Why This Cover?: "灼之花"

"灼之花" was a song written by COP and originally featured Luo Tianyi and Yuezheng Ling. It's a song that's about a red spider lily spirit's (Ling) unrequited love as she watched a roseleaf bramble spirit (Yanhe) be with the human (Tianyi) she loved and witnessed as the roseleaf bramble turned into ashes. Flower spirits and humans could not physically touch or flower spirits risk disintegration, therefore, they are unable to be together. It is also a sequel to another song, but I'll leave that for another day. I do plan to cover it one day, though perhaps with different vocalists.

This series is obviously meant to be a sad one though sounds very beautiful. It's one of my favorites and I love the designs that appear in the video. While "灼之花" was not my first cover song, it is the first Chinese one. For anyone who knew me, they would know that I favor the Chinese VOCALOIDs. I've been a fan since 2012, so it was only a matter of time before I decided to take the first steps into creating covers and originals for them.

The first thing I thought about when deciding to cover this song (with the help of tora_ouji for the MIDI and MinaKi for the mixing) was who the vocalists would be. Since the series featured Tianyi, Ling, and Yanhe, I didn't want to use them. I wanted to choose a VOCALOID that wasn't featured in this song. Considering how there weren't many Chinese female commercial voicebanks at the time, my options were limited. While Xin Hua and Xingchen were great as an idea, I know that people liked to use these two, so it was not surprising that I noticed someone already covered the song with them.

That left me with Mo Qingxian and Hatsune Miku V4 Chinese.

I loved the idea of using Qingxian for a song cover. I had only gotten her the same year she released (I uploaded this cover in late 2018), so I was excited to try someone who was very new to everyone. However, I had concerns about Miku. Miku was trilingual in Japanese, English, and Mandarin Chinese, with Japanese being the native language. I knew she was going to have issues with pronunciation and something I noticed with some of the songs I was familiar with, people seemed to have an issue with mixing her. She either sounded too loud or the music drowned her voice, which we found out about when MinaKi was trying to mix the song himself.

At this point, I can only be thankful that the little update Crypton Future Media gave her later on made her easier to mix and improved her pronunciation, but I'm sure it's still a nightmare to think about nonetheless.

Admittedly, when I was first dabbling into this cover, I was also communicating with Parapa-kun on the side for an illustration. However, I did not understand the song at first. Qingxian was singing Tianyi's part and Miku was singing Ling's. Without any proper direction, Parapa-kun illustrated Qingxian in Ling's outfit and Miku in Tianyi's as, to be honest, they look very nice in these colors! But after I found out about the story, the illustration had to be redone into what it is today.

These two really did look wonderful and I honestly do love Parapa-kun's style. When I first came across her on DeviantART, she was taking requests to illustrate UTAUs for a challenge, and of course, I offered my own. The final result turned out beautifully and I couldn't help but commission her for this song cover! Needless to say, if I were to work on the first song, I think I'd want to commission her again to complete the set.

This was also one of the first times I commissioned Cluemily for video editing. Cluemily does amazing work and I've seen what she could do with originals and covers! This was also her first time working with Chinese, so it was a little challenge for the both of us. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to work with her time and time again! Also, I'd like to thank her and Parapa-kun for being patient after the mishap with the illustration. Both were very understanding and worked well to adapt to the new situation.

Because this was my second song cover ever, I don't think I should be too hard on myself for this to be a "plug and play" work. I have nothing against people who prefer to "plug and play" instead of tune because tuning does take a lot of time and work. Some people expressed that they just don't have the time to do that. Other times, I hear that they would much rather prefer to focus on mixing, illustrating, and video editing, and I find that to be interesting. For me, I'm not an artist and I don't think I have the patience to edit videos. I also don't have a very good ear for mixing, so I suppose tuning and planning is "my thing". That's better than nothing.

There is another thing I do regret about this and it's that I wasn't too careful when listening to the cover. Chinese is a tricky language and from what I understand, when people say it's a difficult language, most of the time it's referring to at least these two things: the tones and context.

Chinese is a tonal language and Mandarin specifically has four tones and a neutral. That's really not too bad in my opinion considering that other dialects, like Cantonese Chinese, has around nine if I recall correctly. However, tones are not really a worry for voice synthesizers unless it's a speech voicebank or if a singing voicebank was to be manipulated to sound like it's talking. The main problem for this particular cover was the context.

In terms of context, what I find people to be "afraid of" is the idea that Chinese characters don't always mean just one thing. When you combine characters, it can give it a whole other meaning and can change the pronunciation. Basically, one would have to rely on the context of the sentence to know what something is really about. In this case, there were probably one or a few instances in this song cover where I actually used the wrong pronunciation of specific characters. People found this to be a forgivable mistake and, again, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself because it is one of the first covers I did, but I still can't help but be bothered by it.

At the same time, this mistake helped me to try to be more careful in future covers. It's certainly never going to be my last mistake, but at least I could try to not repeat it.

Despite my little regrets, I don't think I'll re-cover this song. In fact, I view it as an example of my growth. Not only do I attempt to tune covers these days, I also try to pay close attention to detail in terms of context. In addition, knowing the story or meaning of the song can help with illustrations and create the tone of how the vocals should sound.

As mentioned before, I want to try to cover the "prequel" song because not doing so would feel weird. Although I thought of using Qingxian again, I decided against it. I want to try using someone else, but I won't say who it would be. This plan isn't going to happen very soon, but it's definitely on the list. I can only hope that people would be looking forward to it.