered generally appealing and she gained a number of fans. She is one of the most appealing vocals for VOCALOID2 because of her youthful sounds and ability to easily sound cute and energetic.

• AVANNA and OLIVER can compliment SONiKA's vocal.

• She generally works well with electronic undertones and vocal effects, though she can easily lose more clarity with certain ones like echoing.

• She is unstable when she reaches the top of her optimum range and will suddenly change from being soft and muffled to loud and clear. 

  • One range reported where she is clear is #B2 to #G3.

• Something often picked up upon is SONiKA's overall vocal commonly suffers from noise issues that, while possible to remove, affects her raw vocals.

• The overall quality of her vocal is arguable. 

• SONiKA was ranked 4 out of 5 stars in her review by Sound on Sound and was recommended as a quality product.

• When imported into VOCALOID3, SONiKA develops a Aspirated Plosive glitch. She also suffers from an [h] phoneme related glitch.

• She can easily get drowned out by other vocalists due to her softness. 

• The process of improving her clarity often results in the previously mentioned background noises also becoming clearer. This results in further editing to remove them. 

  • Certain vocal effects can add heavy amounts of metallic sounding results to her vocal. Adding echoing effects for example is one such situation which can make them more apparent.

• Her clear range may also need balancing with the rest of her vocal. You cannot always treat one range as the same as the rest of her vocal range, as what works for one range doesn't necessarily work for the rest and vice versa.

• She can naturally trill her Rs.

• One of her higher [V] samples has a Skype sound in the background.

• The most important peak in the EQ is the 1KHz peak.

• Some recommend using FL Studio's soundgoodizer on her vocals

• Sonika has some odd phonemes that have issues depending on the note length.

• Has a tendency to mumble and slur her words.

• Opening will further remove mumbling, but will make another bug more apparent; you can hear her consonants pronounced at a note higher than what she's set at, making her low singing sound odd.

• Breathiness causes the consonant note-mismatch too. The louder the note is, the less you can hear it.

• Brightness and Clearness go hand in hand, and make the notes all level and much less mumbly.

• She can hold high notes, but the voice quality is questionable and she's a bit hard to understand.

• She’s a good deep singer.

• EQing is very important, and her treble range should be boosted.

• She has issues holding long notes.

• She can reproduce Mandarin with 90% accuracy.

• If you want to use SONiKA as the lead, Kagamine Rin (JPN) strengthens SONiKA's voice quite a bit. Using her for backing is a good idea. She'll be much quieter, so vague Engrish isn't a huge issue.

• Her [@U], [u:], [e] and [i:] can sound awkward enough to  kill the entire line with its out-of-place sound.

• Her [V], [Q], [@] and [{] have a glitch where they can randomly sound repulsive.