Part 2: Lyrics

TL;DR

Find the song lyrics. Common sources are YouTube video descriptions, comments, artist Bandcamp pages, and online lyric sites (e.g. Genius).
- If you're using Genius, make sure to account for the "things you may like" box and for non-traditional spaces, which may mess with UltraStar-Creator.
- You should listen to the song at least once to account for lyric repeats (which may not be in the lyrics) and for any mistakes (i.e. inconsistencies between the lyrics and what you hear).
Split the song lyrics into syllables. Song syllables usually follow the same rules as English syllables, but artists can be creative and disregard them.
- For this reason, I usually split syllables manually, even though dictionary-based tools exist to automatically split syllables.
Split the syllables into sung syllables, accounting for pitch changes.
- This is technically optional, as you can do this during the finetuning process. However, I recommend doing it now because it saves time later on.
- You can do this at the same time as you split syllables. See my video as an example.

Finding lyrics

The next step to creating a chart is to get the lyrics of the chart. Usually, lyrics are available on websites like Genius, or in the YouTube comments section of videos.

Wherever you get your lyrics, you should listen through the song once or twice and make sure they are correct. An issue I've seen with some UltraStar charts is people seemingly writing the lyrics on their own and subsequently getting them wrong -- avoid this. It is completely normal, even if you are very proficient in the language of the song you're trying to chart, to be unable to make out the lyrics. That's just how singing tends to be. If someone's already done the work of figuring out the lyrics for you, and those lyrics make sense to your ear, then just use those.

If your song of choice is CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

Most songs that we deal with are in English or will use Roman characters (i.e., the alphabet, sometimes with diacritics/accents). If the song you would like to chart is in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you can theoretically choose between romanizing the lyrics or using the native script.

While most programs can display non-Roman alphabet characters perfectily fine, the main problem with native script arises in Japanese, where one kanji -- for example, 男 (otoko) can have multiple syllables embedded (o+to+ko). Due to how the UltraStar format works, you cannot have a syllable display 男 and then have that single syllable drag on across multiple notes. You would have to use 男~~ to display this, or just use kana (お / と / こ).

This is less of a problem in Chinese, since the vast majority of characters are one syllable. Here is an example TXT, which uses this song. (You may have to repair the text encoding before saving this TXT.) Of course, if you want to chart one of these songs but your intended audience is an English (or any other Roman alphabet language) speaking audience, you should use romanization anyway. But I just wanted to flag this as useful information for anyone making a CJK song.

About lyrics from Genius

Genius is one of the most common websites for song lyrics these days, but it comes with some caveats that you should be aware of.

Genius puts a "things you may like" box in the middle of song lyrics which will basically be impossible to avoid copy pasting. Make sure to remove it before you start tapping the song.
For whatever reason, Genius doesn't always use normal spaces to separate words. I've sometimes seen Genius include other Unicode spaces that look identical to spaces, but might not be properly parsed by UltraStar-Creator -- for example, the four-per-em space. You may want to put your text into a Unicode inspector to ensure that all of the spaces in the lyrics are actually spaces.

For our example song, the artists actually put the lyrics on their Bandcamp page, so I'll be using that. There are some small changes -- for example, repetition of lyrics -- that I'll have to make in order to have the full lyrics. In my experience, this is common in artist-published lyrics, which is why you should always listen to the song at least once to correct any possible mistakes and account for any repetitions.

Another bonus: when you find lyrics yourself, you usually don't have to figure out where line breaks go. In this case, I might only barely touch line breaks for stylistic reasons. You will probably only have to touch line breaks (i.e. add them yourself) if you get a very long line of lyrics. Some editors, like Yass Reloaded, will warn you if a line is too long.

Songs with dialogue or rap

Some songs have spoken parts, dialogue, or rap within them. Sometimes, lyrics do not include these spoken parts. Ideally, you should include spoken parts in your song where possible (and then later mark it as rap or freestyle). You should also split the syllables of these spoken parts (but you likely will not need to concern yourself with pitch changes within said parts).

