General Question: Improving performance

[Cam-H]

I'd really appreciate some feedback or advice on how 'top' game vocalists actually approach getting their expert FCs. What process is typically applied;

• to songs you don't know / not heard before, and
• to songs you know but find troublesome to the point of stagnation.

I'm 'reasonably OK' at the game, and have a few expert five star efforts on GH5 so far. With that said, I've still not attempted about one third of the playlist yet, and there are several songs including; Brianstorm, Wolf Like Me, and What I Got where I am really floundering to get even semi-respectable scores on Hard level.

My approach with new songs has been generally to download them in iTunes, and play them repeatedly in the car, at gym, etc. Usually this is enough to get a decent Hard-level score after a few attempts. If things are going well, I'll simply move up to Expert and try fine tune it.

My problem is increasingly with these occasional songs where I just can't break out of a rut and see no progress being made. YouTube clips have been quite handy at times (digression: thanks to dr00bles for Medicate path ... I've not got Diamond, but doubt I would have even got Gold without this clip), but failing to move beyond repeatedly getting 'Solids' is pretty frustrating. I sometimes try these songs in different octaves, and that occasionally can help.

How do you go about learning a new and unheard song? Start at Medium and work up? Hop straight into Expert? Download the original and learn it first? Use YouTube clips from other vocalists? Other approaches?

Thanks in advance.

[Cam-H]

I'd really appreciate some feedback or advice on how 'top' game vocalists actually approach getting their expert FCs. What process is typically applied;

• to songs you don't know / not heard before, and
• to songs you know but find troublesome to the point of stagnation.

I'm 'reasonably OK' at the game, and have a few expert five star efforts on GH5 so far. With that said, I've still not attempted about one third of the playlist yet, and there are several songs including; Brianstorm, Wolf Like Me, and What I Got where I am really floundering to get even semi-respectable scores on Hard level.

My approach with new songs has been generally to download them in iTunes, and play them repeatedly in the car, at gym, etc. Usually this is enough to get a decent Hard-level score after a few attempts. If things are going well, I'll simply move up to Expert and try fine tune it.

My problem is increasingly with these occasional songs where I just can't break out of a rut and see no progress being made. YouTube clips have been quite handy at times (digression: thanks to dr00bles for Medicate path ... I've not got Diamond, but doubt I would have even got Gold without this clip), but failing to move beyond repeatedly getting 'Solids' is pretty frustrating. I sometimes try these songs in different octaves, and that occasionally can help.

How do you go about learning a new and unheard song? Start at Medium and work up? Hop straight into Expert? Download the original and learn it first? Use YouTube clips from other vocalists? Other approaches?

Thanks in advance.

[dr00bles]

This is a good question.

I play exclusively on Expert mostly because lower difficulties will reward you for singing incorrect pitches, and if you keep singing those wrong pitches (say in a repeated chorus), then it will reinforce a bad habit. It's best, in my opinion, to sing on Expert (if you're playing for score/perfection, anyway) so you can be sure that what you're singing is "correct" (i.e. what the game wants).

I'd say I probably knew about 20 of the 83 songs in GH5, so naturally, there had to be a learning process. Mostly, I do what you do. I download the songs and listen to them on the way to work, at the gym, anywhere I can. I tend to listen more closely to the songs I know are harder. Then, after about a week, I give 'em a crack on Expert. Usually I sing straight through at first to get a feel for the song, its difficult areas, etc. Then it's straight to practice mode where I take it phrase by phrase at the trouble spots.

YouTube clips from other vocalists can also be very helpful (glad my Medicate vid helped), which is why I set up my vocals video reference thread. The only word of caution I have is that sometimes vocalists will barely squeeze out "Excellents" (God knows I've done it a million times), and if you try to perfectly replicate what they're singing you might end up missing the mark. But in general, doing this will help, especially with oddly pitched songs like Sultans of Swing.

