making of tomoe

I wanted to just once be one of those people who were like "ya i made an utau once. they're kinda bad". I thought it'd be fun to have one, so I just made one. Along with some random links, I mainly followed MioDioDaVinci's UTAU guide, which was really helpful I would say.

I'm a big VOCALOID fan, but I'm not really in any of the circles, especially not in the tuning or UTAU circle so I was pretty much clueless about most things. I did not even know the difference between CV and VCV before all of this.

I based my UTAU off of a preexisting character I already had, Tomoe, my Project Sekai OC. I don't really play PRSK anymore so I decided why not.

I picked Tomoe because I felt like they had the most achievable voice for me. Out of all my PRSK OCs. The voice I did for Tomoe is kind of like when you're like 14 and doing voice acting for a project but you're embarrassed and also the walls are thin so you kind of do this like fake yelling thing. That's basically what I did to record Tomoe. I don't think Tomoe would actually sound like that, but I also don't spend a lot of time talking myself, so I'm not exactly good at doing voices.
I recorded Tomoe's CV voicebank first, which is actually pretty different from his VCV voicebank because it was my first time recording, so sometimes I would start recording with my normal voice and other things. I would say Tomoe CV's samples are closer to my actual voice, but due to the nature of CV, they actually sound pretty different from me. I recorded her voice samples on my iPhone in the closet with an embroidery hoop as a pop filter. Don't underestimate the iPhone microphone.

Immediately after making Tomoe CV I decided I wanted to make a VCV voicebank because. I don't know. I thought it'd be fun.
I recorded Tomoe VCV twice actually, I'm not really sure why I did that, I think it was because I was noticing how I was just speaking in my normal voice in a lot of the voice samples. But I used oremo! Which really does speed up the process so much. I really would recommend using it if you're going to record a VCV voicebank.
This time I was actually able to not break character, so Tomoe VCV is pretty breathy, but that's kind of what I was aiming for.

My voice is naturally on the deeper end so while I was listening to the samples, I wondered if it would sound good if I pitched up all of the samples. I did that, and that's what the current Tomoe is right now. It's just me doing a weird voice and then pitching that voice up. I kind of wanted Tomoe's voice to be like it would be kind of hard to tell what gender they were, but I would say Tomoe VCV sounds a bit boy-ish? Like, little boy type. I'm not too sure though. I might mess around and see how she'd sound like without the pitchup though. Or I might pitch them up even higher, but you get these weird audio distortions if you go too far.

The demo I have on this page actually doesn't really do a good job at showing how Tomoe sounds normally because for most of the song they are singing in a higher pitch haha. I'll try to make a second demo in Tomoe's normal range soon.

As of now, Tomoe's oto is actually a wee bit messed up, so I need to adjust it soon, I think for some songs Tomoe speaks a bit too slowly, so they are not ready yet haha.
I used setparam to oto btw! Pretty standard stuff.

Misc. Personal Writing

I had a lot of thoughts to write here, but ultimately decided most of it was emotional filler to get to my main point. Erasing is counterintuitive to all of what I had just written, but it's okay.
Maybe one day I'll feel like sharing my complete thoughts while making them, but for now this is all you get.

I like Tomoe. So despite how I feel about myself, I'm glad Tomoe can exist.