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Part 8: Testing

TL;DR

  • Please, please, please test your song before you publish it.
  • Testing is the easiest way to catch silly mistakes that you did not catch earlier, such as an obviously incorrect pitch or a lyric that looks wrong.
  • You should test on Medium difficulty, because Easy's pitch recognition is too lenient and can mislead you on whether your pitches are correct.
  • You should get a score that is about as good as you would on a well-made chart. For example, I regularly get 9500+ when playing on Medium, so that is my target on my own songs.
  • If testing is unsuccessful (you don't get a good enough score), there are a variety of reasons why that could be. It does not necessarily mean that your song is unplayable or even necessarily 'low-quality'.
    • If in doubt, ask for help (e.g. on the UltraStar Vocaluxe & Performus Community (Discord)). Someone can help test your chart for you, or help finetune it further if they think there are possible improvements.

Overview

Congratulations! You've finally finished charting a song. Seriously, that's a big accomplishment and I hope that it is only the start of more songs to come. More people making karaoke is always a good thing.

All that remains is to test the song. You may wonder why this is necessary, considering how many assurance measures have been done in the previous steps. Here are the main reasons why:

  • People can make silly mistakes, especially if they chart something quickly. A pitch can be obviously incorrect, or a lyric can display in an unintended way. It happens.
  • It helps you verify that your song works in the real world. Up until now, we've been doing all of our work in editors, and while we may theoretically end up with a good chart, we won't know for sure until we test it.

Testing difficulty and goal

The difficulty and goal largely depends on your personal skill in comepttiive karaoke games. I generally recommend that people test on Medium. This is because:

  • Easy is generally too lenient with pitch recognition. If you have incorrect pitches and you test on Easy, then you might not even know it because the game will just mark your singing as correct.
  • Hard, by contrast, is a bit too strict (at least for most people). Personally, my scores on Hard tend to fluctuate between 7000 and 9000 on a really good chart, so it's hard to tell if a low score is because of a currently present skill issue or because the song is mechanically difficult.

Your target score should be whatever score you can normally get on Medium. This might not mean much until around the 7500+ mark, but the idea is: if you're getting similar scores on your chart to the ones that you get on known well-made charts, then your chart is probably pretty good. (Of course, if you're unable to get decent scores on well-made charts and on your own chart, that would suggest a skill ceiling that you have yet to break, or a calibration issue on your end. Regardless, you can always ask someone to test the song for you before you release it more widely.)

So, without further ado, let's test!

...

Oh, uh, you'll need your microphone for this.

Gameplay testing

I think the result is pretty clear:

Success

When testing is unsuccessful

But what if your testing is unsuccessful? Or, put another way, what if you're unable to get a good of a score as you would on any other song?

First: You can always try again. You could've just had a bad attempt, or needed to (re)familiarize yourself with the song in its full context after you spent at least a couple hours playing tiny parts of the song to finetune it.

Second: It could just be a hard chart. Some songs are just mechanically going to be difficult -- particularly songs where you have to sing very quickly, or songs where the pitch changes very rapidly or jumps very high.

Third: It could be a skill issue. Just like you can ask someone to help finetune, you can also ask someone to help test a song for you, especially if they're generally pretty good at sight reading karaoke.

Failing all of those, it's possible that the chart isn't all that great -- and that's okay, especially if it's your first one! Most charts can be salvaged and further finetuned. This would, again, be a point where you can ask for help. Again, I recommend the UltraStar Vocaluxe & Performus Community (Discord). The folks there are generally pretty open to helping clarify things, test things, pitch things, everything. Just ask politely and try not to ask too much of people (i.e., don't ask people to finetune 3 billion songs at once). The point is to build your skills so that you can create better-quality charts on your own, and then eventually help contribute back to the karaoke ecosystem that we all enjoy.

By making a song, you are already contributing a lot more than one who just downloads things and calls it a day. That's a pretty big step! And even if your first charts aren't that great -- mine certainly weren't either -- they're only the first step in what can eventually become great charting.

Next steps

Now that you're done testing your song, you're ready to upload it somewhere! But where?

<< Back to Part 7: Golden Notes >> Continue to Part 9: Submission

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