In terms of improvement, there's one thing you always have to remember. Your brain takes a while to really soak in the things it's learned. So often I find myself in a situation where I'll labor away on a song in practice mode for hours, learning and perfecting every phrase, and still unable to string it all together in a real run. Then I'll go back the next night and FC it on my first try. Your brain is weird like that. Sometimes sleep will help you absorb all your hard work.

Vocals, more than the other instruments, is a two-step process:

1) Learn (i.e. understand what the game wants)
2) Execute (i.e. actually produce the sounds the game wants)

Try to take it step-by-step. Spend some quality time making mental notes of what the game is looking for. Then see how well you can replicate it.

Some songs are hard to learn but easy to execute (I'd say Under Pressure falls into this category), while others are both hard to learn and hard to execute (Superstition, Stone Cold Crazy). Either way, it's all about truckin' on, seeing what makes the game happy, and conditioning yourself to apply your voice accordingly and consistently.

Hope this helps! Let us know how you progress.
_________________

My accomplishment thread

[dr00bles]

This is a good question.

I play exclusively on Expert mostly because lower difficulties will reward you for singing incorrect pitches, and if you keep singing those wrong pitches (say in a repeated chorus), then it will reinforce a bad habit. It's best, in my opinion, to sing on Expert (if you're playing for score/perfection, anyway) so you can be sure that what you're singing is "correct" (i.e. what the game wants).

I'd say I probably knew about 20 of the 83 songs in GH5, so naturally, there had to be a learning process. Mostly, I do what you do. I download the songs and listen to them on the way to work, at the gym, anywhere I can. I tend to listen more closely to the songs I know are harder. Then, after about a week, I give 'em a crack on Expert. Usually I sing straight through at first to get a feel for the song, its difficult areas, etc. Then it's straight to practice mode where I take it phrase by phrase at the trouble spots.

YouTube clips from other vocalists can also be very helpful (glad my Medicate vid helped), which is why I set up my vocals video reference thread. The only word of caution I have is that sometimes vocalists will barely squeeze out "Excellents" (God knows I've done it a million times), and if you try to perfectly replicate what they're singing you might end up missing the mark. But in general, doing this will help, especially with oddly pitched songs like Sultans of Swing.

In terms of improvement, there's one thing you always have to remember. Your brain takes a while to really soak in the things it's learned. So often I find myself in a situation where I'll labor away on a song in practice mode for hours, learning and perfecting every phrase, and still unable to string it all together in a real run. Then I'll go back the next night and FC it on my first try. Your brain is weird like that. Sometimes sleep will help you absorb all your hard work.

Vocals, more than the other instruments, is a two-step process:

1) Learn (i.e. understand what the game wants)
2) Execute (i.e. actually produce the sounds the game wants)

Try to take it step-by-step. Spend some quality time making mental notes of what the game is looking for. Then see how well you can replicate it.

Some songs are hard to learn but easy to execute (I'd say Under Pressure falls into this category), while others are both hard to learn and hard to execute (Superstition, Stone Cold Crazy). Either way, it's all about truckin' on, seeing what makes the game happy, and conditioning yourself to apply your voice accordingly and consistently.

Hope this helps! Let us know how you progress.
_________________

My accomplishment thread

[BOYOBOYY]

Really good advice Droobles. If i'm really struggling to get an FC I will give it a run through, and make a note of all the places that have a cluster of unusual pitches (the main cause of SOLIDs for me) and I will work out the pitches individually and repeat them to myself until I have it down in my head then I will try to hit it in the song. A break in the song is a good time to remind yourself of that awkward phrase. If the phrase is quite early in the song then thats good because you can just start over until you hit it. If you play on Hard perhaps it might be an idea to practice on Expert? Perhaps it might even help to mute the music and just try to hit the pitch lines. Sounds weird, I know, but I can usually guess what note it is I have to sing when I'm sightreading a song by looking at the lines (might be from a lot of experience). Also another benefit to that is you're not getting distracted by what you're hearing/what you think you're hearing and what you actually need to sing, and when you figure out what needs to be sung its going to be a lot easier when you have to do it in an actual run. I used to take a phrase and find the notes I needed to sing and record myself singing them then play it back until I had it down.

