沖編歌エビ / Okiamiuta Ebi -MAFIGGY- - Recovered!
If you were an UTAU user in the early days, you probably got at least one person who had never heard of UTAU to record a CV bank for you. It was pretty easy and resulted in some varying degrees of success. (When I did it, one bank was pretty usable and the other was barely usable.) With the advent of CVVC and VCV, recording an UTAU became less of a "hide in the computer lab and do it before class starts" kind of thing.
That's how Okiamiuta Ebi was created. Ebi's voice provider, Prill, had no interest in UTAU. As far as I know, Prill has never actually touched UTAU.
As a note, this was an UTAU made by the Mae-Chii-Kim triad. Whenever something is weird, it's because we were really weird kids. The name? I typed in random words into Jisho and made a name with like five kanji. Chii cleaned it up into Okiamiuta. (And then we added Mafiggy because that was a thing we said back then.) The name Ebi? Well, Prill sounds like Krill (which I assumed were shrimp). Ebi is shrimp! The design? I did it. I make weird designs. I wanted to find the original design, but I can't. But believe me, it did not look good.
That's how Okiamiuta Ebi was created. Ebi's voice provider, Prill, had no interest in UTAU. As far as I know, Prill has never actually touched UTAU.
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| Art from UTAU Wikia |
The Story of Ebi
Ebi actually was quite liked. She had quite a bit of fan art made throughout the years and a few covers created for her.
The thing that got her "famous" is a silly story. I was close with Yoko Itone's voice provider, and I wanted to use Yoko Itone in a way that would get her more recognition. To accomplish that, I made a Magnet cover with Yoko and Ebi.
To put it lightly, literally the opposite thing happened.
After posting that video, a Japanese producer found Ebi and made an English cover that blew the minds of everyone.
We were really lax on what counted as understandable English back in those days, so we were flipping out. We were of the mind that we could actually understand Ebi!
To push the point that literally the opposite thing happened from what I was expecting, the person who made that cover used the traced art from my Magnet video!
From that, Ebi got a reputation as an UTAU that was good for English, some really cute fan art, and a few more covers. But as Megaupload went down, so did her chances at popularity. As a silly little heavily accented CV bank, I doubt she'll ever gain back that popularity. However, anything is possible.
How can I download Ebi?
I uploaded the original ZIP file. I didn't redo the OTO or add anything - the novelty of the ZIP being from August of 2009 was too great to bother with fixing up the bank in any way. The OTO has one or two lines of configuration, so you would need to redo it if you want to seriously use her.
To download her, click here.
I can't contact anyone else involved, but seriously, as the namer and the designer, I give anyone permission to do to her what Rev did to Yoko. Fix her up, make fake VCV, whatever. Free reign! You all have free reign!!
Hopefully, anyone who missed Ebi sees this. They'll finally be able to download her and use her again!
(note: I wanted to pack this article full of fanart, but I don't really feel comfortable embedding a ton of images without getting permission first. Usually I only embed official images from the banks themselves or images from archives and wikis. Those feel like they're free game, but someone's random image from pixiv? Naw. Sorry for the bland article.)
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