Y'know? Making Songman scream things like "IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT? THIS IS WHAT YOU'LL FUCKING GET, YOU MOTHERFUCKING SHIT!" has been oddly therapeutic. It's like... it's the same thing I wanna say to customers every time they complain about the quality of a product or, worse, a job (or worse yet, a job I did for them). And the more I tweak it, the more raw and agonized he sounds, and it's like "Honestly, same."
Ah, I went into this expecting to just do a little bit of lighthearted experimentation of which nothing much would come, but this may be the most fun I've had working on a cover in a while.
Ah, I went into this expecting to just do a little bit of lighthearted experimentation of which nothing much would come, but this may be the most fun I've had working on a cover in a while.
Interesting! The writeup on the Vocaloid Wiki makes it sound like VEL makes all consonants shorter, so it at least makes it seem like it would affect any consonant in the note. But it also mentions what sounds like what you were saying about moving the start of a note much earlier, maybe even overlapping the preceding note.
VEL (Velocity)
Velocity determines how quickly the singers pronounces the note/word, thus influencing consonant trailing and consonant duration. Higher velocities result in shorter consonants and subjectively affects the attack of the lyric[1][2]. This parameters affects strongly the fricatives and affricates, like the "s" and "f" sounds. Unlike the other parameters, its value is adjusted through a series of individual bars per note instead of a continuous curve; a trait carried from the old 'Note Velocity' parameter.
In VOCALOID2, large adjustments produced insignificant changes, so usually people didn't adjust this value very much. However since VOCALOID3 and onwards, this parameter indeed affects significantly the consonant length, making critical adjust it for achieve a correct pronunciation, emphasis or attack.
As it affects the consonant length, it can move the beginning of a note closer to, and sometimes even so that it overlaps, the preceding note. In the case of plosives this can sometimes result in an almost silent preparatory interval prior to sounding of the actual consonant.
As said before, the Velocity parameters work differently across VOCALOID and VOCALOID2 (in V1, it manipulated the volume of the note), so it's important take note of this if you ever attempt to export a VSQ file into a VOCALOID MIDI file.
Does this all mean that VEL really only affects an initial consonant, and what you did was basically move the "c" in "cup" to overlap with the preceding "fuck" and thereby make the "ck" sound like it had come earlier?