[BOYOBOYY]

Really good advice Droobles. If i'm really struggling to get an FC I will give it a run through, and make a note of all the places that have a cluster of unusual pitches (the main cause of SOLIDs for me) and I will work out the pitches individually and repeat them to myself until I have it down in my head then I will try to hit it in the song. A break in the song is a good time to remind yourself of that awkward phrase. If the phrase is quite early in the song then thats good because you can just start over until you hit it. If you play on Hard perhaps it might be an idea to practice on Expert? Perhaps it might even help to mute the music and just try to hit the pitch lines. Sounds weird, I know, but I can usually guess what note it is I have to sing when I'm sightreading a song by looking at the lines (might be from a lot of experience). Also another benefit to that is you're not getting distracted by what you're hearing/what you think you're hearing and what you actually need to sing, and when you figure out what needs to be sung its going to be a lot easier when you have to do it in an actual run. I used to take a phrase and find the notes I needed to sing and record myself singing them then play it back until I had it down.

[dr00bles]

[dr00bles]

[dogfoodnyc]

[dogfoodnyc]

[Cam-H]

dr00bles and BOYOBOYY,

Many thanks to both of you for your extensive replies.

[Cam-H]

dr00bles and BOYOBOYY,

Many thanks to both of you for your extensive replies.

[Icemage]

I hate, hate, hate sightreading in GH5 (or any GH vocals engine for that matter), but GH5 is particularly annoying because the hollow pipes make it very hard to figure out if I'm off key by a little or a lot.

My order of preference is to:

- If the song is available in Rock Band 2, I'll play the song through in RB2 first and nail down the pitches as much as I can. Once I'm confident that I'm doing it mostly right I switch back to GH5 (I did this on They Say since I got fed up with missing those little pitch warbles that I couldn't see). This does have some pitfalls, as the two games aren't always charted the same way on vocals (see: Feel Good Inc. and Under Pressure), but it at least gets you closer, faster.

- Watch the official music video (or better yet, someone else's FC run) on Youtube and just familiarize myself with the music without singing. Then a few more times, attempting to sing along and watching for dissonant notes. Pitfalls are as mentioned above by dr00bles.

- Go into practice mode and hammer the phrases into my head the hard way. This is not always an effective approach, because of the problem I mentioned earlier about not knowing exactly how far off any given note is from what is charted.

Other than that... repetition, repetition, repetition.
_________________

PS3 Expert Rock Band Vocalist
My YouTube vocals videos

[Icemage]

I hate, hate, hate sightreading in GH5 (or any GH vocals engine for that matter), but GH5 is particularly annoying because the hollow pipes make it very hard to figure out if I'm off key by a little or a lot.

My order of preference is to:

- If the song is available in Rock Band 2, I'll play the song through in RB2 first and nail down the pitches as much as I can. Once I'm confident that I'm doing it mostly right I switch back to GH5 (I did this on They Say since I got fed up with missing those little pitch warbles that I couldn't see). This does have some pitfalls, as the two games aren't always charted the same way on vocals (see: Feel Good Inc. and Under Pressure), but it at least gets you closer, faster.

- Watch the official music video (or better yet, someone else's FC run) on Youtube and just familiarize myself with the music without singing. Then a few more times, attempting to sing along and watching for dissonant notes. Pitfalls are as mentioned above by dr00bles.

- Go into practice mode and hammer the phrases into my head the hard way. This is not always an effective approach, because of the problem I mentioned earlier about not knowing exactly how far off any given note is from what is charted.

Other than that... repetition, repetition, repetition.
_________________

PS3 Expert Rock Band Vocalist
My YouTube vocals videos

[Dentata]

I'm not in the league of some of the other folks who have replied, (I'm just a dr00bles wannabe with better taste in hockey teams ). That said, I do have a couple of ideas that haven't already been mentioned.