Whether you include dialogue is ultimately up to you -- there are charts out there without their dialogue charted, and adding it will likely add difficulty to the charting process -- but I would personally recommend it if you think you can do it, as it will result in a higher-quality chart.

About punctuation and paragraph breaks

Songs sometimes include punctuation in lyrics. The ones that I would like to highlight are question marks, exclamation points, and periods/full-stops.

Generally speaking, you should not include these punctuation in the song (commas are fine). This is mainly a stylistic choice, and there may be songs where punctuation is appropriate. I also generally keep punctuation in if there is a spoken dialogue part in the song.

Paragraph breaks are useful for your own readability. For example, when you copy paste lyrics from Google, paragraph breaks are lost, making the lyrics and individual sections harder to read or dinstinguish. However, they don't actually have any impact on the chart. Only line breaks do, since karaoke is shown two lines at a time (the current line being sung and the upcoming line).

Bandcamp lyrics, modified to include repeats and missing words

Thought I ran into you in Ponyville
Some other mare in black sat on our hill
I made a point to remember the way you laugh
Since you're not here it feels like I'm stuck in the past
Life's getting better but I can't seem to move on
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Seems like the princess took your words to heart
Wish it didn't cost me the mare I love
I made a point to remember the way you laugh
Since you're not here it feels like I'm stuck in the past
Life's getting better but I can't seem to move on
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Words we'd say, gone away
It feels like it was yesterday

Nostalgia
It circles in my mind
She's in my head
I'm not the same

Nostalgia
It circles in my mind
She's in my head
Like yesterday

And when the clock strikes twelve
I sit in darkness by myself
Wish I could turn back time
Relive the days when you were mine

On this page, I will work through first six lines to demonstrate how to split syllables. An audio excerpt of these six lines is embedded below:

Splitting lyrics: normal syllables

Automatic lyric splitting

UltraStar-Creator offers a feature to automatically split lyrics for you. While you may find this convenient, I personally don't use it. Here's why:

The songs I chart often contain words that won't be in the lyric-split dictionary -- for example, "everypony".
While words often have an objective answer as to how they should be split into syllables, this isn't always the case. Singers can and will be creative.
Any mistakes that automatic lyric splitting may create (e.g. a word that is split when it shouldn't be, or vice versa) will have to be rectified by you anyway, so it's kind of a net zero in time saved, in my opinion.

The next step is to split the lyrics into normal syllables. Singing is similar to talking, so usually the principles of spoken syllables also apply to sung words.

This concept may already be intuitive to you, but in case it isn't: A syllable is often described as a 'beat' in language, generally made up of a vowel and its surrounding consonants. Let's examine the first six lines:

Thought I ran into you in Ponyville
Some other mare in black sat on our hill
I made a point to remember the way you laugh
Since you're not here it feels like I'm stuck in the past
Life's getting better but I can't seem to move on
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

For our purposes, words are separated either by spaces or by the plus symbol (+). For example, the sentence "Hel+lo world" will be split into three syllables: Hel, lo, and world. In the first line, there are seven words, so that's at least seven syllables. The words "into" and "Ponyville" have more than one syllable (two and three, respectively).

When splitting lyrics, you might need to ask yourself: "if I were to say it out loud, what would it sound like?". This is doubly true for words you might not be familiar with, like, in this case, "Ponyville". I would recommend listening to the song as you split syllables, just in case the artist decided to be a little creative with how they sang their syllables.

Numbers in lyrics

Some songs have numbers in them -- for example, Bowling for Soup's 1985. In most cases, any numbers will need to be written out in their spoken form. There are two main reasons for this:

Numbers can be spoken differently. In the case of 1985, you could read it as one-thousand nine-hundred and eighty-five or nineteen eighty-five or probably other ways too. A singer will have no way of knowing how the number should be read unless it is spelled out in full.
Numbers can span for more syllables than there are characters. "1985" is read as five syllables (nine+teen eigh+ty five), which is more than can be displayed in four characters without adding something like a tilde.

