Open your Ultrastar Deluxe song-folder, create a new folder inside and put the mp3 and the txt in that. If you have images and/or a video, you can put those in as well.
Now open up USDX and go to "Sing". Go through the options (difficulty is unimportant) until you come to the song selection. Highlight your new song (it should be there now), but instead of starting it, press "E". A similar window should greet you:
Some basic controls first:
- Left/Right change the highlighted note
- Up/Down jump between lines
- Holding SHIFT and using the cursors moves the note around. Left/Right change its position, Up/Down its pitch.
- Holding CTRL and pressing Left/Right extends/contracts the beginning of a note, holding ALT does the same to the end.
- Holding CTRL, ALT and SHIFT grabs the highlighted note and every note after it, and moves them with Left/Right.
- Pressing Space Bar lets you hear the currently highlighted note in the song.
- Holding SHIFT and pressing the Space Bar plays the current note's pitch with a piano tune.
- Pressing P lets you hear the current line in the song. The audiable clicks represent the beginnings of the notes. Pressing P while holding SHIFT plays the pitches of the whole line.
- To save your changes, press S. You'll use this a lot.
First, check the BPM. That's the Beats Per Minute, and you can only change note positions by one beat. If it's below 300, you might have problems finetuning the song. If it is, press SHIFT+M to double the beat count, without changing any note positions.
Let's start editing the song. For now, only concern yourself with the position. Extend the first note up to the second, and give it a listen. Now, position the note so that you hear that one syllable. Note that there are some sounds in the spoken language that don't carry a pitch, like "S", "F" and "Th" (don't believe me? Go on, try singing a high-pitched S). Keep those as short as possible in your notes. Rinse and repeat for every other note in the first line.
As a rule of thumb, every note should be at least two beats long and there should be at least one beat pause between notes. This is not a hard rule, but something that makes singing much easier and more realistic, especially on higher difficulties.
Press P to check if every note's start matches up with the words sung.
Now go back to the first note and check the "Start" entry, highlighted in red in the image above. It should be 0 or higher. If it's negative, hold CTRL, ALT and SHIFT and move the whole song to the right until you reach 0. Now you have to adjust the Gap (highlighted in blue) until the song matches the notes again. Do this by pressing 9 and 0 on the main keyboard area (not the Numpad) to adjust the gap by 10 ms, and CTRL+9 and 0 to shift it by a whole second.
Once the notes match up again, you can move to the next line. Check that you don't have overlapping notes between lines by highlighting the last note of a line, adding up the Start and Duration numbers, and comparing it to the next note's Start.
Rinse, repeat until all lines are in place.
You might realize now that you missed a word or need an additional pitch for an elongated word. Should this be the case, you can create additional notes by highlighting a note that is at least 2 beats long and pressing CTRL+"-" (on the main keyboard, not the numpad) to split the note.
This can be used to check long notes where you are not quite sure if they have already ended or not. Create an extra note and shuffle it around until you can just not hear the word when pressing P. Now extend your note to that position.
Afterwards, you can delete the added note by pressing CTRL+Delete.
If you want to change the text, you have to press F4. You can change multiple words by pressing Left/Right, and leave the editing mode by pressing ENTER. If you are using a keyboard setting other than US, doublecheck the words you've entered. USDX is quite eccentric whether it leaves your native keyboard or switches to US.
Sometimes, you'll want to change linebreaks as well. If you want to merge lines, select the earlier one and press SHIFT+"-" (again, not numpad). You might need to switch lines to update the text, though. If you want to cut a line in half, select the word you want to be the first of the new line, and press "-". If pitches are too high or low (can happen if you import files from Composer), the new line might not be displayed correctly. In this case, save and reload the song for it to fix itself.
In the end, it should look like this:
Now starts the fun part: tuning. If you happen to have a songsheet of the song, you're extremely lucky. You can convert the musical notes to their pitch, and use it to tune the notes. Odds are you won't, though. At this point, you only have your ears to go by.
Press SHIFT+Space, then Space alone, then raise/lower the pitch with SHIFT+Up/Down until it matches the song. It's a bit trial-and-error at first, but you'll get an ear for it eventually. Also, most songs use around 5 pitches reagularly, with the odd sixth or seventh strewn in.
If you feel the song is much higher/lower than the starting pitch (0), you can increase/decrease the whole song's pitch by a whole octave by pressing SHIFT and Numpad+/-.
Pressing Numpad+/- alone will in-/decrease the pitch
for the whole song by 1. Good if you feel that you got the melody pinned down, but want to test out some different starting pitches. Just be sure to set it back to the original value once you're done.
By using SHIFT+P, you can listen to the pitch of the whole line. This can be useful since sometimes every individual pitch sounds about right, but in unison it just sounds wrong.
If you have spoken text in your song, you can fade it out by pressing F. Keep them on the starting pitch, as they will still be shown on Performous.
You should also regularly save your progress, leave the editor and playtest the song. Once all that's finished, it will look something like this:
Now for some finishing touches: Golden Notes. Select a few notes in the song and press G. Those will be worth double points. These should be either hard-to-reach pitches, long sustained notes or important words in the text. Or just space them out equally throughout the song as you think it fits. On a perfectly sung song, Golden Notes should value around 1000-1500 points, and never over 2500. Remember that long sustained notes in otherwise short songs (eg. the second "honey" and "Everything" in So Many Wonders) weigh heavily on the score, and can easily push the Golden Note score beyond 2000.
For more information on USDX, and a few keyboard shortcuts you might find useful and I might have forgotten to mention, check the "documentation.pdf" in the Ultrastar DX installation folder.
During your playtest you probably noticed that sometimes the lines switch too early or too late. That's nothing you can fix with USDX, you need to adjust that manually in the .txt-file.
You can read about that
here and in my comments
here.
If you have background/cover pics, just adjust the filenames in the #COVER and #BACKGROUND lines.
If you want to add a video, add the line
#VIDEO:*filename*.mp4 (or avi, or similar)
to your header.
If the video doesn't sync up with the song, you can add a line
#VIDEOGAP:*number*as well. Note that while the gap is given in milliseconds, the videogap is in seconds, so start off with something like 0.5. The number can be negative as well.
After you're done, copy the content of your .txt in [ CODE] into the WIP thread. Also include links to pics, video and audio, if those aren't provided already. We'll do a run-over, add some project details and upload the song for you, if it's good enough. We'll have download options for individual songs soon.
If there's anything you want clarified, just ask away. Keep this thread to general questions, though. For specific songs, ask them in the WIP or Feedback section.
