Chart the vocals
for any song,
start to finish.

Load the audio

Start with the song. One file is fine. If you have the vocal and the backing as separate stems, use both and everything after this gets easier: you can hear the singer on their own while you work, and the game can lift the vocal out from under the person holding the microphone.

Drop two files in at once and it sorts them into the right slots on its own. If there is cover art, a backdrop or a timed .lrc lyric file sitting beside the track, those come in with it.

Song info

What the song is, who charted it, and how fast it runs. Title, artist, album, genre, year and the language, which is what decides how the words get split on the next step. Your charter name goes on it in whatever colors you fancy, the same rich text the game uses for player names.

The tempo is worked out from the audio. It shows you how confident it is, and when it is wrong you halve it, double it or tap it in yourself. Turn the clicks on and play the song: if they drift off the beat the number is wrong, and if they land on every other beat, press x2.

Lyrics

Paste the words in. They get split into the syllables that are actually sung rather than the ones a dictionary would print, using the rules of the language you picked, and anything it gets wrong you fix by hand. It remembers your corrections and stops getting that word wrong.

The panel underneath shows how the song will sing: one box per note, line by line, with a running count of lines, words, syllables and sections. Green means you taught it that one.

Pitch breaks

Some words get held while the pitch moves underneath them. Click a word once for every extra pitch it passes through and it picks up a +. A "so" held up and then back down again is so + +.

Each + is simply one more note on the same word: one more tap on the next step, and one more thing to drag on the step after that. Most songs need a handful, on the long held notes.

Tap the timing

Play the song and tap Enter as each syllable starts. One tap per note, and nothing to hold: a note simply runs until the next one is tapped.

Fast lines get slowed to 50, 65 or 80 per cent, and the song stays in its own key while they do, so you can still hear where you are instead of a record dragging to a halt. Backspace takes the last tap back. Click any syllable in the list to move the tap there and rewind to it, or nudge every tap in the song 20 milliseconds either way if your ears were running ahead all along.

Pitches

Everything is already in time, so all that is left is how high each note goes. It reads the sung line straight off the recording and lays the notes on it, a phrase at a time rather than a note at a time, so nothing lands an octave away from what it is sung next to.

Then you drag whatever it got wrong. A guide tone plays the note under the cursor so you can hear what you are setting, with its own volume against the song. Anything too quiet or too ragged to be sure of is listed for you to check by ear rather than quietly guessed at.

A strip above the roll is where overdrive is charted: mark the phrases that fill the singer's meter, then pick the moments in the rests where they are allowed to let it out. It sits above the roll rather than inside it because overdrive is charted at the scale of a song, and a mark made in a roll zoomed to a bar or two is blind to the run it belongs to.

Export

Everything above goes into one .fvchart: the stems, the cover, the backdrop and the notes as the game plays them. The last screen lays out what is going in and what the chart came to, line by line with the note count and the range on each.

Write it out, drop it in a folder the game is watching, and it is on the song list. Open the same file again later and the tool picks it apart and puts you back on whichever step you want.