If you want to practice splitting lyrics with this song, then try it and then compare it with the lyrics below once you're finished:

First six lines split by syllable

Thought I ran in+to you in Po+ny+ville
Some o+ther mare in black sat on our hill
I made a point to re+mem+ber the way you laugh
Since you're not here it feels like I'm stuck in the past
Life's get+ting bet+ter but I can't seem to move on
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Why didn't I get the same answer?

Syllables can be inherently ambiguous. In this example, "our" could be interpreted as two syllables (the "ow" sound and the "er") sound, but I chose not to indicate that because:

It sounded more to me like the singer was shortening the "our" sound to "are", which is common in English
The second half of "our" would be covered by a pitch change anyway, which will be covered in the next section

The point of syllable splitting is mainly to save time later on, and to make tapping more intuitive. It does not need to be perfect. If splitting "our" into two syllables is more intuitive to you, then that is not necessarily a mistake. It is perfectly fine.

If you want, you can stop here (and continue to the next part), but I would recommend later splitting this into sung syllables / pitch changes. This will save time later on!

Splitting lyrics: sung syllables and pitch changes

Let's examine this section by section.

Thought I ran into you in Ponyville

Line 1

Most of this line is pretty self-explanatory. Thought, I, ran, you, and in are all one syllable. into is two syllables, but that is the same as it would be if you spoke it.

Most of the 'flair' in this line comes from the word Ponyville. Intuitively, it would be three syllables (Po+ny+ville), but if you listen to the excerpt:

Ponyville

Both Po and ny seem to have a pitch change! The Po goes down from C# to B, while ny goes down from B to F#. Players will have to sing this -- they can't just stay on the C# or the B (well, they could, but it wouldn't be accurate), so it should be notated in the chart. Usually, people use tildes to drag out syllables that have their pitch change midway. So, this word would look like this:

Po+~+ny+~+ville

And the full line would look like this:

Thought I ran in+to you in Po+~+ny+~+ville

Some other mare in black sat on our hill

Line 2

While the words are different, this line is actually pretty similar to the first line! Some other mare in black sat is the same as it would be spoken (that is, every word is one syllable except for o+ther, which is two), but the words "on" and "our" have one pitch change each. Incidentally, it's the exact same pitch change as the last line, since this line is melodically a clone of the last line. Compare them side by side:

On our hill

Ponyville

So, just like the last line, we can use tildes to notate that we're staying on the syllable, but moving to a different pitch.

on+~ our+~ hill

And, in full:

Some o+ther mare in black sat on+~ our+~ hill

Alternate lyric styles

Some people choose to instead use hyphens and/or duplicate letters to separate dragged out words. So, instead of on+~ our+~, it would be o-on o-our, or alternatively o+~n o+~ur (displayed in-game as o~n o~ur). This choice is purely stylistic and has no bearing on the gameplay quality of the chart.

On older versions of UltraStar-Creator, you may have to use +- instead of -, as - by itself is not recognised as a syllable separator. In that case, you would write o+-on o+-our.

I made a point to remember the way you laugh

Line 3

I hope the idea of sung syllables is becoming a bit clearer by now. If not, don't worry -- it's something that takes practice, and you don't necessarily have to do this at the lyric splitting stage. If you miss a more subtle syllable change, you can always add it later on after you've tapped the song. The main point of doing it now is that you save time because you don't have to split the note and then shorten both notes and move the new note to a new position if you have already tapped it out in advance.

On this line, the ber in re+mem+ber has a pitch change (E -> F#), as does the word laugh, which goes down a tone at the end (E -> D).

I made a point to re+mem+ber+~ the way you laugh+~

You could also notate the laugh+~ as la-augh, if you want.

Since you're not here it feels like I'm stuck in the past

Line 4

This line is melodically a clone of the previous line.

