The paper presents the entry in this year’s Blizzard Challenge of the Politehnica University of Bucharest. We present a parametric speech synthesis system based on HTS, which tried to achieve two important goals: gain better control over the vocal tract filter, and allow greater variability for the excitation source features by separating, as much as possible, the two processes. We proposed the spectral tilt as a feature of both voiced and unvoiced excitation that can be easily and reliably estimated and extracted from the smoothed spectrum, leaving more consistent data for the vocal tract model. We also engaged the problem of modelling the STRAIGHT aperiodicity coefficients in a new manner, which provides more details to synthetic speech. It was the first entry from the laboratory, and unfortunately both the limited experience and the scarce human resource deployed had decisively influenced the results.