Why this cover?: 大氿歌

In Summer 2019, DeepVocal was releasing as the successor of Sharpkey. Similar to UTAU, DeepVocal allowed users to create and release their own vocalists for the software. At this point, a couple of friends were working on giving their UTAUs a DeepVocal voicebank. This included Canary (a member of JAE VOCAL PROJECT), Pinku (an affiliate), and Seishi Starchaser (another affiliate). Out of curiosity, I decided to the software a try, and at the time, Pinku Chinese was still in development. After asking permission to use him early, I immediately thought of a song that I thought would match up with him: "Da Jiu Ge" (大氿歌) by ilem. To briefly summarize it, it's an appreciation for wine culture.

The song only released in March that year and it was already gaining a lot of attention at the time, mainly because it was part of ilem's "2:3" album. This album was a pretty big project at the time, with many people working to make covers very quickly. The song was fresh in my mind, so it didn't take me long to consider it for Pinku.

When I started to tune the song, I quickly realized how badly I needed to tune it. I was admittedly scared to. When I checked the parameters, I was at first confused, but after a couple of tweaks here and there, I realized that it really wasn't that hard at all! Perhaps I was concerned because at the time, I only knew how to use VOCALOID5, but even that was limited for me. I never really adjusted the parameters in V5 as I couldn't understand how to do so without it sounding terrible. Quickly, I began to enjoy and appreciate DeepVocal's parameters.

Before I knew it, I was pulling an all-nighter on this cover. I worked until 4 AM one summer night, then going over it the next day. Excitedly, I began to show it around to some close friends before finally becoming satisfied with the end result. After it was mixed, I attached the audio to the original video, then uploaded it after Pinku was officially released. Needless to say, I was rather proud of it.

Even as I look back on this cover now, I'm well aware that it's got some flaws here and there. However, I don't resent the cover. I'm still fond of it as I recall how excited I was to try something new and try to finish it as quickly as possible. I wish I still had this high-speed motivation as I did when I first began my attempts at tuning. Nowadays, I find it hard to find the time and desire to tune much at all anymore. Sometimes, it just feels like a chore, but I always hope the end result is something I could be proud of and be fond of far in the future.

In addition, I still have a hard time understanding how to use UTAU. Though OpenUTAU is an option now, I haven't tried it just yet. At the time of the Pinku "Da Jiu Ge" cover, I found a great appreciation for DeepVocal and realized that I would finally be able to use a small selection of JAE VOCAL  PROJECT characters, so long as they had a voicebank within DeepVocal. No longer would I restrict myself as an organizer; now I'd be able to tune them directly!