Since you're not here it feels like I'm+~ stuck in the past+~

It might help to play the audio and then mentally 'tap' out a syllable every time there's a new word or you see the + symbol.

Alternatives: I-I'm, pa-ast

Life's getting better but I can't seem to move on

Line 5

This line is melodically a clone of the previous two lines.

Life's get+ting bet+ter but I can't+~ seem to move on+~

Alternatives: ca-an't, o-on

Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Line 6

There are actually no changes on this line! No mid-syllable pitch changes, and every word is one syllable. So you can actually just use this line verbatim.

Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Result

Let's combine everything we did here and see what we get:

Thought I ran in+to you in Po+~+ny+~+ville
Some o+ther mare in black sat on+~ our+~ hill
I made a point to re+mem+ber+~ the way you laugh+~
Since you're not here, it feels like I'm+~ stuck in the past+~
Life's get+ting bet+ter but I can't+~ seem to move on+~
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

And now, let's extend that out to the whole song:

Lyrics split for syllables and pitch changes

Thought I ran in+to you in Po+~+ny+~+ville
Some o+ther mare in black sat on+~ our+~ hill
I made a point to re+mem+ber+~ the way you laugh+~
Since you're not here, it feels like I'm+~ stuck in the past+~
Life's get+ting bet+ter but I can't+~ seem to move on+~
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Seems like the prin+cess took your words to+~ heart
Wish it di+dn't cost me the mare+~ I+~ love
I made a point to re+mem+ber+~ the way you laugh+~
Since you're not here, it feels like I'm+~ stuck in the past+~
Life's get+ting bet+ter but I can't seem+~ to move on+~
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Words we'd say
Gone a+way
It feels like it was yes+ter+day+~

Nos+tal+gia
It cir+cles in my mind
She's in my head
I'm not the same+~

Nos+tal+gia
It cir+cles in my mind
She's in my head
Like yes+ter+day+~

And when the clock strikes twelve+~
I sit in dark+ness by my+self+~
Wish I could turn back time
Re+live the days when you were mine+~

How those lyrics would look in-game

Thought I ran into you in Po~ny~ville
Some other mare in black sat on~ our~ hill
I made a point to remember~ the way you laugh~
Since you're not here, it feels like I'm~ stuck in the past~
Life's getting better but I can't seem+~ to move on~
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Seems like the princess took your words to~ heart
Wish it didn't cost me the mare~ I~ love
I made a point to remember~ the way you laugh~
Since you're not here, it feels like I'm~ stuck in the past~
Life's getting better but I can't~ seem to move on~
Things aren't the same since you've been gone

Words we'd say
Gone away
It feels like it was yesterday~

Nostalgia
It circles in my mind
She's in my head
I'm not the same~

Nostalgia
It circles in my mind
She's in my head
Like yesterday~

And when the clock strikes twelve~
I sit in darkness by myself~
Wish I could turn back time
Relive the days when you were mine~

Why is there an extra line break?

If you were reading every lyric carefully, you may have noticed a new line break was added between Words we'd say and Gone away. This was a stylistic choice that I personally felt aligned better with the song, since there is an audible gap between "Words we'd say" and "Gone away". Line breaks are entirely subjective, and as long as you're giving singers time to catch up to the lyrics, they're entirely up to you!

For reference, I have recorded a video of me splitting the lyrics in real time, which you can see below. I hope it helps illustrate how I do this part.

UltraStar Song Creation Tutorial: Lyric Splitting example

Next steps

Once your lyrics are split, you're ready to figure out the BPM of the song!

<< Back to Part 1: Lyrics >> Continue to Part 3: BPM

Quick navigation: Index / Preface A / Preface B / Part 1: Audio / Part 2: Lyrics / Part 3: BPM / Part 4: Tapping / Part 5: Finetuning / Part 6: Pitching / Part 7: Golden Notes / Part 8: Testing / Part 9: Submission