From Japanese to English

Making the “Tales of the Abyss opening w/ English vocals” video was actually very hard. Not so much the video aspect, but doing the song was really difficult. Why? Because the song is originally in Japanese (hence the title of this post).

I got the idea to do this simply because I LOVE Tales of the Abyss. :D It is by far my favorite RPG! Anyhow, I was watching the show online and replaying the video game one day when I thought it would be pretty cool if somebody dubbed over the theme song with English vocals. The opening theme to the show is pretty awesome, and the lyrics are rather good, but unless you feel like going through the trouble of reading the on-screen translation of the lyrics you have no idea what they’re singing. Even if you do, though, I just feel that you can’t totally appreciate it unless it’s in a language you understand. So, I decided I was going to be that someone to dub over it. I didn’t realize at that time, however, that there were others out there who had sung the song in English already and put it on YouTube. But, I have yet to see someone (other than myself) use the opening video from Tales of the Abyss for the video, and not just a video of them singing. Anyways, I went through a painful process of trying to read the grainy subtitles for the song (the video quality I was watching the show in wasn’t too stellar) and typing them into MS Word. After that I jacked in my headphones, brought up Audacity, and plugged in my microphone. I played the song dozens of times and tried singing along in English before I ever recorded. The big problem I kept having was scrolling down in MS Word so I could keep up with the lyrics. But, I eventually managed to memorize them, and kinda got the notes down to where I felt like I could make an attempt at recording. My first several attempts were awful, and I don’t think I even got beyond the first verse. But, after several more tries, some editing of the lyrics to fit the amount of notes a little better, and resting my voice for a few moments, I made a few more attempts and finally realized I had no way of editing out the voice on the original Japanese track. I could have screamed if I wasn’t already going horse.

I brainstormed on ways to get rid of the voice, but came up short. Then I looked to see if somebody had already done the work for me… Nothing. But then I looked at the opening video in the video game. They were the same song! There were some slight differences in the instruments, and no one was singing, but essentially they were the same song, and what’s better is that the guitar was providing me with all of my notes! I was so freaking happy! So, I went through it one more time with the “instrumental track” and then simply put the voice recording into Windows Live Movie Maker along with the opening video to TotA and adjusted the balance a little between the video’s volume and the voice recording’s volume to get an okay blend. Once that was done I saved it as a “wmv”, watched it a few times to check for errors, and then uploaded it to YouTube.

The video was originally uploaded to my “Theatrical Ninja Let’s Plays” channel before it was only LPs, but it is now on my “Theatrical Ninja Videos” channel, and has 30+ views. It had somewhere over 100 when it was first uploaded, but no longer. Oh well! It’s still a nice video, and TotA fans seem to appreciate it.