Off-key?

I just finished a song with Sakiko that was originally by Miku. Of course, since Miku's voice is much higher than mine, Sakiko sounded strained on the higher notes. I lowered the pitch of the vocals in UTAU exactly one octave, and figured that was fine as long as it was one full octave and not in-between.

It sounded alright to me, but now a friend (who has more experience with this than me) is telling me it's a bit off-key. Not sure what I should do about it. Am I just tonedeaf?

(if you're curious, it's this. I left the octave changed for Pumpking as well, and added a t99 flag to both of them.)

It does sound a bit off-key... ;; I'd suggest re-doing it with it in the normal key but putting a g- flag on both of them so they sound better on the high notes. :3

Well, an octave is 12 notes (semitones too) so if you changed just 8 notes instead of 12, that's the problem.
But I doubt you did that.

Aside of that, there are two kind of listening the pitch: relative and absolute.
If you look for doing a change of octaves, only people with relative ear will see it fine. Musicians with absolute pitch ear will see the change and say it's off-tune.

Maybe you want to check the two wikipedia articles about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_pitch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch

irei1as wrote:If you look for doing a change of octaves, only people with relative ear will see it fine. Musicians with absolute pitch ear will see the change and say it's off-tune.

Hmm, well, that's probably my problem. I haven't had any musical training to speak of; I'm just kind of going by ear with UTAU.

I would re-do it, but I stupidly forgot to save the UST and I really don't want to do everything over again. OTL But I'll keep that in mind for next time.

Thanks again for your help.