Ninezero's overdrive vocal mode has lost its grit

Synthesizer V Studio
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Here’s a comparison of Ninezero’s overdrive vocal mode between his original voicebank in Synth V 1, his original voicebank in Synth V 2, and his new Synth V 2 voicebank. With each new iteration, his overdrive has gotten weaker and had less impact on the timbre of his voice. In Synth V 1, using it on a high note results in a sound that gradually transitions from sung to screamed, with no further edits needed sometimes. The same voicebank has similar behavior on high notes in Synth V 2, but has slightly less grid on average notes compared to Synth V 1.

The Synth V 2 voicebank can get a little more grit by increasing tension and breathiness, but the sound is much less natural and dynamic. Even using the mouth opening parameter, neither increasing nor decreasing it gets closer to how Synth V 1 sounded. Retakes got a little closer, but the expression panel helped very little here. No manual edits I made in Synth V 2 could do better than what Synth V 1 did by default.

On a positive note, I do like how his Synth V 2 voice has improved the muted vocal mode. I was able to get a good dynamic crescendo by changing vocal modes and using the mouth opening parameter. But I think that’s not what most people use Ninezero for. They use him for his overdrive mode, and that seems to be disappointing currently. I hope that with some updates, he will sound closer to his Synth V 1 version.

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Same here. All my old projects with Ninezero lost punch and overdrive. Tried to craft my melodies exactly to use this characteristic of this voice bank and now all the work is lost. Overdrive was the main reason I picked Ninezero. I also noticed that his Australian accent is way more pronounced in this new V2 version than in V1. I hope Dreamtonics work all this around and deliver us a better experience, not a “downgrade”.

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True, he lost a part of his grit.

But on the other hand, he can be much more expressive, and somewhat agressive in his intonation. Not a real replacement of V1, but not that bad either.

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Arthelion, can you, please share some tips on how to make him sound “aggressive”?! I’m struggling to find that out.

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I noticed that Breathiness adds some grit (much more than Overdrive actually) and makes the pronunciation more harsh, in particular on some syllabs in “ack” like “attack” or so.
I push it to 0.8
Then overdrive Timbre & Pronun to the max, Solid pitch half way, and tension around 0.3, plus some Gender to 0.25 to have more body.
With a little reverb & delay, it sits well in the mix. At least on the track i’m working on for the moment.

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