Exciting news!

My dearest friend, Luna, was kind enough to alias Yasune's voicebank for me!  So, she can now officially be used in both romaji and hiragana!  Her new voicebank with the updates as well as her icon and info update can be downloaded here.

In other news, I also have been working on several songs for her, and a few of them have been finished and uploaded.  I'll post them at the bottom of the post, along with each video's artwork.  Incidentally, the songs I've fully finished (as you'll see) are Dark Woods Circus and -ERROR; I've finished STROBO NIGHTS but haven't done the artwork yet, and CANDY CANDY and iNSaNiTY are both still in the process of being mixed.

Also, small tweak to her design - her mouthpiece has been removed from her headset.  Why?  Because I always forget to draw it in, that's why.  I don't see why she needs it, anyway, if she's an UTAUloid, she might as well just be able to amplify her own voice without the aid of a mic.  So, no mouthpiece for Yasune.

(she's not wearing gloves because I forgot to draw them felt it made her look more vulnerable)

Back, possibly.

So. I disappeared for a while again. Although in all fairness it wasn't for nearly as long as usual.

So here's the dealio. Basically that guy who was going to help me alias Yasune's voicebank contacted me again (way a long time ago, this was not by any means recent) and said that before he did anything I would need to rerecord her entirely first. I don't remember the reason why. And unfortunately, due to my mic being broken, that wasn't a possibility so I basically told him thank you but never mind. So, from the looks of it, she's just not going to be aliased. I actually might try again myself on different computers if I can get my hands on them and see if the outcome is any different, but that's not going to be happening just now.

Anyway so that happened and while I'm sure he meant nothing necessarily bad by it, I really love Yasune, she's my baby, so I kind of took it a little hard. I know, I know. I need to grow a thicker skin. But, I'm bad with any kind of negative feedback/criticism so I got kind of discouraged and abandoned Yasune for a little while, the awful mother that I am.

I've recently started having her sing a new song though! It's truly not really suited to her voice but I wanted to do it just for fun. And doing so made me remember how much I love her and how happy having her sing makes me. She's not perfect, not by far, but I made her and I love her. So I'm going to try to not disappear for such long periods of time from now on. I want to try to make using her a routine thing that I do frequently.

Oh and also my mic is -possibly- working again so I can -maybe- rerecord her now. It's a little iffy. But the thing is... While I know I really need to rerecord her, I recorded her so long ago when my voice was a bit higher that I'm scared she'll sound different now and I don't want that because I love her the way she is. So I'm just gonna have to play it by ear I suppose.

Actual real progress! Holy smokes!

Guess who finished Yasune's costume design! Yup! Me!

Front and side view:

With, as stated in a previous post, these headphones:

Another progress update

So I got the preliminary-but-on-proper-paper-instead-of-a-napkin drawings of her costume done. I'm not gonna upload them right now though because I'd need to go all the way upstairs to get to the scanner and it's 3 in the morning and I'm in bed. So I'll probably do that tomorrow.

Plus I have Neopets to attend to.

Have a great night, everyone!

Te

I just have to say this though, the little microphone burp (I have no idea what the technical term is for that popping sound you get with t's and p's on mics sometimes so I just call it that) at the beginning of her "te" sound (she has a lot of mic burps but that one is the most noticeable by far) is starting to really drive me batty. I'd rerecord it but I've come to realize that my mic no longer works properly and I can't afford a new one. SO YEAH. IT MAKES ME MAD.

Strobo Nights

So I am a bundle of happy right now. You wanna know why? New beginnings and godly USTs, that's why.

Lemme explain a bit.

I found one of those self-esteem Tumblrs and it did freakin' wonders for me. I have the courage to draw her now. Well not now now, it's 3 in the morning and really dark in here. But I'm going to start tomorrow. I'm gonna do this!
/start Homestuck reference

where doing it man

where making this happen

/end Homestuck reference

As well, this great guy here who I don't actually know but he is great because he volunteered to alias Yasune's voicebank for me. So I sent him her download and hopefully that'll get rolling sometime soonish (although honestly he can take as long as he flipping wants, I am just so ridiculously grateful).

And last but certainly not least, Strobo Nights. I decided I wanted to do a cool, special song for the reveal of her OFFICIAL character design, as well as hopefully the release of her aliased voicebank. Her ACT 2, even, you could call it. Could you call it that? Darned if I know!
But I digress.
So I found this UST for Strobo Nights by Nukude. And this is my favorite UST I have ever found. Wanna know why? I didn't have to touch it. Loaded it into UTAU, exported WAV, popped into Audacity with the off vocal (which they also kindly included), save, done. I have gotten so used to fiddling with timing issues in USTs and/or having to enter all the lyrics manually because the UST IS IN HIRAGANA AND SO I CAN'T USE IT YET, it was SO SO SO nice to find a UST that had NOTHING WRONG WITH IT. And they were even kind enough to include romaji, hiragana, and VCV versions. What a great UST pack, man! So nice! Dude, I would give you a hug and a cookie for your hard work if I was able to, because you deserve it.

Anyways, y'all (who am I even talking to, no one reads this xD) don't get to hear it quite yet because I want it to be her ACT 2 (I'm just gonna call it that for now even though I doubt this qualifies for being called that) debut song. But it's really great! I think so, anyway. But she's my baby and I'm biased. xD


EDIT: I just realized I've now officially posted more blog posts in this month alone than I did in any other YEAR I've been doing this. Hopefully that means I'm finally gonna stick to it? Maybe?! Or maybe I just talk more now, haha.

PONPONPON finished!

