Getting those pop singers to sing on your tracks these days can be a pain. You have to feed and pamper them, deliver their every whim, pay them their "talent" and royalty fees, and you have to subject them to Auto Tune (the frequency of which depends on the level of "talent" they have). Given these conditions plus the fact that you are still just a producer/songwriter on the rise (hopefully) who can't afford the fees of any pop sensation (yet), maybe it's for the best that you settle with virtual alternatives. Zero-G Vocaloid Sonika is now about to offer her services to you for a one-time payment only.

Despite the disdain of the majority for virtual vocalists, labeling them as a travesty of the human voice, Sonika can become your pop vocal workhorse. According to Zero-G, she is the new cyberspace starlet who will hit those notes perfectly every time, hence this fact is among your first pro. She never misses a note unless you want to and saves you from using Auto-Tune. She can sing leads, harmonies, and backgrounds in the English language. With a little work as wells the knowledge of her phonetics, you can make her sing in some other languages too. Her voice can easily be modified and shaped in various ways thus offering a lot of color to your songs. She can be as virtuosic as you like as she has the ability to spread any sustained vowel or voiced consonant across as many notes as you like with perfect legato. She can also make use of a selection of natural vibrato types, and you can drag and drop your chosen type to any note or notes, and control the time-position and amount of the vibrato.

You also have control over the following parameters

• Changing syllables/phonemes
• Timing of each note (precise position/length)
• Vibrato (you can change its type/position/amount/frequency)
• Volume
• Attack
• Crescendo or diminuendo
• Pitch bend (amount, and positionable in time)
• Glide (portamento)
• Resonance (Frequency/bandwidth/amplitude)
• Harmonics
• Noise
• Brightness
• Clearness
• Gender factor

KEY FEATURES:

• New GUI with improved user functionality
• A much more realistic and natural sounding vocal
• Realtime Keyboard Performance (VST Instrument): Written lyrics can be assigned a note by touch of a keyboard. Now you can "sing" using a keyboard.
• New functionalities and improvements
• Note Auditioning
• Transparent control track
• Toggling between Playback and Rendering
• Expression Control
• Four-note polyphony

People may say a virtual vocalist is creepy, but where will you ever get this kind of a vocalist that does not need to eat or sleep, does not have whimsical demands, and can sing every note spot on? Sonika won't make those unreasonable demands (except on your computer probably) nor will ask for session fees, so could you say that she's the total package? That's for you to decide. Zero-G Vocaloid Sonika will run on Windows XP or Vista and supports VST 2.0 and ReWire though she will not run on Cakewalk Sonar (Sorry Sonar users; you can't have her). Sonika will retail at about 200 USD. As of this time of writing, Zero-G is now shipping her worldwide, so now you've got a chance to have that (virtual) girl, er, singer you've always wanted.