- If you don't do so already, try playing with headphones. I'm on the Wii, and when I got my wireless headphones, things definitely improved for me.

- Play with the audio mixer. I put the game vocals as high as possible, everything else as low as possible, and my voice is muted. Other combinations might work better for you...in RB2, I had to shut Bob Dylan up in order to FC Tangled Up in Blue, but he's a special case.

- Play with the audio calibration settings. There seems to be a small lag for the engine to figure out the note you are singing. My headphones take the audio directly from the Wii, before it goes through the TV, so I auto-calibrate to 0. When I added 20ms to this, several songs in GH5 got easier for me. (Brianstorm, and the "Why Did You"s of In The Meantime come to mind).

- Practice mode gives you plenty of feedback if you can do the math in your head. Each phrase is worth the same amount percentage wise (+/- 1 for rounding), so you can figure out where you are missing easily enough. If you aren't sure what the numbers should be, drop to easy for 1 run and write them down, but unless you doing lots of phrases at a time in practice mode, you can figure it out easily enough. Small groups of phrases is what I do in practice mode, often groups of 4 which form a verse or chorus, but that depends on how the game groups them.

- Know when to walk away, and know when to run If you are getting frustrated, change songs or do something else. Fortunately, the Wii controller includes a wrist strap, so my TV is still intact.

- Drink water and don't eat. Thinner people sing better. Seriously, vocal cords need the liquid, and food = phlegm = ballads sounding like death metal.

- Have fun. It is a game, and not everyone was meant to FGFC it.

[Dentata]

I'm not in the league of some of the other folks who have replied, (I'm just a dr00bles wannabe with better taste in hockey teams ). That said, I do have a couple of ideas that haven't already been mentioned.

- If you don't do so already, try playing with headphones. I'm on the Wii, and when I got my wireless headphones, things definitely improved for me.

- Play with the audio mixer. I put the game vocals as high as possible, everything else as low as possible, and my voice is muted. Other combinations might work better for you...in RB2, I had to shut Bob Dylan up in order to FC Tangled Up in Blue, but he's a special case.

- Play with the audio calibration settings. There seems to be a small lag for the engine to figure out the note you are singing. My headphones take the audio directly from the Wii, before it goes through the TV, so I auto-calibrate to 0. When I added 20ms to this, several songs in GH5 got easier for me. (Brianstorm, and the "Why Did You"s of In The Meantime come to mind).

- Practice mode gives you plenty of feedback if you can do the math in your head. Each phrase is worth the same amount percentage wise (+/- 1 for rounding), so you can figure out where you are missing easily enough. If you aren't sure what the numbers should be, drop to easy for 1 run and write them down, but unless you doing lots of phrases at a time in practice mode, you can figure it out easily enough. Small groups of phrases is what I do in practice mode, often groups of 4 which form a verse or chorus, but that depends on how the game groups them.

- Know when to walk away, and know when to run If you are getting frustrated, change songs or do something else. Fortunately, the Wii controller includes a wrist strap, so my TV is still intact.

- Drink water and don't eat. Thinner people sing better. Seriously, vocal cords need the liquid, and food = phlegm = ballads sounding like death metal.

- Have fun. It is a game, and not everyone was meant to FGFC it.

[dr00bles]

Agree with all advice above (except maybe the RB2 bit due to differences in charting).

Also, this may sound lame, but watch the vocals tutorial. They have a new section about vocal health that's actually pretty valuable.
_________________

My accomplishment thread

[dr00bles]

Agree with all advice above (except maybe the RB2 bit due to differences in charting).

Also, this may sound lame, but watch the vocals tutorial. They have a new section about vocal health that's actually pretty valuable.
_________________

My accomplishment thread

[kire]

[kire]

[Icemage]

[Icemage]

[tidus]

[tidus]

[dr00bles]

[dr00bles]

[Dentata]

[Dentata]