So I cracked down on myself and finished PONPONPON today. Why? Because my lovely moirail Senna hates that song and the prospect of creating something that forces her to listen to it fills me with unadulterated glee. It's kind of like poking someone repeatedly with a stick, but that stick is made of repetitive, sparkly, bubblegummy music. But you know I love you, Senna-chan. ♥ All in good fun, dear!

I'm actually super super happy at how it turned out! I'm sure most of that credit is due to TheBonnieTung, who made the UST! Thank you very much, TheBonnieTung!

So here ya go:

The art is...really, really poor. But. I was having a hard time with it so eventually I was just like, whatever, screw it, it'll be a sketch and everyone will just have to deal.

But anyways, yeah!

Progress update: no progress!

So I haven't touched her outfit design yet, because, to be perfectly honest, even though I know what I want to draw... I'm afraid to draw it. Maybe that sounds silly. But I've noticed, somehow, that while my traditional drawing skills have gotten better, my digital drawing skills have gone straight down the toilet. It's such a hit to my confidence every time I open GIMP or Corel now that I can't bring myself to do it just yet. I'll get to it though, I promise.

In the meantime, I've posted over on the VocaloidOtaku forums about my aliasing troubles and some lovely people are trying to help me, so I'm hopefully going to be able to get that sorted out. I know I said I'd given up, but, I feel like she's never going to be a complete, proper UTAU without an aliased voicebank. I know people will think she's inferior for it and maybe even assume I'm just too lazy or stupid to do it. And I don't want that. So I hope someone will be able to help me get that problem fixed.

So, instead, I leave you guys with this. I found this kind of scary edit I did a long time ago of a photo of me; I'd gotten bored and decided to try to turn myself into Yasune. I had...mixed results. Anyways, I thought it was kinda funny/interesting/stupid, so here ya go.

Yeah, fourth post of the day. So sue me.

I'm redesigning Yasune! Yeah, you heard me. Not her physical features, but her outfit and possibly her hairstyle (not color, STYLE). Her original outfit and style will remain as a sort of costume that can be used if someone wants to, but her canon UTAU costume is going to be a little more recognizable.

Updates to come later!

Progress Edit 1:

So I've finished designing her headphones! Possibly the most important part of her design, since it will be showing on her icon in the UTAU program itself. Here's my design of it - I'm pretty happy with it, so I don't think I'll end up tweaking it any:

As you can probably tell, I'm going to be moving away from her current violet and white color palette and moving into pinker territory. I feel like it would go nicer with her green hair (I don't know, I like pink and light green together, it looks nice, imo). I feel like I wanna throw at least one other color in there as well besides the white, when I get to her outfit. Not sure what though, yet. Maybe either a gold-yellow or something like aqua or teal?

Sorta-Kinda Progress Edit so like 1.5:

Well I got tired of drawing so I had her sing Dear You instead. I'm not gonna upload it because a lot of the timing is really wonky and tbh I'm too lazy to fiddle with it, but I'll keep it to listen to because why not.

Progress Edit 2:

So I've finally decided on a costume design! And oh my gosh I'm so happy with it. I haven't drawn it up properly yet though, it's...at the moment, it's just a rough sketch on a napkin. Heheh. I'll get on drawing it up properly soon!

About to punch someone in the face, seriously

So I started trying to alias Yasune's voicebank because her voicebank currently is only in romaji. Didn't work. Like at all. The characters kept coming up as ?'s. So I looked it up and apparently you have to install the Japanese keyboard and set your computer locale to Japan, also. So, done and done. And after following every single instruction, uninstalling and reinstalling UTAU SIX TIMES, and multiple restarts, it STILL won't work. Even with my locale set to Japan and everything, UTAU without the English patch is just those weird symbols, definitely not Japanese. And whenever I try to type hiragana into the alias box, it'll show up, and then immediately disappear, and then I can't type anything in the box again without x'ing out and trying again. And if I paste them in, ?'s again. THIS IS A BUNCHA BULL. I swear I followed everyone's instructions to the letter, and I'm just having no luck at all with it.

So, instead, I am now renaming all of her files to hiragana and am going to attempt to alias them in romaji. UGH.

EDIT:
So I just finished doing that and it doesn't work. At all. None of them will play. So, sorry guys, she's not going to have an aliased voice bank. It's just not going to happen. I did everything I possibly could.

Goodnight

So I finished "Last Night, Good Night" and boy am I happy with it! This is, in my opinion, the best song she's sung so far. Probably has something to do with the absolutely amazing UST by Sango312. It has to be the best UST I've come across so far.

So here's the completed song!

And also, the video's art:

It's quite simple but I thought it matched the feel of the song...plus it was done at 5 in the morning in a little under 10 minutes, so, do not judge me! XD

Forward motion!

So I'm back! It seems like every time I get the motivation to do something with Yasune, I lose it almost as soon as I've begun... But anyway.

I actually haven't gotten any of my planned stuff done..heheh... But, I do have a few things to report!

First of all, I'm working on 2 songs with Yasune simultaneously at the moment, "Last Night, Good Night" which is almost done - I may have it done tonight, as a matter of fact - and "PONPONPON" which I'm doing for the heck of it because it's one of those songs just just drives me a little bit nuts but in a good way. That one's gonna take a little longer because I'm having a small timing issue with the UST and I'm lazy. So y'know.

Secondly, and even more exciting! Yasune's been used by someone other than me for the very first time as a whole song! And they even drew her! Man! When I found the video I was SO happy and thrilled that they liked Yasune-chan enough to use her. Again, it's AMBIENTloids... I'm really getting to like them, haha! And they're so talented! Here's the video, and seriously, check them out, because they are way better with UTAUs than I am. Bahaha. And I'm a little ashamed to say that the best art so far of Yasune is by them, wah, I need to work on that...