V-Vocal sometimes turns my vocals in to a Space Chipmunk!! Help

     LOL i had v-vocal do this to me on a tune drove me crazy. It took some of my notes like an octive up..,. I realised that I was singing in 2 different KEYS , C and F and when I set the v-vocal to FIX the whole vocal track to just the key of Cmaj I got notes that jumped. I fixed this by just selecting the phrase the note gets jumped and manually edit that area, I also found that by selecting another key relative to the key I was singing in I was able to just auto fix and not have the notes jump. I dont know why it happens, maybe some freq pops over the mike and V-Vocal just squashes it for some damn reason. Also I have gotten into the habbit of always clonning my vocal tracks before using V-Vocal, that way I can smash and crunch with v-vocal as much as I want and still keep the original vocal track to experiment or fix problems. Hope this helps...

I just wish V Vocal would open w/o crashing Sonar... a year, and no one has been able to fix it despite multiple reinstalls. Hmm.  Although... Alvin doesn't exactly sound like my thing! I've actually seen vids on the net where V Vocal was used and it sounded quite good.  I hope you get it fixed!  :)

The "note" and "sense" controls determine how automatic corrections are done. "Sense" tells V-V how far off a note needs to be before it gets any correction, and "Note" tells it how drastically to make those corrections. Forget both of them, as V-Vocal should not be used that way (same advice applies to Autotune and  Melodyne) unless you're specifically after the Cher Effect.

If your goal is transparent corrections, make them by hand and audition each change to make sure you haven't introduced artifacts or made a too-noticeable edit. Use the erase tool to un-do sections as many times as it takes to get it right. If you do it this way, there will be no surprises at the end of the process.

And most important, don't change notes that don't need it! Just because it looks wrong doesn't mean it sounds wrong. Judge each note by ear, in context, to decide whether or not it really needs correction.

Why doesn't the "pitch follow" control default to zero, or at least remember your last setting? Apparently, it's because nobody at CW or Roland is actively working on V-Vocal. It's been unchanged since pitch-to-MIDI was added at version 1.5 back in 2007. I've been assuming, perhaps naively, that Roland has been quietly developing V-Vocal's successor. I hope that's the case!

You can, however, force the "pitch follow" control to default to zero with an edit to VVOCAL.INI.  Locate this text file in \program files\cakewalk\shared dxi\vvocal\skin and bring it up in Notepad. To find the appropriate section, search for the comment line ";Display 8 ( Formant Control )".

Next, find the line that begins with "Ctrl181=", followed by a list of numbers. Make a copy of that line and then comment out the original by placing a semicolon in front of it.  Count over to the 17th number in the list, which should be 100. Change it to 0.

Next, find the line that begins with "Ctrl183=", make a copy of it and comment out the original. Again count over to the 17th number in the list, which should also be 100. Change it to 0.

The reason that are two edits is the first one sets the default value and the second one sets the value display. Once you've done these two edits, V-Vocal will subsequently come up with the Pitch Follow knob at zero by default.

I prefer to work on smaller chunks, e.g. one verse or one chorus at a time. But that's just a personal preference. If I accidentally munge it up badly, I'll lose less work after un-doing it. V-Vocal does not care how big the clip is. I've worked on large clips with no problems.

What you want to avoid is having a whole bunch of V-Vocal clips active at once. Although many users don't have issues, having lots of VV clips does seem to be a common scenario for those who experience crashes. Think of VV as an editor rather than as an effect and bounce your changes right away. You can always retrieve the original clip and start over if necessary, so it's not like there's any danger of losing anything by committing your edits.

I didn't figure the VVOCAL.INI hack out, somebody else did and I just added it to my notes, which I have volumes of.

For folks who are kind of tech-minded propellerheads, a great tool for finding out how stuff works is called Process Monitor, which you can download free from sysinternals.com. With it, you can determine which files are opened, which registry keys are written and read, and specifically what actions were being taken right before an application blows up or hangs. Much of what I know about the inner workings of SONAR have been revealed by this tool. I have used it many times to resolve strange issues.